X SUNDAY SUPPER

          He for God only.—MILTON.         

PURITAN hostility to the proceedings in St. Paul’s survived the demise of Flynn and his newspaper and spluttered into activity upon occasion, as when Francis instituted the Litany as a separate Sunday afternoon service or allowed his school-room to be used for musical entertainments organised by the local nigger minstrels—(the annual visit of Moore and Burgess gave birth to numerous amateur troupes)—or when in the jumble sales which were held at intervals he countenanced and even patronised raffles. One pretext was as good as another, but the fundamental grievance was his friendship with Father Soledano, a priest attached to the Roman Catholic Cathedral. The offence was greater in that he had no friend, hardly a kindly acquaintance among the Anglican clergy. They fought shy of him because he had incurred the disapproval of the dean, though their wives occasionally called on Mrs. Folyat because she was still visited by the bishop’s wife.

Father Soledano was an Irishman of Spanish extraction, a little ugly man, with a lame leg, stiff bristling hair receding from a knobby, wrinkled forehead, little eyes glowing under bushy brows, a long upper lip and a sensitive mouth, and a chin that looked as though he had to shave it every half hour.

The Roman Catholic Cathedral was about a mile away from St. Paul’s, and Father Soledano lived in the priest’s house in an asphalt court that lay under its shadow. The surrounding district was inhabited mostly by poor Irish—ignorant, drunken, superstitious, and Jews, whose morality was a reproach to the rest of the dwellers in the slums; and there were French people, and Bavarians, Lithuanians, not a few Poles, and refugees from Russia. All these [Pg 96]were swept into the various trades and manufactories—sweated tailoring, sweated shirt-making, sweated jam-making, sweated engineering. And Father Soledano found his work of digging for their souls infinitely amusing. Several of his Catholics lived over in the parish of St. Paul’s, and he had sought Francis out on hearing a tale of his kindness to an old woman who, by practising midwifery, supported her daughter-in-law and four children. This old woman was a Catholic, and every penny she could spare was spent in buying images of saints. She had the Virgin, and St. Peter, and St. Anthony of Padua, and a little Saint Catherine of Siena. One day two of the men who had assaulted Frederic and overturned the gravestone of the boy James, made a round of all the Catholic houses they could discover and destroyed all the images. When Francis heard of it he went from house to house and was given a list of all that had been destroyed, and a week later he went round with his chief sidesman carrying a clothes-basket full of saints, and made good every loss. When the aforesaid old woman found herself with a new Virgin, a new Saint Peter, and a new Saint Anthony of Padua and a more beautiful new Saint Catherine of Siena than she had ever thought of in her wildest dreams, she knelt down and began to pray for the soul of the English Father. And Francis knelt down and prayed with her, and all the children gathered round and stared at their grandmother and the portly bearded man kneeling there by the kitchen table, and their mother began to cry, and the old woman began to cry, until Francis lifted her up and kissed her on the cheek. Then he sent the children out to buy bread and jam and cake and they had a lovely tea together.

Francis did not tell the tale to anybody, but it was soon out all over the parish, and there was much indignation. A few of the parishioners left the church and Mrs. Folyat was shocked and affronted. What offended her most was that Francis had carried the images publicly and openly through the streets. Being an inveterate gossip herself, she could not endure being the subject of it, except it were flattering to her vanity.

[Pg 97]

Father Soledano wrote to Francis and thanked him, and Francis invited him to come and see him. The invitation was accepted, and the two men found that they had many things in common outside their profession, and they had many a long talk about old Dublin days. Soledano was amused by the Anglican’s easy-going optimism, and Francis was shocked, interested, and stimulated by the priest’s almost cynical pessimism. They never discussed religion. To a certain extent they secretly allied forces in their work of dealing with the moral and economic difficulties of their poor, a certain substratum of whom were ultimately Catholic and Anglican according as they could win the attention and sympathy of the district visitors or the Little Sisters, though they hardly ever attended service either in the Cathedral or in St. Paul’s.

Every now and then Soledano would come to supper at Fern Square on Sundays, and it so happened that he was there when Bennett Lawrie appeared for the first time dressed sprucely for the occasion with a new suit and a very high collar and a blue birds-eye tie. The whole family was present, having been to church in full force—Serge read the Lessons—and they had sat down to their meal, having forgotten all about young Lawrie, when there came a resounding peal at the bell. The servant was out and Gertrude opened the door to him. His face was utterly tragic, and he could hardly find his voice to ask if Mrs. Folyat were in. Gertrude admitted him, showed him into the dining-room, where several people were talking all at once, and disappeared into the kitchen to fetch him plate, knife, and fork. It was some moments before Frederic recognised him—two gas-jets in glass globes do not give very much light—and Bennett suffered agonies of shyness and began to wish he had never come. He saw Francis open his mouth and insert a large piece of cold beef and his beard wag as he chewed it slowly, and he rather resented it. He had romanticised Francis, and had always pictured him in his vestments very saintly and impressive. The other man, Soledano, sitting between Mrs. Folyat and Minna, looked much more like a saint. . . . [Pg 98]Minna gazed at Bennett with mischievous approval, and he thought her very beautiful and cast down his eyes. Frederic said “Hullo” and told his mother who Bennett was, and Mrs. Folyat bade Serge and Mary make room for the young man between them. Gertrude returned with plate, knife and fork. Bennett sat down at the place made for him, and conversation was resumed and flowed on over him. It was chiefly concerned with food, and Mrs. Folyat was very anxious to know what Father Soledano had to eat at the priests’ house. He told her they ate very little meat and a great deal of macaroni. Mary tried to talk to Bennett but could get nothing out of him but “Yes” and “No.” He liked music but knew nothing about it, and had never been to a concert.

Serge tackled him. The directness of his questions embarrassed Bennett, and the kindliness of his interest moved him so that a lump rose in his throat and he could hardly get out his replies. He had, he said, been born in the town and had hardly ever been away from it; once to Scotland, where his father came from, and once to Westmoreland and once to Derbyshire. His family were so poor, you see, though they had once been quite rich and lived in a big house with a garden. He could just remember the garden. He was nineteen and had been in business since he was sixteen, first of all in a little office where there was only one clerk, and then, by the influence of his uncles, in a great firm of shippers where, if you did not earn very much, you were at any rate safe. His mother was Low Church and his father was a Presbyterian but never went to any place of worship. He had two brothers and two sisters, but they were all older than himself and didn’t care about the things he cared for, though one of his brothers sang in the choir at the Church of the Ascension, where they only wore surplices and no cassocks. . . . Timidly he asked Serge if it was true that he was an artist, and Serge laughed and said he was a sort of middle-aged embryo.

“That must be splendid,” said Bennett, wistfully. “I draw, but not real things, only dreams and horrible grotesques. We started a family paper once but the [Pg 99]others wouldn’t do anything, and I had to write it all myself and draw all the pictures, and they laughed at everything I did, and I drew a picture of my mother being carried off by the devil and they burnt it. I write verses about the people in the office, but they don’t like them unless they’re—you know—rather nasty. We can’t smoke in our office and everybody takes snuff. I think I’d like to have been a clergyman.”

He suddenly became conscious that Gertrude’s eyes were upon him and that she was devouring every word he said. He had recognised her as the young woman who came so often to St. Saviour’s, and he had thought about her a great deal. He had tortured himself with the notion that she might have come to see him, had even dreamed lofty romances in which she figured as a mysterious lady of high degree who swept him off in a great carriage with two tremendous horses, and then had been ashamed. It comforted him a little to know that she was the daughter of the Rev. Francis Folyat, and that her attendance at St. Saviour’s could therefore only have been prompted by the highest spiritual motives. . . . All the same she was looking at him exactly as she did when he came down to the steps of the nave and stood with the great brass offertory-plate. He was wretchedly nervous, but he imagined the Folyats to be a happy united family, and he basked in the warmth which seemed to pervade their house. He listened to their bantering conversation and was very much afraid of them all except Serge. Frederic seemed to drink a vast quantity of beer, and he remembered stories that he had heard of him in the office. Like everybody else who was interested in church matters, he was familiar with the flying gossip concerning the Folyats, and the ill-natured remarks that were current about the unmarried daughters. He thought Minna more and more beautiful, and Mary devoted, and Gertrude—he could not disentangle Gertrude from all the absurd things he had thought of her before he knew who she was.

Mrs. Folyat began, as she always did in the presence of a newcomer, to talk of the ancestors on the wall, and to tell the lurid stories of the Red Lady, who had known [Pg 100]more than was ever written of the Monmouth rebellion, and the Grey Lady who had such a violent temper, that, losing it one day out driving with her husband in a high chariot, she boxed his ears so that he lost his balance and fell out and broke his neck. She rambled on by way of Baron Folyat to Willie, now safely established as Earl of Leedham, and she declared, being thoroughly warmed to her subject, that failing heirs male, and in the event of the extirpation of two other branches of the family—and less likely things had happened—Serge would become heir, or his sons, if he ever had any.

Bennett was much impressed, as it was meant that he should be, and began to talk of his own ancestry. There were Lawries in Elgin as far back as Robert the Bruce, and for hundreds of years there had been Lawries who were lairds or in the ministry. Mrs. Folyat asked him who his mother was, and Bennett replied:

“She was a Miss Smith. She married my father when she was seventeen. People don’t seem able to marry so young nowadays.”

“It is difficult, isn’t it, Gertrude?” asked Minna.

The meal came to an end, and Francis asked Frederic to accompany him to the study to discuss a theatrical entertainment that was in process of organisation in aid of the restoration of the organ. Mary and Minna cleared away and Gertrude helped her mother upstairs, carrying her spectacles, book and knitting-bag. Serge, Bennett, and Father Soledano were left in the dining-room. Serge and Bennett smoked and Father Soledano began to talk. Bennett was unused to drinking beer. Serge had plied him with it rather too generously in the frequent lapses in their conversation, and the fumes of it had gone to his head so that it felt very hot and large, while inside it his brain worked with unwonted swiftness and a hectic clarity. His cheeks were flushed and they burned, but on the whole he found his new sensations very pleasant, and there was a sort of splendour in being treated by these grown men, an artist and a priest, as one of themselves. To Bennett all artists were great artists—he was not his father’s son for nothing—and the priesthood [Pg 101]was the noblest and most exalted calling possible for man. He lived from Sunday to Sunday. On Monday morning he died and was buried in his office. On Saturday evening came a glorious resurrection, and he rose to exalted heights each Sunday morning when he took the sacrament. He was an emotional creature and had no other outlet.

He sat looking from Serge to Father Soledano and from Father Soledano to Serge as they talked, but took little account of what they said. They were exchanging impressions of the town and speaking of it in a curious critical way that Bennett found difficulty in following. He knew nothing of the machinery of the world. He was poor, and he had accepted it as axiomatic that poor people had to do work that was distasteful to them. He had no notion of what that work resulted in, or who profited by it. You went on working until you had enough to marry, and then you married and went on working until you died. His brothers were both bank-clerks, and he gathered that their work was even duller than his own, which consisted in addressing envelopes and taking messages down into the warehouse where there were rough men who were even poorer than himself. They packed and unpacked bales of cotton-goods which were placed on lorries and carried off to trains, which took them away to the sea and across the sea to Bombay and Calcutta and Shanghai and Yokohama. There were many other processes going on in the office and warehouses, but that seemed to be the general principle—cotton came from America, was bought on the Exchange, spun and woven in the mills near Oldham, brought to the warehouse and dispatched—fully insured—through the complicated machinery of the office. There were five partners in the firm and they were all very rich. One of the employees, the head-clerk, had six hundred a year, but he himself, Bennett, received every week only thirty shillings. Many young men of his age were earning only half that sum, and he was quite ready to admit, without thought or examination, that he was worth no more to his employers. He did not understand the machinery in which he played [Pg 102]a part, did not want to understand it, and did not find it sufficiently interesting. Being poor, he had to work, and the nature of the work was not his affair. It absorbed the greater part of his life, but it was outside his work that he was as really alive as he could be.

This visit to Fern Square was perhaps the greatest adventure of his life. He had heard Father Soledano’s voice droning on for some time, and now he heard words that interested him.

“The middle classes are beginning to invest their savings in industrial securities. That is going to make things worse than ever for the poor, since it means organised exploitation, dividends to be paid as well as the profits of private enterprise. It seems to me that men are inventing machinery for making money and letting them get out of hand. A machine that no man can control or use for the purposes of good is the most perilous engine of destruction.”

“A machine,” thought Bennett, and at once there came to his mind the streets surrounding his office where all day long there was the thud of machinery and thousands of men and women being swallowed up in the morning by great black ugly buildings, and spewed out again in the evening, all, he supposed, as weary and listless as he felt himself on every evening except Saturday.

“Isn’t that,” said Serge, “isn’t that what has happened with the Church? . . . You don’t mind my discussing it in that way? . . . Hasn’t it become a machine which takes everything from men and gives them nothing? I fancy my father’s Church doesn’t meddle much, or, at any rate, effectually, with politics, but yours is always struggling after the temporal power which it has lost.”

“That is because we believe that the Church and State should be one.”

“I agree. And so they would be if the Church were really a Church, and the State were really a State. I have never been to your church, but I know that my father’s is only an imitation, a fairly good imitation and quite attractive, but it has nothing at all to do with religion as I understand it.”

[Pg 103]

“It depends what you mean by religion.”

“I take it to mean the profoundest instinct in a human being, that instinct of life which embraces and should direct all the rest.”

“I agree, but it is impossible.”

“Why is it impossible?”

Bennett did not hear Father Soledano’s reply. The dialogue had been to him like the murmuring of mysterious voices in a dream, bearing no relation to his own actual experience. His own religion was so axiomatic that the possibility of criticism, outside crude condemnation, to which he was hardened and accustomed, had never occurred to him, and yet, now that it had happened, it was as something remote, impious, but menacing and disturbing. That Father Soledano should lend himself to such talk perturbed him not at all, for he had been brought up to believe that anything was possible for the Roman Catholic priesthood. He was conscious of resentment, and told himself that it was because these things were being said in Mr. Folyat’s house. He was hurt, and childishly he wished to hand on the pain to some one. He waited until Father Soledano’s voice had died down, and then he said, taking no account of his words:

“It isn’t for us to inquire into these things. If we believe at all in the authority and the Divine origin of the Church we are bound by its tradition and its—its dogma.”

“I beg your pardon,” replied Serge. “I forgot that you were there. I don’t believe in the authority or the Divine origin of the Church, and I refuse to be bound by its tradition, which has always been, to say the least of it, unhappy in its results, or its dogma, which seems to me unsound and more or less contradictory of the spirit of the New Testament.”

“But—but . . .” Bennett pounced on Serge with an air of triumph, brandishing his point before proving it. “But what about morals?”

“That,” said Serge, “is exactly where you and I part company. You Christians have only evolved a morality which you apply to the affairs of others and not to your [Pg 104]own. You have no standard of goodness—only the wickedness of other people, a Pharisaic standard which would have been repulsive to the Man whom you choose to regard as your Founder. My father’s sermons, for instance—and they are like every parson’s sermons—begin by drawing such a frightful picture of human wickedness that when it is over his hearers feel that they are angels of goodness in comparison. It’s an old dodge, and I daresay Father Soledano makes use of it too.”

“I do,” said Father Soledano. “I do.”

Bennett gaped at him. He felt that he would burst into tears if this went on any longer, and indeed his eyes were wet and his throat was so dry that he could not speak.

“You like your religion?” asked Serge.

“It is my whole life.” Bennett was surprised at the ferocity with which he said this. He was staggered by Serge’s answer:

“I am sorry for you. You will be badly hurt when life gobbles you up and gives you other engrossing interests, which you will be ill-equipped to tackle.”

“Come, come,” said Father Soledano. “It is not fair. It is not fair to come down from the general to the particular like that.”

“I protest,” answered Serge. “My whole indignation arises from the unkindness and dishonesty of stuffing young people, and ignorant people, with generalisations.”

“What else can you give them? They are not conscious of individuality.”

“I don’t believe that, and even if it were so you ought to leave them free to become conscious—if they can.”

“The risk is too great.”

“What risk?”

Bennett’s mind had been moving swiftly and partly by memory, partly by intuition he came to this:

“People can’t do as they like.”

Serge stood up suddenly and paced round the room.

“Young idiot!” he said. “They can, and they do. Isn’t it your experience, Father, that they do? The trouble is that with all these foolish generalisations buzzing [Pg 105]in their heads they are always doing the wrong things, and doing them in the wrong way, shuffling, and sneaking so as to hide away from the bogies you give them.” He turned to Bennett and asked: “Has what you do and think on Sunday the slightest bearing on what you do and think on week-days?”

“It keeps me from temptation,” said Bennett so earnestly that there was not the smallest hint of priggishness in him.

Serge took him by the arm and lifted him clean out of his chair and set him down with a jolt on to his feet.

“Keeps you from temptation, does it! How?—By running away from it.”

Bennett was very angry. He raised his voice:

“If you had to live in my house you wouldn’t talk like that. My father’s a drunken beast and my mother doesn’t even try to understand us. You’d believe in God if you lived in our house. . .” He came to an end suddenly. Serge patted him kindly on the shoulder.

“That’s all right. That’s all right. Let’s go upstairs and see what a happy home is like, or perhaps you would prefer to go and talk to my father and Father Soledano in the study.”

“I’ll go with you,” said Bennett.

They went upstairs, and Father Soledano joined Francis in the study. In the drawing-room they found Frederic holding forth about the performance in the school-room. The piece chosen was The Rose and the Ring, in a musical version.

Gertrude asked Bennett if he could sing. He replied that he could, and Frederic graciously allowed him the use of one of his songs, “On, on, my bark, dash through the foam.” Bennett had a light baritone voice with a curious harsh quality in the middle notes, but he loved singing and really let himself go. When he had finished Mrs. Folyat looked up from her Family Herald and said:

“Very nice, very nice indeed. Even Frederic does not sing it so well.”

Frederic asked Bennett to take a part in The Rose and the Ring, and he accepted. Gertrude took him aside to [Pg 106]show him his part, and Mary produced her violin and played Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words for half an hour, after which she produced a table and cards and sat playing Bézique with her mother. (Mrs. Folyat declared that she could not sleep without her game. No one else was allowed to play cards on Sunday.)

Serge sat teasing Minna, and time flew.

There came a ring at the bell, and after a little interval a gaunt figure in black stalked into the room, stood by the door, and said:

“Bennett, your mother says you’re to come home.”

Bennett rose to his feet at once, muttered good-bye, turned the colour of a red peony and slunk out after the old Scotch servant.