Robert Elsmere
'My dear Wardlaw, my condolences to your coat! But I don't believe if I
were a rough myself I could resist "dips." Let me introduce a
friend--Mr. Elsmere--and if you will have him, a recruit for your work.
It seems to me another pair of arms will hardly come amiss to you!'
The short red-haired man addressed shook hands with Elsmere,
scrutinising him from under bushy eyebrows. He was panting and
beplastered with tallow, but the inner man was evidently quite
unruffled, and Elsmere liked the shrewd Scotch face and gray eyes.
'It isn't only a pair of arms we want,' he remarked drily, 'but a bit of
science behind them. Mr. Elsmere, I observed, can use his.'
Then he turned to a tall affected-looking youth with a large nose and
long fair hair, who stood gasping with his hands upon his sides, his
eyes, full of a moody wrath, fixed on the wreck and disarray of the
schoolroom.
'Well, Mackay, have they knocked the wind out of you? My friend and
helper--Mr. Elsmere. Come and sit down, won't you, a minute. They've
left us the chairs, I perceive, and there's a spark or two of fire. Do
you smoke? Will you light up?'
The four men sat on chatting some time, and then Wardlaw and Elsmere
walked home together. It had been all arranged. Mackay, a curious morbid
fellow, who had thrown himself into Unitarianism and charity mainly out
of opposition to an orthodox and _bourgeois_ family, and who had a great
idea of his own social powers, was somewhat grudging and ungracious
through it all. But Elsmere's proposals were much too good to be
refused. He offered to bring to the undertaking his time, his
clergyman's experience, and as much money as might be wanted. Wardlaw
listened to him cautiously for an hour, took stock of the whole man
physically and morally, and finally said, as he very quietly and
deliberately knocked the ashes out of his pipe,--
'All right, I'm your man, Mr. Elsmere. If Mackay agrees, I vote we make
you captain of this venture.'
'Nothing of the sort,' said Elsmere. 'In London I am a novice; I come to
learn, not to lead.'
Wardlaw shook his head with a little shrewd smile. Mackay faintly
endorsed his companion's offer, and the party broke up.
That was in January. In two months from that time, by the natural force
of things, Elsmere, in spite of diffidence and his own most sincere wish
to avoid a premature leadership, had become the head and heart of the
Elgood Street undertaking, which had already assumed much larger
proportions. Wardlaw was giving him silent approval and invaluable help,
while young Mackay was in the first uncomfortable stages of a
hero-worship which promised to be exceedingly good for him.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
There were one or two curious points connected with the beginnings of
Elsmere's venture in North R----, one of which may just be noticed here.
Wardlaw, his predecessor and colleague, had speculatively little or
nothing in common with Elsmere or Murray Edwardes. He was a devoted and
orthodox Comtist, for whom Edwardes had provided an outlet for the
philanthropic passion, as he had for many others belonging to far
stranger and remoter faiths.
By profession he was a barrister, with a small and struggling practice.
On this practice, however, he had married, and his wife, who had been a
doctor's daughter and a national schoolmistress, had the same ardours as
himself. They lived in one of the dismal little squares near the Goswell
Road, and had two children. The wife, as a Positivist mother is bound to
do, tended and taught her children entirely herself. She might have been
seen any day wheeling their perambulator through the dreary streets of a
dreary region; she was their Providence, their deity, the representative
to them of all tenderness and all authority. But when her work with them
was done, she would throw herself into charity organisation cases, into
efforts for the protection of workhouse servants, into the homeliest
acts of ministry towards the sick, till her dowdy little figure and her
face, which but for the stress of London, of labour, and of poverty,
would have had a blunt fresh-coloured dairymaid's charm, became symbols
of a divine and sacred helpfulness in the eyes of hundreds of straining
men and women.
The husband also, after a day spent in chambers, would give his evenings
to teaching or committee work. They never allowed themselves to breathe
even to each other that life might have brighter things to show them
than the neighbourhood of the Goswell Road. There was a certain
narrowness in their devotion; they had their bitternesses and ignorances
like other people; but the more Robert knew of them the more profound
became his admiration for that potent spirit of social help which in our
generation Comtism has done so much to develop, even among those of us
who are but moderately influenced by Comte's philosophy, and can make
nothing of the religion of Humanity.
Wardlaw has no large part in the story of Elsmere's work in North R----.
In spite of Robert's efforts, and against his will, the man of meaner
gifts and commoner clay was eclipsed by that brilliant and persuasive
something in Elsmere which a kind genius had infused into him at birth.
And we shall see that in time Robert's energies took a direction which
Wardlaw could not follow with any heartiness. But at the beginning
Elsmere owed him much, and it was a debt he was never tired of
honouring.
In the first place, Wardlaw's choice of the Elgood Street room as a
fresh centre for civilising effort had been extremely shrewd. The
district lying about it, as Robert soon came to know, contained a number
of promising elements.
Close by the dingy street which sheltered their schoolroom rose the
great pile of a new factory of artistic pottery, a rival on the north
side of the river to Doulton's immense works on the south. The old
winding streets near it, and the blocks of workmen's dwellings recently
erected under its shadow, were largely occupied by the workers in its
innumerable floors, and among these workers was a large proportion of
skilled artisans, men often of a considerable amount of cultivation,
earning high wages, and maintaining a high standard of comfort. A great
many of them, trained in the art school which Murray Edwardes had been
largely instrumental in establishing within easy distance of their
houses, were men of genuine artistic gifts and accomplishment, and as
the development of one faculty tends on the whole to set others working,
when Robert, after a few weeks' work in the place, set up a popular
historical lecture once a fortnight, announcing the fact by a blue and
white poster in the schoolroom windows, it was the potters who provided
him with his first hearers.
The rest of the parish was divided between a population of dock
labourers, settled there to supply the needs of the great dock which ran
up into the south-eastern corner of it, two or three huge breweries, and
a colony of watchmakers, an offshoot of Clerkenwell, who lived together
in two or three streets, and showed the same peculiarities of race and
specialised training to be noticed in the more northerly settlement from
which they had been thrown off like a swarm from a hive. Outside these
well-defined trades there was, of course, a warehouse population, and a
mass of heterogeneous cadging and catering which went on chiefly in the
riverside streets at the other side of the parish from Elgood Street, in
the neighbourhood of St. Wilfrid's.
St. Wilfrid's at this moment seemed to Robert to be doing a very
successful work among the lowest strata of the parish. From them at one
end of the scale, and from the innumerable clerks and superintendents
who during the daytime crowded the vast warehouses of which the district
was full, its Lenten congregations, now in full activity, were chiefly
drawn.
The Protestant opposition, which had shown itself so brutally and
persistently in old days, was now, so far as outward manifestations
went, all but extinct. The cassocked monk-like clergy might preach and
'process' in the open air as much as they pleased. The populace, where
it was not indifferent, was friendly, and devoted living had borne its
natural fruits.
A small incident, which need not be recorded, recalled to Elsmere's
mind--after he had been working some six weeks in the district--the
forgotten unwelcome fact that St. Wilfrid's was the very church where
Newcome, first as senior curate and then as vicar, had spent those ten
wonderful years into which Elsmere at Murewell had been never tired of
inquiring. The thought of Newcome was a very sore thought. Elsmere had
written to him announcing his resignation of his living immediately
after his interview with the bishop. The letter had remained unanswered,
and it was by now tolerably clear that the silence of its recipient
meant a withdrawal from all friendly relations with the writer.
Elsmere's affectionate sensitive nature took such things hardly,
especially as he knew that Newcome's life was becoming increasingly
difficult and embittered. And it gave him now a fresh pang to imagine
how Newcome would receive the news of his quondam friend's 'infidel
propaganda,' established on the very ground where he himself had all but
died for those beliefs Elsmere had thrown over.
But Robert was learning a certain hardness in this London life which was
not without its uses to character. Hitherto he had always swum with the
stream, cheered by the support of all the great and prevailing English
traditions. Here, he and his few friends were fighting a solitary fight
apart from the organised system of English religion and English
philanthropy. All the elements of culture and religion already existing
in the place were against them. The clergy of St. Wilfrid's passed them
with cold averted eyes; the old and _faineant_ rector of the parish
church very soon let it be known what he thought as to the taste of
Elsmere's intrusion on his parish, or as to the eternal chances of those
who might take either him or Edwardes as guides in matters religious.
His enmity did Elgood Street no harm, and the pretensions of the Church,
in this Babel of 20,000 souls, to cover the whole field, bore clearly no
relation at all to the facts. But every little incident in this new
struggle of his life cost Elsmere more perhaps than it would have cost
other men. No part of it came easily to him. Only a high Utopian vision
drove him on from day to day, bracing him to act and judge, if need be,
alone and for himself, approved only by conscience and the inward voice.
'Tasks in hours of insight willed
Can be in hours of gloom fulfilled;'
and it was that moment by the river which worked in him through all the
prosaic and perplexing details of this new attempt to carry enthusiasm
into life.
It was soon plain to him that in this teeming section of London the
chance of the religious reformer lay entirely among the _upper working
class_. In London, at any rate, all that is most prosperous and
intelligent among the working class holds itself aloof--broadly
speaking--from all existing spiritual agencies, whether of Church or
Dissent.
Upon the genuine London artisan the Church has practically no hold
whatever; and Dissent has nothing like the hold which it has on similar
material in the great towns of the North. Towards religion in general
the prevailing attitude is one of indifference tinged with hostility.
'Eight hundred thousand people in South London, of whom the enormous
proportion belong to the working class, and among them, Church and
Dissent nowhere--_Christianity not in possession_.' Such is the estimate
of an Evangelical of our day; and similar laments come from all parts of
the capital. The Londoner is on the whole more conceited, more