Robert Elsmere
break your heart to think of it! Watch by Him to-night, my friend, my
brother, and to-morrow let the risen Lord reclaim His own!'
Never had Robert seen any mortal face so persuasively beautiful; never
surely did saint or ascetic plead with a more penetrating gentleness.
After the storm of those opening words the change was magical. The tears
stood in Elsmere's eyes. But his quick insight, in spite of himself,
divined the subtle natural facts behind the outburst, the strained
physical state, the irritable brain--all the consequences of a long
defiance of physical and mental law. The priest repelled him, the man
drew him like a magnet.
'What can I say to you, Newcome?' he cried despairingly. 'Let me say
nothing, dear old friend! I am tired out; so, I expect, are you. I know
what this week has been to you. Walk with me a little. Leave these great
things alone. We cannot agree. Be content--God knows! Tell me about the
old place and the people. I long for news of them.'
A sort of shudder passed through his companion. Newcome stood wrestling
with himself. It was like the slow departure of a possessing force. Then
he sombrely assented, and they turned towards the City. But his answers,
as Robert questioned him, were sharp and mechanical, and presently it
became evident that the demands of the ordinary talk to which Elsmere
rigorously held him were more than he could bear.
As they reached St. Paul's, towering into the watery moonlight of the
clouded sky, he stopped abruptly and said good-night.
'You came to me in the spirit of war,' said Robert, with some emotion,
as he held his hand; 'give me instead the grasp of peace!'
The spell of his manner, his presence, prevailed at last. A melancholy
quivering smile dawned on the priest's delicate lip.
'God bless you--God restore you!' he said sadly, and was gone.
CHAPTER XLI
A week later Elsmere was startled to find himself detained, after his
story-telling, by a trio of workmen, asking on behalf of some thirty or
forty members of the North R---- Club that he would give them a course
of lectures on the New Testament. One of them was the gasfitter Charles
Richards; another was the watchmaker Lestrange, who had originally
challenged Robert to deliver himself; and the third was a tough old
Scotchman of sixty with a philosophical turn, under whose spoutings of
Hume and Locke, of Reid and Dugald Stewart, delivered in the shrillest
of cracked voices, the Club had writhed many an impatient half-hour on
debating nights. He had an unexpected artistic gift, a kind of 'sport'
as compared with the rest of his character, which made him a valued
designer in the pottery works; but his real interests were speculative
and argumentative, concerned with 'common nawtions and the praimary
elements of reason,' and the appearance of Robert in the district seemed
to offer him at last a foeman worthy of his steel. Elsmere shrewdly
suspected that the last two looked forward to any teaching he might give
mostly as a new and favourable exercising ground for their own wits; but
he took the risk, gladly accepted the invitation, and fixed Sunday
afternoons for a weekly New Testament lecture.
His first lecture, which he prepared with great care, was delivered to
thirty-seven men a fortnight later. It was on the political and social
state of Palestine and the East at the time of Christ's birth; and
Robert, who was as fervent a believer in 'large maps' as Lord Salisbury,
had prepared a goodly store of them for the occasion, together with a
number of drawings and photographs which formed part of the collection
he had been gradually making since his own visit to the Holy Land. There
was nothing he laid more stress on than these helps to the eye and
imagination in dealing with the Bible. He was accustomed to maintain in
his arguments with Hugh Flaxman that the orthodox traditional teaching
of Christianity would become impossible as soon as it should be the
habit to make a free and modern use of history and geography and social
material in connection with the Gospels. Nothing tends so much, he would
say, to break down the irrational barrier which men have raised about
this particular tract of historical space, nothing helps so much to let
in the light and air of scientific thought upon it, and therefore
nothing prepares the way so effectively for a series of new conceptions.
By a kind of natural selection Richards became Elsmere's chief helper
and adjutant in the Sunday lectures,--with regard to all such matters as
beating up recruits, keeping guard over portfolios, handing round maps
and photographs, etc.,--supplanting in this function the jealous and
sensitive Mackay, who, after his original opposition, had now arrived at
regarding Robert as his own particular property, and the lecturer's
quick smile of thanks for services rendered as his own especial right.
The bright, quicksilvery, irascible little workman, however, was
irresistible and had his way. He had taken a passion for Robert as for a
being of another order and another world. In the discussions which
generally followed the lecture he showed a receptiveness, an
intelligence, which were in reality a matter not of the mind but of the
heart. He loved, therefore he understood. At the club he stood for
Elsmere with a quivering spasmodic eloquence, as against Andrews and the
Secularists. One thing only puzzled Robert. Among all the little
fellow's sallies and indiscretions, which were not infrequent, no
reference to his home life was ever included. Here he kept even Robert
absolutely at arm's length. Robert knew that he was married and had
children, nothing more.
The old Scotchman, Macdonald, came out after the first lecture somewhat
crestfallen.
'Not the sort of stooff I'd expected!' he said, with a shade of
perplexity on the rugged face. 'He doosn't talk eneuf in the _aa_bstract
for me.'
But he went again, and the second lecture, on the origin of the Gospels,
got hold of him, especially as it supplied him with a whole armoury of
new arguments in support of Hume's doctrine of conscience, and in
defiance of 'that blatin' creetur, Reid.' The thesis with which Robert,
drawing on some of the stores supplied him by the squire's book, began
his account--_i.e._ the gradual growth within the limits of history of
man's capacity for telling the exact truth--fitted in, to the
Scotchman's thinking, so providentially with his own favourite
experimental doctrines as against the 'intueetion' folks, 'who will have
it that a babby's got as moch mind as Mr. Gladstone, ef it only knew
it!' that afterwards he never missed a lecture.
Lestrange was more difficult. He had the inherited temperament of the
Genevese _frondeur_, which made Geneva the headquarters of Calvinism in
the sixteenth century, and bids fair to make her the headquarters of
continental radicalism in the nineteenth. Robert never felt his wits so
much stretched and sharpened as when after the lecture Lestrange was
putting questions and objections with an acrid subtlety and persistence
worthy of a descendant of that burgher class which first built up the
Calvinistic system and then produced the destroyer of it in Rousseau.
Robert bore his heckling, however, with great patience and adroitness.
He had need of all he knew, as Murray Edwardes had warned him. But
luckily he knew a great deal; his thought was clearing and settling
month by month, and whatever he may have lost at any moment by the turn
of an argument, he recovered immediately afterwards by the force of
personality, and of a single-mindedness in which there was never a trace
of personal grasping.
Week by week the lecture became more absorbing to him, the men more
pliant, his hold on them firmer. His disinterestedness, his brightness
and resource, perhaps, too, the signs about him of a light and frail
physical organisation, the novelty of his position, the inventiveness of
his method, gave him little by little an immense power in the place.
After the first two lectures Murray Edwardes became his constant and
enthusiastic hearer on Sunday afternoons, and, catching some of Robert's
ways and spirit, he gradually brought his own chapel and teaching more
and more into line with the Elgood Street undertaking. So that the
venture of the two men began to take ever larger proportions; and,
kindled by the growing interest and feeling about him, dreams began to
rise in Elsmere's mind which as yet he hardly dared to cherish; which
came and went, however, weaving a substance for themselves out of each
successive incident and effort.
Meanwhile he was at work on an average three evenings in the week
besides the Sunday. In West End drawing-rooms his personal gift had
begun to tell no less than in this crowded, squalid East; and as his
aims became known, other men, finding the thoughts of their own hearts
revealed in him, or touched with that social compunction which is one of
the notes of our time, came down and became his helpers. Of all the
social projects of which that Elgood Street room became the centre,
Elsmere was, in some sense, the life and inspiration. But it was not
these projects themselves which made this period of his life remarkable.
London at the present moment, if it be honeycombed with vice and misery,
is also honeycombed with the labour of an ever-expanding charity. Week
by week men and women of like gifts and energies with Elsmere spend
themselves, as he did, in the constant effort to serve and to alleviate.
What _was_ noticeable, what _was_ remarkable in this work of his, was
the spirit, the religious passion which, radiating from him, began after
a while, to kindle the whole body of men about him. It was from his
Sunday lectures and his talks with the children, boys and girls, who
came in after the lecture to spend a happy hour and a half with him on
Sunday afternoons, that in later years hundreds of men and women will
date the beginnings of a new absorbing life. There came a time, indeed,
when, instead of meeting criticism by argument, Robert was able simply
to point to accomplished facts. 'You ask me,' he would say in effect,
'to prove to you that men can love, can make a new and fruitful use, for
daily life and conduct, of a merely human Christ. Go amongst our men,
talk to our children, and satisfy yourself. A little while ago scores of
these men either hated the very name of Christianity or were entirely
indifferent to it. To scores of them now the name of the teacher of
Nazareth, the victim of Jerusalem, is dear and sacred; his life, his
death, his words, are becoming once more a constant source of moral
effort and spiritual hope. See for yourself!'
However, we are anticipating. Let us go back to May.
One beautiful morning Robert was sitting working in his study, his
windows open to the breezy blue sky and the budding plane-trees outside,
when the door was thrown open and 'Mr. Wendover' was announced.
The squire entered; but what a shrunken and aged squire! The gait was
feeble, the bearing had lost all its old erectness, the bronzed strength
of the face had given place to a waxen and ominous pallor. Robert,
springing up with joy to meet the great gust of Murewell air which
seemed to blow about him with the mention of the squire's name, was
struck, arrested. He guided his guest to a chair with an almost filial
carefulness.
'I don't believe, Squire,' he exclaimed, 'you ought to be doing
this--wandering about London by yourself!'
But the squire, as silent and angular as ever when anything personal to
himself was concerned, would take no notice of the implied anxiety and
sympathy. He grasped his umbrella between his knees with a pair of brown
twisted hands, and, sitting very upright, looked critically round the
room. Robert, studying the dwindled figure, remembered with a pang the