Robert Elsmere by Mrs. Humphry Ward (best classic literature txt) 📕

his visitor to the point from which, as it seemed to him, Elsmere's work might start, viz., a lecture-room half a mile from his own chapel, where two helpers of his had just established an independent venture.

Murray Edwardes had at the time an interesting and miscellaneous staff of lay-curates. He asked no questions as to religious opinions, but in general the men who volunteered under him--civil servants, a young doctor, a briefless barrister or two--were men who had drifted from received beliefs, and found pleasure and freedom in working for and with him they could hardly have found elsewhere. The two who had planted their outpost in what seemed to them a particularly promising corner of the district were men of whom Edwardes knew personally little. 'I have really not much concern with what they do,' he explained to Elsmere, 'except that they got a small share of our funds. But I know they want help, and if they will take you in, I think you will make something of it.'

After a tramp through the muddy winter streets, they came upon a new block of warehouses, in the lower windows of which some bills announced a night-school for boys and men. Here, to judge from the commotion round the doors, a lively scene was going on. Outside, a gang of young roughs were hammering at the doors, and shrieking witticisms through the keyhole. Inside, as soon as Murray Edwardes and Elsmere, by dint of good humor and strong shoulders, had succeeded in shoving their way through and shutting the door behind them, they found a still more animated performance in progress. The schoolroom was in almost total darkness; the pupils, some twenty in number, were racing about, like so many shadowy demons, pelting each other and their teachers with the 'dips' which, as the buildings were new, and not yet fitted for gas, had been provided to light them through their three R's. In the middle stood the two philanthropists they were in search of, freely bedaubed with tallow, one employed in boxing a boy's ears, the other in saving a huge ink-bottle whereon some enterprising spirit had just laid hands by way of varying the rebel ammunition. Murray Edwardes, who was in his element, went to the rescue at once, helped by Robert. The boy-minister, as he looked, had been, in fact, 'bow' of the Cambridge eight, and possessed muscles which men twice his size might have envied. In three minutes he had put a couple of ringleaders into the street by the scruff of the neck, relit a lamp which had been turned out, and got the rest of the rioters in hand. Elsmere backed him ably, and in a very short time they had cleared the premises.

Then the four looked at each other, and Edwardes went off into a shout of laughter.

'My dear Wardlaw, my condolences to your coat! But I don't believe if I were a rough myself I could resist "dips." Let me introduce a friend--Mr. Elsmere--and if you will have him, a recruit for your work. It seems to me another pair of arms will hardly come amiss to you!'

The short red-haired man addressed shook hands with Elsmere, scrutinizing him from under bushy eyebrows. He was panting and beplastered with tallow, but the inner man was evidently quite unruffled, and Elsmere liked the shrewd Scotch face and gray eyes.

'It isn't only a pair of arms we want,' he remarked dryly, 'but a bit of science behind them. Mr. Elsmere, I observed, can use his.'

Then he turned to a tall, affected-looking youth with a large nose and long fair hair, who stood gasping with his hands upon his sides, his eyes, full of a moody wrath, fixed on the wreck and disarray of the schoolroom.

'Well, Mackay, have they knocked the wind out of you? My friend and helper,--Mr. Elsmere. Come and sit down, won't you, a minute? They've left us the chairs, I perceive, and there's a spark or two of fire. Do you smoke? Will you light up?'

The four men sat on chatting some time, and then Wardlaw and Elsmere walked home together. It had been all arranged. Mackay, a curious, morbid fellow, who had thrown himself into Unitarianism and charity mainly out of opposition to an orthodox and bourgeois family, and who had a great idea of his own social powers, was somewhat grudging and ungracious through it all. But Elsmere's proposals were much too good to be refused. He offered to bring to the undertaking his time, his clergyman's experience, and as much money as might be wanted. Wardlaw listened to him cautiously for an hour, took stock of the whole man physically and morally, and finally said, as he very quietly and deliberately knocked the ashes out of his pipe,--

'All right, I'm your man, Mr. Elsmere. If Mackay agrees, I vote we make you captain of this venture.'

'Nothing of the sort,' said Elsmere. 'In London I am a novice; I come to learn, not to lead.'

Wardlaw shook his head with a little shrewd smile. Mackay faintly endorsed his companion's offer, and the party broke up.

That was in January. In two months from that time, by the natural force of things, Elsmere, in spite of diffidence and his own most sincere wish to avoid a premature leadership, had become the head and heart of the Elgood Street undertaking, which had already assumed much larger proportions. Wardlaw was giving him silent approval and invaluable help, while young Mackay was in the first uncomfortable stages of a hero-worship which promised to be exceedingly good for him.


CHAPTER XXXVIII.

There were one or two curious points connected with the beginnings of Elsmere's venture in North R---- one of which may just be noticed here. Wardlaw, his predecessor and colleague, had speculatively little or nothing in common with Elsmere or Murray Edwardes. He was a devoted and Orthodox Comtist, for whom Edwardes had provided an outlet for the philanthropic passion, as he had for many others belonging to far stranger and remoter faiths.

By profession, he was a barrister, with a small and struggling practice. On ibis practice, however, he had married, and his wife, who had been a doctor's daughter and a national schoolmistress, had the same ardors as himself. They lived in one of the dismal little squares near the Goswell Road, and had two children. The wife, as a Positivist mother is bound to do, tended and taught her children entirely herself. She might have been seen any day wheeling their perambulator through the dreary streets of a dreary region; she was their Providence, their deity, the representative to them of all tenderness and all authority. But when her work with them was done, she would throw herself into charity organization cases, into efforts for the protection of workhouse servants, into the homeliest acts of ministry toward the sick, till her dowdy little figure and her face, which but for the stress of London, of labor, and of poverty, would have had a blunt fresh-colored dairymaid's charm, became symbols of a divine and sacred helpfulness in the eyes of hundreds of straining men and women.

The husband also, after a day spent in chambers, would give his evenings to teaching or committee work. They never allowed themselves to breathe even to each other that life might have brighter things to show them than the neighborhood of the Goswell Road. There was a certain narrowness in their devotion; they had their bitternesses and ignorances like other people; but the more Robert knew of them the more profound became his admiration for that potent spirit of social help which in our generation Comtism has done so much to develop, even among those of us who are but moderately influenced by Comte's philosophy, and can make nothing of the religion of Humanity.

Wardlaw has no large part in the story of Elsmere's work in North R----. In spite of Robert's efforts, and against his will, the man of meaner gifts and commoner clay was eclipsed by that brilliant and persuasive something in Elsmere which a kind genius had infused into him at birth. And we shall see that in time Robert's energies took a direction which Wardlaw could not follow with any heartiness. But at the beginning Elsmere owed him much, and it was a debt he was never tired of honoring.

In the fast place, Wardlaw's choice of the Elgood Street room as a fresh centre for civilizing effort had been extremely shrewd. The district lying about it, as Robert soon came to know, contained a number of promising elements.

Close by the dingy street which sheltered their school-room, rose the great pile of a new factory of artistic pottery, a rival on the north side of the river to Doulton's immense works on the south. The old winding streets near it, and the blocks of workman's dwellings recently erected under its shadow, were largely occupied by the workers in its innumerable floors, and among these workers was a large proportion of skilled artisans, men often of a considerable amount of cultivation, earning high wages, and maintaining a high standard of comfort. A great many of them, trained in the art school which Murray Edwardes had been largely instrumental in establishing within easy distance of their houses, were men of genuine artistic gifts and accomplishment, and as the development of one faculty tends on the whole to set others working, when Robert, after a few weeks' work in the place, set up a popular historical lecture once a fortnight, announcing the fact by a blue and white poster in the school-room windows, it was the potters who provided him with his first hearers.

The rest of the parish was divided between a population of dock laborers, settled there to supply the needs of the great dock which ran up into the south-eastern corner of it, two or three huge breweries, and a colony of watchmakers, an offshoot of Clerkenwell, who lived together in two or three streets, and showed the same peculiarities of race and specialized training to be noticed in the more northerly settlement from which they had been thrown off like a swarm from a hive. Outside these well-defined trades there was, of course, a warehouse population, and a mass of heterogeneous cadging and catering which went on chiefly in the river-side streets at the other side of the parish from Elgood Street, in the neighborhood of St. Wilfrid's.

St. Wilfrid's at this moment seemed to Robert to be doing a very successful work among the lowest strata of the parish. From them at one end of the scale, and from the innumerable clerks and superintendents who during the daytime crowded the vast warehouses, of which the district was full, its Lenten congregations, now in full activity, were chiefly drawn.

The Protestant opposition, which had shown itself so brutally and persistently in old days, was now, so far as outward manifestations went, all but extinct. The cassocked monk-like clergy might preach and 'process' in the open air as much as they pleased. The populace, where it was not indifferent, was friendly, and devoted living had borne its natural fruits.

A small incident, which need not be recorded, recalled to Elsmere's mind--after he had been working some six weeks in the district--the forgotten unwelcome fact that St. Wilfrid's was the very church where Newcome, first as senior curate and then as vicar, had spent those ten wonderful years into which Elsmere at Murewell had been never tired of inquiring. The thought of Newcome was a very sore thought. Elsmere had written to him announcing his resignation of his living immediately after his interview with the Bishop. The letter had remained unanswered, and it was by now