Chapter 12

For some hours he slept heavily in his pitched, huddled attitude, but as the cloud of sleep lightened before waking, he had another dream of the old forge at Bethersden, and of himself working there, in the days before the “voices” came. He saw the great red glow of the forge spread out over the cross-roads, fanning up the road to Horsmonden and the road to Witsunden and the road to Castweasel. He saw the smithy full of it, and himself and his father working in it, with arms swung over the glowing iron—he heard the roar of the furnace and the thump of the hammers; and a great fulness of peace was in his heart. Dimly conscious in his dream of all that had passed since those happy days, he felt a wonderful relief at being back in them, and the sweetest doubt as to the reality of his later experiences.... So it had been a dream, all his ministerial trouble and travail, his brief snatch at love, his son’s birth in sorrow and life in defiance and death in shame.... The hammers swung, and the forge roared, and the light fanned up to the stars....

Then he woke, with the roar and thump still in his ears, for his head hung down over the straw below the level of his body. All his limbs were cramped, and he found it difficult to rise. The first despair of waking was upon him, and he wished he could have died in his dream. Bright sunshine was streaming into the barn, lighting up its dark old corners where the cobwebs hung like lace. Framed in the big doorway was a green hill freckled with primroses and cuckoo flowers, with broom bushes budding against a thick blue sky that seemed to drip with sunshine.

He stumbled out into the stroke of the wind, now scarcely enough to ripple the big rain puddles that lay [305] blue and glimmering in the road. He was in a part of the country he did not know, doubtless beyond the frontiers of the Four Roads, in some by-lane behind Rushlake Green.

Though it was too late, he felt that even now he could not go back to Sunday Street. He shrank from meeting human beings, especially those who had sat before him in rows like pea-pods last night. Oh, those heads! he would never forget them, how they had stared and rolled.... He turned away from the road, and went up the rising ground behind the barn. It was a spread of wild land, some common now in its spring bloom of gorse and violets. He threw himself down upon the turf, and for a few minutes lay motionless, with the sun gently steaming his damp crumpled clothes.

He longed to be back in his dream, back in the red glow of the furnace, back at the old cross-roads in Kent. A sense of great cruelty and injustice was upon him. Why had the Lord called him from the work he loved, away to unknown cares and sorrows, to a life for which he was not fitted? It even seemed to him that if only he had been left a blacksmith this tragedy of Jerry would not have happened ... if Jerry had never been in the impossible, grotesque situation of “a clergyman’s son.”... Why had the Lord sent voices, which never came now, which, indeed, had not come since his marriage? Why had the Lord raised up the minister at Tenterden, to send him to a training college and try to make him what he never could be, a gentleman? He was no minister—only a poor image of one, which everybody laughed at. He had had qualms of doubts before this, but he had put them from him; now he was too exhausted, too badly bruised and beaten, to deceive himself any further. He was no minister of God—he could hardly, after a twelve years’ pastorate, scrape together a [306] congregation; people went anywhere but to the Particular Baptists. They never asked for his ministrations at sick-beds, they hardly ever came to him to be married or buried, as if they doubted the efficacy of these rites at his hands; he had not performed one baptism in the last five years, and the only time his church has been full was when they had all come to gaze on him, to see how he bore his trouble. On the other hand, if a man had a sick sheep or an ailing cow, or if his horse went lame or spoiled his knees, he called him in at once. That ought to have shown him. He was not a minister but a farrier, and the people of Sunday Street knew it, and treated him accordingly.

He lay with his face hidden against the grass. It seemed as if his life had stopped like a watch, leaving him, like a stopped watch, still in being. Jerry, the centre and spring of his existence for twenty years, was gone; his ministry was gone—he could not go back after what had happened, and no brethren would call him elsewhere. He could not stay on at Sunday Street or return to the forge at Bethersden. Here he was, past middle age, without friends, without kin, without livelihood, without resources of any kind. He saw himself alone in a world burning and crashing to ruin, a world that bristled with the crosses of martyred boys and was black with the dead hopes of their fathers.

A sob broke from him, but without tears. His being seemed dried up. The horror of thick darkness was upon him, of this blasted world rocking and staggering to the pit, of the flame which devoured all, good and bad, elect and damned, wheat and weeds. Who could endure to the end of this Judgment? Who hoped to be saved? All was burnt up, dried, and blasted. The day of the Lord had come indeed and had consumed him like a dry stick.

“My soul is full of troubles and my life draweth nigh unto the grave.

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“I am counted with them that go down into the pit.

“Free among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, whom Thou rememberest no more.

“Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness, in the deeps.

“Thy wrath lieth hard upon me, and thou hast vexed me with thy waves.

“Thy fierce wrath goeth over me; thy terrors have cut me off.

“Lover and friend hast thou put from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness.”