XXXIII THE CONCLUSION OF THE MATTER

          The vision of Christ that thou dost see Is my vision’s greatest enemy. Thine has a great hook nose like thine Mine has a snub nose like to mine.         
          THE EVERLASTING GOSPEL.

TWELVE middle-class Englishmen and an official sat in inquest on the body of Frederic. They gazed shyly and uninterestedly upon it and then heard the evidence to the effect that he was most happily married and was without financial worry of any kind. . . . The verdict, in view of the fact that the revolver was in the deceased’s overcoat pocket, was one of death by misadventure.

Francis learned the truth from Mr. Clibran-Bell. Mrs. Folyat was not told, neither was Jessie. Queer things were rumoured, however, and Mrs. Folyat began to feel—not absolutely without foundation—that she was looked upon askance. She went into deep mourning and raised Frederic to sainthood, and surrounded herself with relics from among his personal belongings. She brooded over the past and began to piece together her scattered memories. Nothing took clear shape except, what she had not seen at the time, the long coolness between her husband and her son, and she began to charge and reproach Francis with it. By vilifying Francis she had the illusion that she was exalting Frederic. She kept insisting that Francis must be sorry now that her poor angel was dead. Francis was remorseful. He was probing deeper and deeper into the unillumined past, groping his way through tortuous mole-galleries. The perpetual false deification of Frederic bothered him, his wife’s voice, lachrymose and thin, dinning in his ears, was [Pg 335]an exasperation. He was busy, frantically busy, forcing his way with all the strength of his nature out of the slough of despond into which he had fallen, and she seemed intent on thrusting him out of the slough into a sea of treacly mud. At length, one day, when she had raised Frederic a peg higher in her idolatrous beatification, suddenly the truth was wrenched from him:

“Can you not see that he meant to kill himself?”

“Oh! Frank . . . !”

He could despitefully have bitten his tongue out for having said it, but, having done so, he owed it to her to go on. It might prove her salvation. It might bring her back to him so that together they might perceive and win to the ways of brightness.

“He took the pistol with him in his pocket. He had no luggage with him. He had locked the door of his office and paid up his clerks’ wages and the premiums of his pupils.”

“Oh! Frank . . . Oh! Frank!”

And Francis hoped that she would turn to him and understand, but her very anguish of sorrow she must turn to self-indulgence, and she moved from the luxury of worship to the luxury of self-accusation:

“We drove him to it. All of us. We never understood him.”

She told Jessie, who was prostrated by the knowledge, and Mr. Clibran-Bell refused ever to enter the Folyats’ house again.

Francis passed through the very blackest hours of all after that. He prayed to his God but was not comforted; his mind would run only in the harshest channels of the faith he had spent his life in teaching. The God he found was a jealous God, a God of cruelty and vengeance and punishment. In vain he told himself that this was the just visitation of sins. He could not believe it. All his spirit craved for the belief in mercy, the living eternity, the life everlasting. He was hemmed in by the habit of years, and long familiarity with things sacred, all the vocabulary of paradox that had flowed so easily from his lips week in, week out, year after year. He [Pg 336]wanted the truth of it, but it was all words, words, words, a rain of fine dust falling upon his intelligence, blinding his eyes. He needed that in his religion which could square with and illuminate the facts of his existence, but ever the darkness grew more impenetrable.

For three weeks he went on mechanically with his work, going blindly through the ritual which he had fought so hard to establish, but always when he came to the Benediction and commended the congregation to the Peace of God, he knew, could not away with the knowledge, that there was no peace in his own heart, and he rebuked himself and called himself Hypocrite.

He could not take refuge in self-torment. His need was too great. He told himself that he no longer believed, and prayed for help in his unbelief. But there had always been faith in him. Nothing had ever shaken it. His necessity lay in the fact that the symbols he had always used were cheapened, worn, debased. His mind could not change. It was definitely cast in the story of the Godhead in Man in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, born of the Virgin birth, persecuted and slain by the Jews to rise again in glory to the eternal salvation of souls. . . . The teaching of this gospel should, if it had any purpose, lead to noble life, a superb preparation for eternity. But whither had it led himself? To the smallest of small lives, to the ruin of two of his children, fallen into the very snares against which they had been warned with all the threats of eternal punishment and Hell fire at the command of an appointed minister of the Christian religion. . . . He tried to look beyond his own family, to see what effect the Gospel had had upon his parishioners and he could not disguise from himself the pitifulness of their condition. To consider the effect of the Christian religion upon the history of the world was too large an undertaking for him.

Serge had said that he was of those who believe that understanding is not vouchsafed to us. What did he mean? . . . Words haunted him:—“To justify the works of Man to God,” or was it “To justify the works of God to Man”? Surely the last. The works of Man could [Pg 337]not be justified. He felt himself to be near the clue he was seeking, but the effort to follow it was beyond him. For him the only tie between Man and God was Jesus Christ.

He read the Gospels, and soon gave up trying to unravel the hard sayings, but he read again and again every passage in which the words Love and Mercy occurred. They soothed him, and, reading over and over the gentleness of Jesus under persecution, he became softened and very tender, and sought the company of children, his grandchildren.

He rested for a fortnight and then took up his work, for one Sunday only. All the old business of threatening and hectoring and denouncing and holding the wrath of God back with prayer, and piling up mountains upon mountains of sin to teach the love and mercy of the Gospel through and after punishment, everlasting and relentless, was empty, all sound and fury.

His conclusion was, not that the Christian religion had become theatrical, rhetorical, mechanical, inhuman and unjust, but that he himself by his own life had become unworthy to administer it. Like many Christians, faced with the difficult, almost (in these days) impossible, task of distilling the essential truth from its accumulation of tainted lumber, he took refuge, without seeing any inconsistency, in the ascetic ideal, thinking that a life of absolute chastity and poverty and abstraction from the things of this world would give a man the right to hurl thunder and the lightnings of the Jewish Bible at his fellow men. And yet in his heart, as, latent in the hearts of all men, was the true faith in the ineffable love,

    . . . che muove ’l Sole e l’altre stelle.

He could not disentangle this love, this spirit of man, from the superstition of the ages, and could not therefore let it freely move his own existence. He told himself that he had failed, that he ought never to have entered the priesthood, that he was an old man and could not change. No other course lay open to him than to retire.

[Pg 338]

He wrote to his Bishop to ask his leave, and, if it were granted, to apply for a pension from the Diocesan fund.

Never again did he conduct Divine service in any church.

 

He felt infinitely happier when he had done this, and a new brightness came to Mrs. Folyat and Mary when they knew they were to escape from the town where they had come by so much suffering, and the numbing monotony of a rather idle existence in drab surroundings. They set their faces southwards, for they had decided to live in Potsham, where Francis had held his first curacy. They were going to live in Crabtrees, where Francis Folyat and Martha Brett had met and loved each other so long ago, and all day long Francis would be busy in the garden running down to the river, and all day long Martha would sit in the gazebo and look out at the water, and see the tide coming in, and the herons fishing, and the boats go sailing by, all as it had been long ago, peaceful and beautiful. . . . Already, weeks before they could go, the peace of it began to fill the house in Burdley Park, and the dark past slipped away from them and Francis began to feel the richness of old age, when best and worst have been done, and the fruits of reflection can be gathered in.

Often as he sat working in the greenhouse, or in the study turning over his books—he had gone back to the loves of his early days, Fielding and Don Quixote—Francis would think of Serge, and the day when together they had walked away from Mrs. Entwistle’s cottage. That memory preoccupied him more and more, and he felt a desire to see Annie Lipsett again before he went away. She wrote to him at long intervals to let him know that she had not forgotten. His feeling about the episode had always been spiced with the joy of forbidden things. It had been entirely separate from the rest of his life, and yet, unknown to him, it had informed the whole of it, and, in his most need, had given him the assurance of love and mercy which had upheld him in the face of the doctrine and dogma of his Church, even though he had seemed to [Pg 339]himself to be upholding the Church by the sacrifice of himself.

 

He found Annie Lipsett busy and thoughtful. She was going to be married to an auctioneer who had been a lodger in her mother’s house. She had just had a letter from Serge in Ceylon and its friendliness had removed her last anxieties.

“You see, sir,” she said to Francis, “Mr. Serge found me when everything was as complicated as that piece of lace, and he made it all simple. And after that, being with him made one able to bear everything, because one felt that, whatever it was, it would go away. He used to say that being unhappy and dark in your mind was just the same as being unwell in your body, and if it was taken in time there was always a cure for it. So funny he used to be about it. He was always talking to me about the boy, and he used to say that I must teach him nothing, because children are always right by themselves until they begin to imitate grown-up people, and bad things are easier to imitate than good because they are grotesque, and grown-up people have always to be learning good things from children over and over again.”

“I have never forgotten that day when I came to see you.”

“Nor I, sir.”

“We’re going away, for ever. It is queer, but you are the only person whom I really wanted to see before I left. We have never seemed to belong to this place.”

“I used to hate it too, but Mr. Serge made me laugh at it all. He said it was just an accident, though I didn’t know what he meant by that. I often didn’t really understand Mr. Serge, except about the boy, but then I could see that everything he said was true.”

“I hope you will be very, very happy.”

Annie surprised Francis by putting her arms round his neck and kissing him. He returned the kiss.

It was only some time after he had left her that it struck him that he had never once thought of Frederic in connection with her. When he called Frederic to his mind [Pg 340]it was always as a graceful, impudent, funny little boy. He had never known the man Frederic. Frederic had never been a man.

 

Even in our town the green of spring was showing and the zestful wind was blowing upon the blackened houses when Francis, his wife and Mary left upon their long journey to the south. Gleeful and glad they were, and the spring was in their hearts and the keen adventurousness of escape. After long captivity they were shaking from their shoes the dust of the hostile city, leaving in its toils the sole hostage of all their family, Annette, doomed to the life of drudgery to which that city condemns its women, for, except they be born in drudgery, the sons of its women could never endure its service, nor would they be fitted for it.