Robert Elsmere
A hot July had well begun, but still Elsmere was toiling on in Elgood
Street, and could not persuade himself to think of a holiday. Catherine
and the child he had driven away more than once, but the claims upon
himself were becoming so absorbing he did not know how to go even for a
few weeks. There were certain individuals in particular who depended on
him from day to day. One was Charles Richards's widow. The poor
desperate creature had put herself abjectly into Elsmere's hands. He had
sent her to an asylum, where she had been kindly and skilfully treated,
and after six weeks' abstinence she had just returned to her children,
and was being watched by himself and a competent woman neighbour, whom
he had succeeded in interesting in the case.
Another was a young 'secret springer,' to use the mysterious terms of
the trade--Robson by name--whom Elsmere had originally known as a clever
workman belonging to the watchmaking colony, and a diligent attendant
from the beginning on the Sunday lectures. He was now too ill to leave
his lodgings, and his sickly pessimist personality had established a
special hold on Robert. He was dying of tumour in the throat, and had
become a torment to himself and a disgust to others. There was a spark
of wayward genius in him, however, which enabled him to bear his ills
with a mixture of savage humour and clear-eyed despair. In general
outlook he was much akin to the author of the _City of Dreadful Night_,
whose poems he read; the loathsome spectacles of London had filled him
with a kind of sombre energy of revolt against all that is. And now that
he could only work intermittently, he would sit brooding for hours,
startling the fellow-workmen who came in to see him with ghastly
Heine-like jokes on his own hideous disease, living no one exactly knew
how, though it was supposed on supplies sent him by a shopkeeper uncle
in the country, and constantly on the verge, as all his acquaintances
felt, of some ingenious expedient or other for putting an end to himself
and his troubles. He was unmarried, and a misogynist to boot. No woman
willingly went near him, and he tended himself. How Robert had gained
any hold upon him no one could guess. But from the moment when Elsmere,
struck in the lecture-room by the pallid ugly face and swathed neck,
began regularly to go and see him, the elder man felt instinctively that
virtue had gone out of him, and that in some subtle way yet another life
had become pitifully, silently dependent on his own stock of strength
and comfort.
His lecturing and teaching work also was becoming more and more the
instrument of far-reaching change, and therefore more and more difficult
to leave. The thoughts of God, the image of Jesus, which were active and
fruitful in his own mind, had been gradually passing from the one into
the many, and Robert watched the sacred transforming emotion, once
nurtured at his own heart, now working among the crowd of men and women
his fiery speech had gathered round him, with a trembling joy, a humble
prostration of the soul before the Eternal Truth, no words can fitly
describe. With an ever-increasing detachment of mind from the objects of
self and sense, he felt himself a tool in the Great Workman's hand.
'Accomplish Thy purposes in me,' was the cry of his whole heart and
life; 'use me to the utmost; spend every faculty I have, O "Thou who
mouldest men"!'
But in the end his work itself drove him away. A certain memorable
Saturday evening brought it about. It had been his custom of late to
spend an occasional evening hour after his night-school work in the
North R---- Club, of which he was now by invitation a member. Here, in
one of the inner rooms, he would stand against the mantelpiece chatting,
smoking often with the men. Everything came up in turn to be discussed;
and Robert was at least as ready to learn from the practical workers
about him as to teach. But in general these informal talks and debates
became the supplement of the Sunday lectures. Here he met Andrews and
the Secularist crew face to face; here he grappled in Socratic fashion
with objections and difficulties, throwing into the task all his charm
and all his knowledge, a man at once of no pretensions and of unfailing
natural dignity. Nothing, so far, had served his cause and his influence
so well as these moments of free discursive intercourse. The mere
orator, the mere talker, indeed, would never have gained any permanent
hold; but the life behind gave weight to every acute or eloquent word,
and importance even to those mere sallies of a boyish enthusiasm which
were still common enough in him.
He had already visited the club once during the week preceding this
Saturday. On both occasions there was much talk of the growing
popularity and efficiency of the Elgood Street work, of the numbers
attending the lectures, the story-telling, the Sunday school, and of the
way in which the attractions of it had spread into other quarters of the
parish, exciting there, especially among the clergy of St. Wilfrid's, an
anxious and critical attention. The conversation on Saturday night,
however, took a turn of its own. Robert felt in it a new and curious
note of _responsibility_. The men present were evidently beginning to
regard the work as _their_ work also, and its success as their interest.
It was perfectly natural, for not only had most of them been his
supporters and hearers from the beginning, but some of them were now
actually teaching in the night-school or helping in the various branches
of the large and overflowing boys' club. He listened to them for a while
in his favourite attitude, leaning against the mantelpiece, throwing in
a word or two now and then as to how this or that part of the work might
be amended or expanded. Then suddenly a kind of inspiration seemed to
pass from them to him. Bending forward as the talk dropped a moment, he
asked them, with an accent more emphatic than usual, whether in view of
this collaboration of theirs, which was becoming more valuable to him
and his original helpers every week, it was not time for a new
departure.
'Suppose I drop my dictatorship,' he said, 'suppose we set up
parliamentary government, are you ready to take your share? Are you
ready to combine, to commit yourselves? Are you ready for an effort to
turn this work into something lasting and organic?'
The men gathered round him smoked on in silence for a minute. Old
Macdonald, who had been sitting contentedly puffing away in a corner
peculiarly his own, and dedicated to the glorification--in broad
Berwickshire--of the experimental philosophers, laid down his pipe and
put on his spectacles, that he might grasp the situation better. Then
Lestrange, in a dry cautious way, asked Elsmere to explain himself
further.
Robert began to pace up and down, talking out his thought, his eye
kindling.
But in a minute or two he stopped abruptly, with one of those striking
rapid gestures characteristic of him.
'But no mere social and educational body, mind you!' and his bright
commanding look swept round the circle. 'A good thing surely, "yet is
there better than it." The real difficulty of every social effort--you
know it and I know it--lies, not in the planning of the work, but in the
kindling of will and passion enough to carry it _through_. And that can
only be done by religion--by faith.'
He went back to his old leaning attitude, his hands behind him. The men
gazed at him--at the slim figure, the transparent changing face--with a
kind of fascination, but were still silent, till Macdonald said slowly,
taking off his glasses again and clearing his throat--
'You'll be aboot starrtin' a new church, I'm thinkin', Misther Elsmere?'
'If you like,' said Robert impetuously. 'I have no fear of the great
words. You can do nothing by despising the past and its products; you
can also do nothing by being too much afraid of them, by letting them
choke and stifle your own life. Let the new wine have its new bottles if
it must, and never mind words. Be content to be a new "sect,"
"conventicle," or what not, so long as you feel that you are _something_
with a life and purpose of its own, in this tangle of a world.'
Again he paused with knit brows, thinking. Lestrange sat with his elbows
on his knees studying him, the spare gray hair brushed back tightly from
the bony face, on the lips the slightest Voltairean smile. Perhaps it
was the coolness of his look which insensibly influenced Robert's next
words.
'However, I don't imagine we should call ourselves a church! Something
much humbler will do, if you choose ever to make anything of these
suggestions of mine. "Association," "society," "brotherhood," what you
will! But always, if I can persuade you, with something in the name, and
everything in the body itself, to show that for the members of it life
rests still, as all life worth having has everywhere rested on _trust_
and _memory_!--_trust_ in the God of experience and history; _memory_ of
that God's work in man, by which alone we know Him and can approach Him.
Well, of that work--I have tried to prove it to you a thousand
times--Jesus of Nazareth has become to _us_, by the evolution of
circumstance, the most moving, the most efficacious of all types and
epitomes. We have made our protest--we are daily making it--in the face
of society, against the fictions and overgrowths which at the present
time are excluding him more and more from human love. But now, suppose
we turn our backs on negation, and have done with mere denial! Suppose
we throw all our energies into the practical building of a new house of
faith, the gathering and organising of a new Company of Jesus!'
Other men had been stealing in while he was speaking. The little room
was nearly full. It was strange, the contrast between the squalid
modernness of the scene, with its incongruous sights and sounds, the
Club-room, painted in various hideous shades of cinnamon and green, the
smoke, the lines and groups of working-men in every sort of working
dress, the occasional rumbling of huge waggons past the window, the
click of glasses and cups in the refreshment bar outside, and this stir
of spiritual passion which any competent observer might have felt
sweeping through the little crowd as Robert spoke, connecting what was
passing there with all that is sacred and beautiful in the history of
the world.
After another silence a young fellow, in a shabby velvet coat, stood up.
He was commonly known among his fellow-potters as 'the hartist,' because
of his long hair, his little affectations of dress, and his aesthetic
susceptibilities generally. The wits of the Club made him their target,
but the teasing of him that went on was more or less tempered by the
knowledge that in his own queer way he had brought up and educated two
young sisters almost from infancy, and that his sweetheart had been
killed before his eyes a year before in a railway accident.
'I dun know,' he said in a high treble voice, 'I dun know whether I
speak for anybody but myself--very likely not; but what I _do_ know,'
and he raised his right hand and shook it with a gesture of curious
felicity, 'is this--what Mr. Elsmere starts I'll join; where he goes
I'll go; what's good enough for him's good enough for me. He's put a new
heart and a new stomach into me, and what I've got he shall have,
whenever it pleases 'im to call for it! So if he wants to run a new
thing against or alongside the old uns, and he wants me to help him with
it--I don't know as I'm very clear what he's driving at, nor what good I
can do 'im--but when Tom Wheeler's asked for he'll be there!'
A deep murmur, rising almost into a shout of assent ran through the
little assembly. Robert bent forward, his eye glistening, a moved