Robert Elsmere
Directly he found himself in another street he opened the paper under a
lamp-post. It contained a caricature of the Crucifixion, the scroll
emanating from Mary Magdalene's mouth, in particular, containing
obscenities which cannot be quoted here.
Robert thrust it into his pocket and strode on, every nerve quivering.
'This is Wednesday in Passion week,' he said to himself. 'The day after
to-morrow is Good Friday!'
He walked fast in a north-westerly direction, and soon found himself
within the City, where the streets were long since empty and silent. But
he noticed nothing around him. His thoughts were in the distant East,
among the flat roofs and white walls of Nazareth, the olives of Bethany,
the steep streets and rocky ramparts of Jerusalem. He had seen them with
the bodily eye, and the fact had enormously quickened his historical
perception. The child of Nazareth, the moralist and teacher of Capernaum
and Gennesaret, the strenuous seer and martyr of the later Jerusalem
preaching--all these various images sprang into throbbing poetic life
within him. That anything in human shape should be found capable of
dragging this life and this death through the mire of a hideous and
befouling laughter! Who was responsible? To what cause could one trace
such a temper of mind towards such an object--present and militant as
that temper is in all the crowded centres of working life throughout
modern Europe? The toiler of the world as he matures may be made to love
Socrates or Buddha or Marcus Aurelius. It would seem often as though he
could not be made to love Jesus! Is it the Nemesis that ultimately
discovers and avenges the sublimest, the least conscious departure from
simplicity and verity?--is it the last and most terrible illustration of
a great axiom: '_Faith has a judge--in truth_'?
He went home and lay awake half the night pondering. If he could but
pour out his heart! But though Catherine, the wife of his heart, of his
youth, is there, close beside him, doubt and struggle and perplexity are
alike frozen on his lips. He cannot speak without sympathy, and she will
not hear except under a moral compulsion which he shrinks more and more
painfully from exercising.
The next night was a story-telling night. He spent it in telling the
legend of St. Francis. When it was over he asked the audience to wait a
moment, and there and then--with the tender imaginative Franciscan
atmosphere, as it were, still about them--he delivered a short and
vigorous protest in the name of decency, good feeling, and common sense,
against the idiotic profanities with which the whole immediate
neighbourhood seemed to be reeking. It was the first time he had
approached any religious matter directly. A knot of workmen sitting
together at the back of the room looked at each other with a significant
grimace or two.
When Robert ceased speaking one of them, an elderly watchmaker, got up
and made a dry and cynical little speech, nothing moving but the thin
lips in the shrivelled mahogany face. Robert knew the man well. He was a
Genevese by birth, Calvinist by blood, revolutionist by development. He
complained that Mr. Elsmere had taken his audience by surprise; that a
good many of those present understood the remarks he had just made as an
attack upon an institution in which many of them were deeply interested;
and that he invited Mr. Elsmere to a more thorough discussion of the
matter, in a place where he could be both heard and answered.
The room applauded with some signs of suppressed excitement. Most of the
men there were accustomed to disputation of the sort which any Sunday
visitor to Victoria Park may hear going on there week after week.
Elsmere had made a vivid impression; and the prospect of a fight with
him had an unusual piquancy.
Robert sprang up. 'When you will,' he said. 'I am ready to stand by what
I have just said in the face of you all, if you care to hear it.'
Place and particulars were hastily arranged, subject to the approval of
the club committee, and Elsmere's audience separated in a glow of
curiosity and expectation.
'Didn't I tell ye?' the gasfitter's snarling friend said to him.
'Scratch him and you find the parson. These upper-class folk, when they
come among us poor ones, always seem to me just hunting for souls, as
those Injuns he was talking about last week hunt for scalps. They can't
get to heaven without a certain number of 'em slung about 'em.'
'Wait a bit!' said the gasfitter, his quick dark eyes betraying a
certain raised inner temperature.
Next morning the North R---- Club was placarded with announcements that
on Easter Eve next Robert Elsmere, Esq., would deliver a lecture in the
Debating Hall on 'The Claim of Jesus upon Modern Life'; to be followed,
as usual, by general discussion.
CHAPTER XXXIX
It was the afternoon of Good Friday. Catherine had been to church at St.
Paul's, and Robert, though not without some inward struggle, had
accompanied her. Their midday meal was over, and Robert had been
devoting himself to Mary, who had been tottering round the room in his
wake, clutching one finger tight with her chubby hand. In particular, he
had been coaxing her into friendship with a wooden Japanese dragon which
wound itself in awful yet most seductive coils round the cabinet at the
end of the room. It was Mary's weekly task to embrace this horror, and
the performance went by the name of 'kissing the Jabberwock.' It had
been triumphantly achieved, and, as the reward of bravery, Mary was
being carried round the room on her father's shoulder, holding on
mercilessly to his curls, her shining blue eyes darting scorn at the
defeated monster.
At last Robert deposited her on the rug beside a fascinating farmyard
which lay there spread out for her, and stood looking, not at the child,
but at his wife.
'Catherine, I feel so much as Mary did three minutes ago!'
She looked up startled. The tone was light, but the sadness, the emotion
of the eyes, contradicted it.
'I want courage,' he went on--'courage to tell you something that may
hurt you. And yet I ought to tell it.'
Her face took the shrinking expression which was so painful to him. But
she waited quietly for what he had to say.
'You know, I think,' he said, looking away from her to the gray Museum
outside, 'that my work in R---- hasn't been religious as yet at all. Oh,
of course, I have said things here and there, but I haven't delivered
myself in any way. Now there has come an opening.'
And he described to her--while she shivered a little and drew herself
together--the provocations which were leading him into a tussle with the
North R---- Club.
'They have given me a very civil invitation. They are the sort of men
after all whom it pays to get hold of, if one can. Among their fellows,
they are the men who think. One longs to help them to think to a little
more purpose.'
'What have you to give them, Robert?' asked Catherine after a pause, her
eyes bent on the child's stocking she was knitting. Her heart was full
enough already, poor soul. Oh, the bitterness of this Passion week! He
had been at her side often in church, but through all his tender silence
and consideration she had divined the constant struggle in him between
love and intellectual honesty, and it had filled her with a dumb
irritation and misery indescribable. Do what she would, wrestle with
herself as she would, there was constantly emerging in her now a note of
anger, not with Robert, but, as it were, with those malign forces of
which he was the prey.
'What have I to give them?' he repeated sadly. 'Very little, Catherine,
as it seems to me to-night. But come and see.'
His tone had a melancholy which went to her heart. In reality he was in
that state of depression which often precedes a great effort. But she
was startled by his suggestion.
'Come with you, Robert? To the meeting of a secularist club!'
'Why not? I shall be there to protest against outrage to what both you
and I hold dear. And the men are decent fellows. There will be no
disturbance.'
'What are you going to do?' she asked in a low voice.
'I have been trying to think it out,' he said with difficulty. 'I want
simply, if I can, to transfer to their minds that image of Jesus of
Nazareth which thought, and love, and reading have left upon my own. I
want to make them realise for themselves the historical character, so
far as it can be realised--to make them see for themselves the real
figure, as it went in and out amongst men--so far as our eyes can now
discern it.'
The words came quicker towards the end, while the voice sank--took the
vibrating characteristic note the wife knew so well.
'How can that help them?' she said abruptly. 'Your historical Christ,
Robert, will never win souls. If he was God, every word you speak will
insult him. If he was man, he was not a good man!'
'Come and see,' was all he said, holding out his hand to her. It was in
some sort a renewal of the scene at Les Avants, the inevitable renewal
of an offer he felt bound to make, and she felt bound to resist.
She let her knitting fall and placed her hand in his. The baby on the
rug was alternately caressing and scourging a woolly baa-lamb, which was
the fetish of her childish worship. Her broken incessant baby-talk, and
the ringing kisses with which she atoned to the baa-lamb for each
successive outrage, made a running accompaniment to the moved undertones
of the parents.
'Don't ask me, Robert, don't ask me! Do you want me to come and sit
thinking of last year's Easter Eve?'
'Heaven knows I was miserable enough last Easter Eve,' he said slowly.
'And now,' she exclaimed, looking at him with a sudden agitation of
every feature, 'now you are not miserable? You are quite confident and
sure? You are going to devote your life to attacking the few remnants of
faith that still remain in the world?'
Never in her married life had she spoken to him with this accent of
bitterness and hostility. He started and withdrew his hand, and there
was a silence.
'I held once a wife in my arms,' he said presently with a voice hardly
audible, 'who said to me that she would never persecute her husband. But
what is persecution if it is not the determination not to understand?'
She buried her face in her hands. 'I could not understand,' she said
sombrely.
'And rather than try,' he insisted, 'you will go on believing that I am
a man without faith, seeking only to destroy.'
'I know you think you have faith,' she answered, 'but how can it seem
faith to me? "He that will not confess Me before men, him will I also
deny before My Father which is in heaven." Your unbelief seems to me
more dangerous than these horrible things which shock you. For you can
make it attractive, you can make it loved, as you once made the faith
of Christ loved.'
He was silent. She raised her face presently, whereon were the traces of
some of those quiet difficult tears which were characteristic of her,
and went softly out of the room.
He stood a while leaning against the mantelpiece, deaf to little Mary's
clamour, and to her occasional clutches at his knees, as she tried to
raise herself on her tiny tottering feet. A sense as though of some
fresh disaster was upon him. His heart was sinking, sinking within him.
And yet none knew better than he that there was nothing fresh. It was
merely that the scene had recalled to him anew some of those unpalatable
truths which the optimist is always much too ready to forget.
Heredity, the moulding force of circumstance, the iron hold of the past
upon the present--a man like Elsmere realises the working of these
things in other men's lives with a singular subtlety and clearness, and
is for ever overlooking them, running his head against them, in his own.