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

talking to them of China or Egypt or South America, till they followed him up the Amazon, or into the pyramids or through the Pampas, or into the mysterious buried cities of Mexico, as the children of Hamelin followed the magic of the Pied Piper.

Hardly any of those who came to him, adults or children, while almost all of the artisan class, were of the poorest class. He knew it, and had laid his plans for such a result. Such work as he had at heart has no chance with the lowest in the social scale, in its beginnings. It must have something to work upon, and must penetrate downward. He only can receive who already hath--there is no profounder axiom.

And meanwhile the months passed on, and he was still brooding, still waiting. At last the spark fell.

There, in the next street but one to Elgood Street rose the famous Workmen's Club of North R----. It had been started by a former Liberal clergyman of the parish, whose main object however, had been to train the workmen to manage it for themselves. His training had been, in fact too successful. Not only was it now wholly managed by artisans, but it had come to be a centre of active, nay, brutal, opposition to the Church and faith which had originally fostered it. In organic connection with it was a large debating hall, in which the most notorious secularist lecturers held forth every Sunday evening; and next door to it, under its shadow and patronage, was a little dingy shop filled to overflowing with the coarsest freethinking publications, Colonel Ingersoll's books occupying the place of honor in the window and the 'Freethinker' placard flaunting at the door. Inside there was still more highly seasoned literature even than the 'Freethinker' to be had. There was in particular a small half-penny paper which was understood to be in some sense the special organ of the North R---- Club; which was at any rate published close by, and edited by one of the workmen founders of the club. This unsavory sheet began to be more and more defiantly advertised through the parish as Lent drew on toward Passion week, and the exertions of St. Wilfrid's and of the other churches, which were being spurred on by the Ritualists' success, became more apparent. Soon it seemed to Robert that every bit of boarding and every waste wall was filled with the announcement:--

'Read "Faith and Fools." Enormous success. Our "Comic Life of Christ" now nearly completed. Quite the best thing of its kind going. Woodcut this week--Transfiguration.'

His heart grew fierce within him. One night in Passion week he left the night school about ten o'clock. His way led him past the club, which was brilliantly lit up, and evidently in full activity. Round the door there was a knot of workmen lounging. It was a mild moonlit April night, and the air was pleasant. Several of them had copies of 'Faith and Fools,' and were showing the week's woodcut to those about them, with chuckles and spurts of laughter.

Robert caught a few words as he hurried past them, and stirred by a sudden impulse turned into the shop beyond, And asked for the paper. The woman handed it to him, and gave him his change with a business-like _sang-froid_, which struck on his tired nerves almost more painfully then the laughing brutality of the men he had just passed.

Directly he found himself in another street he opened the paper under a lamp-post. It contained a caricature of the Crucifixion, the scroll emanating from Mary Magdalene's mouth, in particular, containing obscenities which cannot be quoted here.

Robert thrust it into his pocket and strode on, every nerve quivering.

'This is Wednesday in Passion week,' he said to himself. The day after to-morrow is Good Friday!'

He walked fast in a north-westerly direction, and soon found himself within the City, where the streets were long since empty and silent. But he noticed nothing around him. His thoughts were in the distant East, among the flat roofs and white walls of Nazareth, the olives of Bethany, the steep streets and rocky ramparts of Jerusalem. He had seen them with the bodily eye, and the fact had enormously quickened his historical perception. The child of Nazareth, the moralist and teacher of Capernaum and Gennesaret, the strenuous seer and martyr of the later Jerusalem preaching--all these various images sprang into throbbing poetic life within him. That anything in human shape should be found capable of dragging this life and this death through the mire of a hideous and befouling laughter! Who was responsible? To what cause could one trace such a temper of mind toward such an object--present and militant as that temper is in all the crowded centres of working life throughout modern Europe? The toiler of the world as he matures may be made to love Socrates or Buddha or Marcus Aurelius. It would seem often as though he could not be made to love Jesus! Is it the Nemesis that ultimately discovers and avenges the sublimest, the least conscious departure from simplicity and verity?--is it the last and most terrible illustration of a great axiom! '_Faith has a judge--in truth?_'

He went home and lay awake half the light pondering. If he could but pour out his heart! But though Catherine, the wife of his heart, of his youth, is there, close beside him, doubt and struggle and perplexity are alike frozen on his lips. He cannot speak without sympathy, and she will not bear except under a moral compulsion which he shrinks more and more painfully from exercising.

The next night was a storytelling night. He spent it in telling the legend of St. Francis. When it was over he asked the audience to wait a moment, and there and then--with the tender, imaginative Franciscan atmosphere, as it were, still about them--he delivered a short and vigorous protest, in the name of decency, good feeling, and common-sense against the idiotic profanities with which the whole immediate neighborhood seemed to be reeking. It was the first time he had approached any religious matter directly. A knot of workmen sitting together at the back of the room looked at each other with a significant grimace or two.

When Robert ceased speaking, one of them, an elderly watchmaker, got up and made a dry and cynical little speech, nothing moving but the thin lips in the shrivelled mahogany face. Robert knew the man well. He was a Genevese by birth, Calvinist by blood, revolutionist by development. He complained that Mr. Elsmere had taken his audience by surprise; that a good many of those present understood the remarks he had just made as an attack upon an institution in which many of them were deeply interested; and that he invited Mr. Elsmere to a more thorough discussion of the matter, in a place where he could be both heard and answered.

The room applauded with some signs of suppressed excitement. Most of the men there were accustomed to disputation of the sort which any Sunday visitor to Victoria Park may hear going on there week after week. Elsmere had made a vivid impression; and the prospect of a fight with him had an unusual piquancy.'

Robert sprang up. 'When you will,' he said. 'I am ready to stand by what I have just said in the face of you all, it you care to hear it.'

Place and particulars were hastily arranged, subject to the approval of the club committee, and Elsmere's audience separated in a glow of curiosity and expection.

'Didn't I tell ye?' the gas-fitter's snarling friend said to him. 'Scratch him and you find the parson. Then upper-class folk, when they come among us poor ones, always seem to me just hunting for souls, as those Injuns he was talking about last week hunt for scalps. They can't go to heaven without a certain number of 'em slung about 'em.'

'Wait a bit!' said the gas-fitter, his quick dark eyes betraying a certain raised inner temperature.

Next morning the North R---- Club was placarded with announcements that on Easter Eve next Robert Elsmere, Esq., would deliver a lecture in the Debating Hall on 'The Claim of Jesus upon Modern Life;' to be followed, as usual, by general discussion.


CHAPTER XXXIX.

It was the afternoon of Good Friday. Catherine had been to church at St. Paul's, and Robert, though not without some inward struggle, had accompanied her. Their mid-day meal was over, and Robert had been devoting himself to Mary, who had been tottering round the room in his wake, clutching one finger tight with her chubby hand. In particular, he had been coaxing her into friendship with a wooden Japanese dragon which wound itself in awful yet most seductive coils all round the cabinet at the end of the room. It was Mary's weekly task to embrace this horror, and the performance went by the name of 'kissing the Jabberwock.' It had been triumphantly achieved, and, as the reward of bravery, Mary was being carried round the room on her father's shoulder, holding on mercilessly to his curls, her shining blue eyes darting scorn at the defeated monster.

At last Robert deposited her on a rug beside a fascinating farm-yard which lay there spread out for her, and stood looking, not at the child but at his wife.

'Catherine, I feel so much as Mary did three minutes ago!'

She looked up startled. The tone was light, but the sadness, the emotion of the eyes, contradicted it.

'I want courage,' he went on--'courage to tell you something that may hurt you. And yet I ought to tell it.'

Her face took the shrinking expression which was so painful to him. But she waited quietly for what he had to say.

'You know, I think,' he said, looking away from her to the gray Museum outside, 'that my work in R---- hasn't been religious as yet at all. Oh, of course, I have said things here and there, but I haven't delivered myself in any way. Now there has come an opening.'

And he described to her--while she shivered a little and drew herself together--the provocations which were leading him into a tussle with the North R---- Club.

'They have given me a very civil invitation. They are the sort of men after all whom it pays to get hold of, if one can. Among their fellows, they are the men who think. One longs to help them to think to a little more purpose.'

'What have you to give them, Robert?' asked Catherine, after a pause, her eyes bent on the child's stocking she was knitting. Her heart was full enough already, poor soul. Oh, the bitterness of this Passion week! He had been at her side often in church, but through all his tender silence and consideration she had divined the constant struggle in him between love and intellectual honesty, and it had filled her with a dumb irritation and misery indescribable. Do what she would, wrestle with herself as she would, there was constantly emerging in her now a note of anger, not with Robert, but, as it were, with those malign forces of which he was the prey.

'What have I to give them?' he repeated sadly. 'Very little, Catherine, as it seems to me to-night. But come and see.'

His tone had a melancholy which went to her heart. In reality, he was in that state of depression which often precedes a great effort. But she was startled by his suggestion.

'Come with you, Robert? To the meeting of a secularist club!'

'Why not? I shall be there to protest against outrage