Robert Elsmere
'But who can have it without? _Seek_, that you may find. Experiment; try
new combinations. If a thing is going that humanity can't do without,
and you and I believe it, what duty is more urgent for us than the
effort to replace it?'
Flaxman shrugged his shoulders.
'What will you gain? A new sect?'
'Possibly. But what we _stand_ to gain is a new social bond,' was the
flashing answer--'a new compelling force in man and in society. Can you
deny that the world wants it? What are you economists and sociologists
of the new type always pining for? Why, for that diminution of the self
in man which is to enable the individual to see the _world's_ ends
clearly, and to care not only for his own but for his neighbour's
interest, which is to make the rich devote themselves to the poor, and
the poor bear with the rich. If man only _would_, he _could_, you say,
solve all the problems which oppress him. It is man's will which is
eternally defective, eternally inadequate. Well, the great religions of
the world are the stimulants by which the power at the root of things
has worked upon this sluggish instrument of human destiny. Without
religion you cannot make the will equal to its tasks. Our present
religion fails us; we must, we will have another!'
He rose and began to pace along the sands, now gently glowing in the
warm September evening, Flaxman beside him.
_A new religion!_ Of all words, the most tremendous! Flaxman pitifully
weighed against it the fraction of force fretting and surging in the
thin elastic frame beside him. He knew well, however--few better--that
the outburst was not a mere dream and emptiness. There was experience
behind it--a burning, driving experience of actual fact.
Presently Robert said, with a change of tone, 'I must have that whole
block of warehouses, Flaxman.'
'Must you?' said Flaxman, relieved by the drop from speculation to the
practical. 'Why?'
'Look here!' And sitting down again on a sand-hill overgrown with wild
grasses and mats of sea-thistle, the poor pale reformer began to draw
out the details of his scheme on its material side. Three floors of
rooms brightly furnished, well lit and warmed; a large hall for the
Sunday lectures, concerts, entertainments, and story-telling; rooms for
the boys' club; two rooms for women and girls, reached by a separate
entrance; a library and reading-room open to both sexes, well stored
with books, and made beautiful by pictures; three or four smaller rooms
to serve as committee rooms and for the purposes of the Naturalist Club
which had been started in May on the Murewell plan; and, if possible, a
gymnasium.
'_Money!_' he said, drawing up with a laugh in mid-career. 'There's the
rub, of course. But I shall manage it.'
To judge from the past, Flaxman thought it extremely likely that he
would. He studied the cabalistic lines Elsmere's stick had made in the
sand for a minute or two; then he said dryly, 'I will take the first
expense: and draw on me afterwards up to five hundred a year, for the
first four years.'
Robert turned upon him and grasped his hand.
'I do not thank you,' he said quietly, after a moment's pause; 'the work
itself will do that.'
Again they strolled on, talking, plunging into details, till Flaxman's
pulse beat as fast as Robert's; so full of infectious hope and energy
was the whole being of the man before him.
'I can take in the women and girls now,' Robert said once. 'Catherine
has promised to superintend it all.'
Then suddenly something struck the mobile mind, and he stood an instant
looking at his companion. It was the first time he had mentioned
Catherine's name in connection with the North R---- work. Flaxman could
not mistake the emotion, the unspoken thanks in those eyes. He turned
away, nervously knocking off the ashes of his cigar. But the two men
understood each other.
CHAPTER XLIX
Two days later they were in London again. Robert was a great deal
better, and beginning to kick against invalid restraints. All men have
their pet irrationalities. Elsmere's irrationality was an aversion to
doctors, from the point of view of his own ailments. He had an unbounded
admiration for them as a class, and would have nothing to say to them as
individuals that he could possibly help. Flaxman was sarcastic;
Catherine looked imploring in vain. He vowed that he was treating
himself with a skill any professional might envy, and went his way. And
for a time the stimulus of London and of his work seemed to act
favourably upon him. After his first welcome at the Club he came home
with bright eye and vigorous step, declaring that he was another man.
Flaxman established himself in St. James's Place. Town was deserted; the
partridges at Greenlaws clamoured to be shot; the head-keeper wrote
letters which would have melted the heart of a stone. Flaxman replied
recklessly that any decent fellow in the neighbourhood was welcome to
shoot his birds--a reply which almost brought upon him the resignation
of the outraged keeper by return of post. Lady Charlotte wrote and
remonstrated with him for neglecting a landowner's duties, inquiring at
the same time what he meant to do with regard to 'that young lady.' To
which Flaxman replied calmly that he had just come back from the Lakes,
where he had done, not indeed all that he meant to do, but still
something. Miss Leyburn and he were not engaged, but he was on probation
for six months, and found London the best place for getting through it.
'So far,' he said, 'I am getting on well, and developing an amount
of energy especially in the matter of correspondence, which alone
ought to commend the arrangement to the relations of an idle man.
But we must be left "to dream our dream unto ourselves alone." One
word from anybody belonging to me to anybody belonging to her on
the subject, and---- But threats are puerile. _For the present_,
dear aunt, I am your devoted nephew,
HUGH FLAXMAN.'
'_On probation!_'
Flaxman chuckled as he sent off the letter.
He stayed because he was too restless to be anywhere else, and because
he loved the Elsmeres for Rose's sake and his own. He thought moreover
that a cool-headed friend with an eye for something else in the world
than religious reform might be useful just then to Elsmere, and he was
determined at the same time to see what the reformer meant to be at.
In the first place, Robert's attention was directed to getting
possession of the whole block of buildings, in which the existing school
and lecture-rooms took up only the lowest floor. This was a matter of
some difficulty, for the floors above were employed in warehousing goods
belonging to various minor import trades, and were held on tenures of
different lengths. However, by dint of some money and much skill, the
requisite clearances were effected during September and part of October.
By the end of that month all but the top floor, the tenant of which
refused to be dislodged, fell into Elsmere's hands.
Meanwhile, at a meeting held every Sunday after lecture--a meeting
composed mainly of artisans of the district, but including also Robert's
helpers from the West, and a small sprinkling of persons interested in
the man and his work from all parts--the details of 'The New
Brotherhood of Christ' were being hammered out. Catherine was generally
present, sitting a little apart, with a look which Flaxman, who now knew
her well, was always trying to decipher afresh--a sort of sweet
aloofness, as though the spirit behind it saw, down the vistas of the
future, ends and solutions which gave it courage to endure the present.
Murray Edwardes too was always there. It often struck Flaxman afterwards
that in Robert's attitude towards Edwardes at this time, in his constant
desire to bring him forward, to associate him with himself as much as
possible in the government and formation of the infant society, there
was a half-conscious prescience of a truth that as yet none knew, not
even the tender wife, the watchful friend.
The meetings were of extraordinary interest. The men, the great majority
of whom had been disciplined and moulded for months by contact with
Elsmere's teaching and Elsmere's thought, showed a responsiveness, a
receptivity, even a power of initiation which often struck Flaxman with
wonder. Were these the men he had seen in the Club-hall on the night of
Robert's address--sour, stolid, brutalised, hostile to all things in
heaven and earth?
'And we go on prating that the age of saints is over, the role of the
individual lessening day by day! Fool! go and _be_ a saint, go and give
yourself to ideas; go and _live_ the life hid with Christ in God, and
see,'--so would run the quick comment of the observer.
But incessant as was the reciprocity, the interchange and play of
feeling between Robert and the wide following growing up around him, it
was plain to Flaxman that although he never moved a step without
carrying his world with him, he was never at the mercy of his world.
Nothing was ever really left to chance. Through all these strange
debates, which began rawly and clumsily enough, and grew every week more
and more absorbing to all concerned, Flaxman was convinced that hardly
any rule or formula of the new society was ultimately adopted which had
not been for long in Robert's mind--thought out and brought into final
shape, perhaps, on the Petites Dalles sands. It was an unobtrusive art,
his art of government, but a most effective one.
At any moment, as Flaxman often felt, at any rate in the early meetings,
the discussions as to the religious practices which were to bind
together the new association might have passed the line, and become
puerile or grotesque. At any moment the jarring characters and ambitions
of the men Elsmere had to deal with might have dispersed that delicate
atmosphere of moral sympathy and passion in which the whole new birth
seemed to have been conceived, and upon the maintenance of which its
fruition and development depended. But as soon as Elsmere appeared,
difficulties vanished, enthusiasm sprang up again. The rules of the new
society came simply and naturally into being, steeped and haloed, as it
were, from the beginning, in the passion and genius of one great heart.
The fastidious critical instinct in Flaxman was silenced no less than
the sour, half-educated analysis of such a man as Lestrange.
In the same way all personal jars seemed to melt away beside him. There
were some painful things connected with the new departure. Wardlaw, for
instance, a conscientious Comtist, refusing stoutly to admit anything
more than 'an unknowable reality behind phenomena,' was distressed and
affronted by the strongly religious bent Elsmere was giving to the work
he had begun. Lestrange, who was a man of great though raw ability, who
almost always spoke at the meetings, and whom Robert was bent on
attaching to the society, had times when the things he was half inclined
to worship one day he was much more inclined to burn the next in the
sight of all men, and when the smallest failure of temper on Robert's
part might have entailed a disagreeable scene, and the possible
formation of a harassing left wing.
But Robert's manner to Wardlaw was that of a grateful younger brother.
It was clear that the Comtist could not formally join the Brotherhood.
But all the share and influence that could be secured him in the
practical working of it was secured him. And what was more, Robert
succeeded in infusing his own delicacy, his own compunctions on the
subject, into the men and youths who had profited in the past by
Wardlaw's rough self-devotion. So that if, through much that went on
now, he could only be a spectator, at least he was not allowed to feel
himself an alien or forgotten.