TRIMBLERIGG

A Book of Revelation

*

‘O, let him pass! he hates him,

That would upon the rack of this tough world

Stretch him out longer.’

By the Same Author

ANGELS AND MINISTERS
DETHRONEMENTS
ECHO DE PARIS
MOONSHINE AND CLOVER
A DOORWAY IN FAIRYLAND
ALL FELLOWS
AND THE CLOAK OF FRIENDSHIP

JONATHAN TRIMBLERIGG
From a drawing by
Edmond X. Kapp

TRIMBLERIGG

A Book of Revelation
by
Laurence Housman

*

With a
frontispiece from a recent portrait
by Kapp

Jonathan Cape Ltd
Eleven Gower Street London

FIRST PUBLISHED IN MCMXXIV
SECOND IMPRESSION IN MCMXXIV
MADE & PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
BY BUTLER & TANNER LTD
FROME AND
LONDON

Contents

Editorial

THE tribal deity to whom Mr. Trimblerigg owed his origin would, I think, have shown a better sense of the eternal fitness of things had he chosen for his amanuensis one whose theological antecedents were more within his keeping and jurisdiction than my own. But when he visited me with the attack of verbal inspiration which I was powerless to throw off in any other form than that which here follows, he seems rather to have assumed an intellectual agreement which certainly does not exist, and to have ignored as unimportant a divergence of view which I now wish to place on record. For, to put it plainly, I do not worship the god of Mr. Trimblerigg; and had these pages been a complete expression of my own feelings, they would have borne hostile witness not so much against Mr. Trimblerigg, as against his deity.

When nations declare war, or when gods deliver judgment against criminals who are so largely of their own making,—fastening in self-justification on some flagrant instance of wrong-doing which, for those who do not wish to reflect, puts the culprit wholly out of court,—they would do well to select their official historians from minds too abject and submissive to form views of their own; and of course verbal inspiration, as in the case of Balaam, is one way of getting the thing done. But whereas, in that historical instance, it was the ass and not the prophet who kicked last, in this instance, having delivered my message, I claim the right to exonerate myself in a foreword which is entirely my own. And so here, in this place—before he makes revelation or utters prophecy—Balaam speaks his own mind.

I do not think that Mr. Trimblerigg’s deity has dealt fairly by him. To me he seems chargeable with the same exploitive elasticity as that which he exposes in Mr. Trimblerigg, whom he first cockered up in his own conceit by a course of tribal theology, and then callously abandoned to its logical consequences when tribal theology went suddenly out of fashion. For Mr. Trimblerigg was emphatically a product of that self-worship of the tribe or clan, on which divine Individualism has so long fattened itself. He was brought up to believe himself one of a chosen sect of a chosen people, and to judge from a theocratic standpoint the ways, doings, and morals of other sects, communities, principalities, and powers. He could not remotely conceive, without being false to his deity, that his own was not immeasurably the best religion in the world, his god a god of perfect balance and proportion, and himself a chosen vessel of the Lord. In that character he was always anointing himself with fresh oil, which, losing its balance, ran far further than it ought to have done. But if, in consequence, he became an oleaginous character, whose mainly was the blame?

I cannot acquit the deity in whose tenets he had been trained. Having been brought up to read history as a pre-eminent dispensation of mercies and favours to his own race, with a slight push of miracle at the back of it—is it any wonder that, when he applied his gospel to propaganda for the interests of that same race, or went out a missionary to the heathen, it was with a conscientious conviction that a little compulsion was necessary for the saving of souls?

And so, in that shadiest episode of all his career, presented to us by his deity in such an unfavourable light, when the poor benighted heathen began painting Mr. Trimblerigg’s fellow-missionaries black and tan, and other horrible colours to indicate their hearty dislike for a blended gospel of free salvation in Christ and duty and allegiance to the Puto-Congo Rubber shareholders; when they did that, he—quite naturally—invoked the law of the Mosaic dispensation, and did the same to them: and defended himself for these gospel-reprisals by saying that it would have been very unreasonable not to protect Christian missionaries by the only method which savages could understand as a stepping-stone to the methods of Christianity.

The picture as presented is true: that was Mr. Trimblerigg all over. He had a lively notion that Christianity could be induced by pagan methods. But has his deity the right to cast either the first or the last stone at him? If he seemed to be always carrying the New Testament in his coat-tail pocket and making it his foundation for occasions of sitting down and doing nothing, while, up and doing, it was the law of Moses with which he stuffed his breast: and if, when he wanted to thump the big drum (as he so often did), he thumped the Old Testament, he was only doing with more momentary conviction and verve and personal magnetism what the larger tribalism of his day had been doing all along; and his tribal deity never seems to have had the slightest qualms in allowing Mr. Trimblerigg to regard himself as a Christian.

Yet all the time the deity himself knew better, as this record abundantly shows; for having made Mr. Trimblerigg partly but not entirely in his own image, he then used him as a plaything, an object of curiosity; and committing him to that creed of racial aggrandisement of which he himself was beginning to tire, thereby reduced him to ridicule, made a fool of him, exalted him to the likeness and similitude of a god, and then—let him go. And though, in the ensuing pages, he has helped himself freely to my opinions, as though they were his own, I do not feel that they were honestly adopted. For a god who tires of his handiwork is still responsible for it, however disillusioned; and when, employing me as his mouthpiece, Mr. Trimblerigg’s maker mocks at the tribal religions which have brought the world so near to ruin, he remains nevertheless a deity tribal in character, albeit a disgruntled one. And if he has manœuvred this record in order to wash his hands of responsibility, it comes, I fear, too late; the source is too suspect to be regarded as impartial, and he himself very much more of a Mr. Trimblerigg than he seems to be aware.

And so my business here is to express an utter disbelief (which I hope readers will bear in mind) that Mr. Trimblerigg’s deity was one about whom it is possible to entertain the larger hope, even in the faint degree suggested by Tennyson,—or that he was anything except a tribal survival to whom Mr. Trimblerigg and others gave names which did not properly belong to him.

What finally laid Mr. Trimblerigg by the heels was the fact that having picked up this god as he went along (finding him favourable to the main chance) it was the main chance—idealized as ‘the larger hope’—which he really worshipped without knowing it. Upon the strength of that inspiration environment intoxicated him, and he drew his spiritual life from the atmosphere around him. Then he was like a bottle of seltzer, which at the first touch of the outer air begins almost explosively to expand; whereas, for the bulk of us, we unbottle to it like still wine without sound or foam, accepting it as the natural element for which we were born. To Mr. Trimblerigg, on the other hand, it came as a thing direct from God: at the first touch of the herd-instinct he bubbled, and felt himself divine. And in the rush of pentecostal tongues amid which he lost his head, he forgot that atmosphere and environment are but small local conditions, and that, outside these, vacuum and interstellar space hold the true balances of Heaven more surely and correctively than do the brief and shifting lives of men.

This spiritual adventurer, with his alert vision so curiously reduced in scale to seize the opportunities of day and hour, missed the march of time from listening too acutely to the ticks of the clock. And if he offers us an example for our better learning, it is mainly as showing what belittling results the herd-instinct and tribal-deism may produce in a mercurial and magnetic temperament,—making him imagine himself something quite other from what he really is, and his god a person far removed from that category in which he has been placed.

My own interpretation of this ‘Revelation,’ which has made me its involuntary mouthpiece, is that it shows the beginning—but the beginning only—of mental change in a god who has become tired of deceiving himself about the work of his creation; and that it has begun to dawn upon his mind—though he denies it in words—that, in making Mr. Trimblerigg, he has made another little mistake, and that his creation was really stuffed as full of them as a plum-pudding is stuffed with plums. And I have a hope that when tribal deity becomes properly apologetic for its many misshapings of a divided world, humanity will begin to come by its own, and acquire a theology which is not an organized hypocrisy for the bolstering up of nationalities and peoples.

For here we have a world full of mistakes, which is governed, according to the theologians, by a God who makes none. And what between predestination and free-will, and grace abounding mixed up with original sin, and orthodoxy and heterodoxy at such universal dash throughout the world that not one honest soul in a million has an even chance of being really right,—when that is the spectacle presented to us in the life of the human race, it becomes something of a mockery to minds of intelligence to be told that their gods have never made mistakes.

Those who have been blessed with good parents, do not like them less because of certain failings and limitations which go to the shaping of their characters; and when, arrived at the age of discretion, they have to withstand their failings and recognize their limitations, they do so with a certain amount of deference and with undiminished affection; but they do not, if they are wise, or if they have the well-being of their parents really at heart,—they do not let it be thought that they regard them either as immaculate or infallible.

I have come to the conclusion that a like duty towards its tribal deities belongs to the human race; and that man has made many mistakes simply by regarding these tribal emanations as immune from error, all-seeing, all-wise, all-loving—which they certainly are not. And I believe that Mr. Trimblerigg would have been a very much better and more useful man if he could have conceived his tribal deity as one liable to error like himself. The terrible Nemesis which seized the soul of Mr. Trimblerigg and hurled it to destruction was a very limited and one-sided conception of what was good and right, embodied in the form of a personal deity who could do no wrong.

So here, as I read it, we have the revelation of the detriment done to a human soul by an embodied belief in itself under cover of a religious creed. And the record of that process has been handed over to me, I suppose, because the tribal deity responsible for the results has got a little tired of the abject flattery of his worshippers, and a little doubtful whether that relation between the human and the divine is really the right one. He is suffering in fact, as I read him, from a slight attack of creative indigestion, and is anxious to get rid of certain by-products which his system cannot properly assimilate: he is anxious, amongst other things, to get rid of responsibility for Mr. Trimblerigg. But the responsibility is there; and I allow myself this foreword in order to declare it in spite of the things which hereafter I am made to say.

‘You cannot unscramble eggs,’ is a dictum as applicable to gods as to mortals. And if people would remember that in their prayers, prayers would be less foolish and fatuous than they often are.

You cannot unscramble eggs. And so, having scrambled Mr. Trimblerigg in the making, his god was attempting a vain thing in trying to unscramble him; and when Mr. Trimblerigg went on his knees and prayed, as he occasionally did, to be unscrambled, he was only scrambling himself yet more in the fry-pan of his tribal theology.

And indeed, when I look at him, I have to admire what a scramble of a man he was!—how the yolk and the white of it, the good and the evil, the thick and the thin of his character did mix, ‘yea, meet and mingle,’ as he would have said himself when his platform sense of poetry got the better of him. And so, in the exercise of those contradictory agilities of soul and brain which made him so mixed yet so divided a character, he skipped through life like a flea to Abraham’s bosom, and there—after so many an alias hastily assumed and as hastily discarded—lies waiting to answer to his true name when true names are called.

What kind of a name, one wonders, did he finally make for himself in the Book of Life? In that desperate saving of his own face which constitutes his career, he put out of countenance many that were his betters; but it was himself that, in the process, he put out of countenance most of all. Yet in the end revelation came to him; and when, in that ghastly moment of self-discovery, he stood fully charged with the truth, who shall say what miraculous, what fundamental change it may not have wrought in him? When he followed the upward rope which led him so expeditiously Elsewhere, it may have been with the equipment of a new self capable of much better and more honest things that he finally entered Heaven. I cannot believe that such a genius for self-adaptation has incontinently missed its mark. But, in that forward aim, it may well be that he and his tribal deity have parted company; for it is to be noted that, at the last gasp, the god loses sight—does not know what has become of him: thinks, perhaps, that he has gone irretrievably and abysmally—Down. I, on the contrary, have a suspicion and a hope that his tendency may have been—UP.

L. H.

CHAPTER ONE
Deus Loquitur

OF course when I made Mr. Trimblerigg, though I had shaped him—I will not say to my liking, but at least to my satisfaction—I did not foresee how he would turn out. It is not my custom to look ahead. I can, to be sure, do so when I please: but that makes the dénouement so dull. I prefer, therefore—and have now made it a rule—that my creations shall, in what they do, come upon me as a surprise—pleasant or the reverse. For since I have given them free-will, let me also have the benefit of it: let them make their own plans, their own careers,—attributing to me, if they must, those features of both for which they do not feel themselves responsible; and let me (in the moment when they think to have fulfilled themselves) experience that small stimulus of novelty which the infinite variety and individuality of my creatures is always capable of providing.

For it is this spice of novelty alone which keeps me from being unutterably disinterested in the workings of what theologians are pleased to call ‘the moral purpose of the universe.’

So it was that, having shaped Mr. Trimblerigg to my satisfaction, I let him go. And as, with his future in his own very confident hands, he went, I did not for the moment trouble to look after him.

When I say that I shaped him to my satisfaction, I am speaking merely as a craftsman. I knew that I had made a very clever man. As to liking him, that had nothing to do with craftsmanship, but would depend entirely on what he did with himself—how he appealed to me as a student of life, when—laying aside my rôle of maker, I became merely the observer.

It is always an interesting experiment whether I shall be drawn to my creations before they become drawn to me. Sometimes I find that they interest me enormously, even while denying me with their last breath. But the unrequited affections of a god have always an element of comedy; for though, in the spiritual direction, one’s creations may take a way of their own, they are never as quit of us as they suppose; and when they know it least they come back to us for inspection and renovation. Even the soul that thinks itself lost is not so lost as to leave one unaware of its condition; though it may have ceased to call, its address is still known.

In Mr. Trimblerigg’s case it was all the other way—from the moment that he discovered me he never let me alone; though I had cast him forth like bread upon the waters, not expecting to see him again for many days, he came back to me early, and from that time on gave me the advantage of his intimate and varying acquaintance to the very end.

I wonder to myself sometimes whether I tried him as much as he tried me, and whether he managed to like me up to the last. This at least I found—that by the time he was five years old, whether I liked him or not, Mr. Trimblerigg liked me; and the reason for his liking was simple—he found me useful.

For one day, having done something which deserved, or was supposed to deserve punishment, he lied about it, and was discovered. The discovery came to his ears before he was actually taxed with it. The small world on which he stood became suddenly an abyss; lifting up his feet he fled for refuge to his own chamber, and was about to hide in the cupboard, when he heard the awful tread of judgment ascending the stairs. Being clever (for which I admit I was responsible) he realized how temporary a refuge the cupboard must necessarily be; what he needed was the eternal; and so, throwing himself on his knees he began praying to me—aloud. And in his prayer he told the truth, volubly, abundantly, and without making any excuse for himself. ‘I have told a lie,’ he cried, ‘O God, I have told a lie!’

The agony of his prayer was heard, not so much by me as by the elder for whose entry he had so accurately timed it. And who, looking upon that youthful and ingenuous countenance, could doubt the sincerity of his grief? His lips quivered, his eyes streamed tears, his nails dug into his tender flesh, leaving marks. At that sight, at those sounds, the paternal heart was deeply moved; the birch was laid aside; elder and younger knelt together and prayed for quite a long time, with great fervour, fixity, and unanimity of purpose, that henceforth young Mr. Trimblerigg should be a good boy, and never never again be caught telling a lie.

That prayer unfortunately was not entirely answered—though between us we did our best. In the years that followed Mr. Trimblerigg lied often and well, but was very seldom caught, and still more seldom punished.

The only really important outcome of that incident was that Mr. Trimblerigg found he liked me; I had been useful to him. And yet I had done, I protest, absolutely nothing—except making him clever. It was not through my providential intervention that he liked me, but through his own. The prayer of faith had saved him from a whipping; it was a lesson he never forgot.

And so, from that day on, he made me his general help and stay; and on every occasion of doubt, difficulty, or distress, was able, by coming to me, to convince himself that he meant well. Never in my whole world’s existence have I come upon anybody who was able to answer his own prayers about himself, and about other people, with such conviction, avidity, and enthusiasm as Mr. Trimblerigg. And why should I complain? It made him a great power in the world, without my having to lift a finger, or turn a hair, or do anything, in fact, except wink an eye, or seem to.

The virtuous incentives of family life, though only provided on a small scale, were not lacking for the development of Mr. Trimblerigg’s character. He had three uncles, two aunts, a great-uncle and a grandfather—all fairly contiguous, the family being of the indigenous not of the migratory kind—besides a father, a mother and a sister, with whom contact was continuous and unescapable. Even in their naming the children had been linked for lovely and pleasant relationship in after-life; for when the Trimblerigg first-born, whom its parents confidently expected to be a son, turned into a daughter—adapting the forechosen name to suit her sex, they called her Davidina; and when, nearly two years later, our own Mr. Trimblerigg struggled out into the world, nearly killing his mother in the process, the destined name Jonathan was there waiting for him.

And so, very early in his career, Mr. Trimblerigg’s sister Davidina became the whetstone of his virtues—its operation summed up in the word ‘emulation.’ Nature would perhaps have brought it about in any case, even if the parental plan had not inculcated and forced it home; but when it became clear to Mr. and Mrs. Trimblerigg senior that no more children were to be theirs, they conceived the idea of blending the business with the moral instincts, and in the training of their two offspring making virtue competitive.

No wonder then, that, as their moral sense dawned, the germ of mutual suspicion and hatred grew lodged in their souls. This, however, did not prevent them, when self-interest prompted, from being also allies, as the following may show.

The parental idea of making virtue competitive had taken one of its earlier forms—for economic reasons, I fancy—in the matter of pocket-money; and the weekly penny was tendered not as a right nor even as a reward for good average behaviour, but as a prize to be wrestled for, gain by the one involving loss by the other—a device that had the incidental advantage of halving the tax on the pocket which provided it.

The fact that Davidina won it far more frequently and easily than he did, set Mr. Trimblerigg his first problem in goodness run as a means to profit. He accordingly invited his sister to an arrangement whereby, irrespective of conduct, they should go shares; and when this accommodating olive-branch was scornfully rejected, he became so offensively good for three weeks on end that Davidina, left penniless, capitulated on terms, and, in order to get a remnant of her money’s worth, bargained that they should be good—or at least each better than the other—in alternate weeks, this being a more tolerable arrangement to her careful soul than that brother Jonathan, with no effort at all, ever secondary in virtue, should share equally the pennies which she had earned.

For a while the plan worked well; Mr. Trimblerigg by calculated effort bettered his sister in the alternate weeks, got the penny and shared it grudgingly but honourably—while Davidina, remaining merely herself, received it in the natural course when Jonathan reverted to his more normal standard.

But there came a day when Mr. Trimblerigg had privily done certain things about which his elders knew less than did Davidina, and so got wrongfully the penny he had not earned. Davidina demanded it; on the denial of her claim they fought, and between them the penny got lost. The next week, though Davidina earned it, Mr. Trimblerigg claimed it, arguing that as last week’s penny had been lost to him through her, this week’s should be his. Davidina thought differently; and putting the penny for safety in her mouth, in the resulting struggle by accident swallowed it.

After that the alliance was over. Thenceforth Jonathan had a permanent and lively incentive for becoming good; and in the competition that ensued Davidina was decisively worsted. Goodness became for Mr. Trimblerigg a matter of calculation, habit, resolute will, and in the long series of defeats which followed, Davidina might, had she chosen, have found satisfaction in the large part she played toward the reshaping of her brother’s character.

So decisive was the change that it became apparent to the world, and was reckoned as proof of that conversion to grace which was necessary for full church-membership in the sect where he belonged. And so, at an unusually early age, Jonathan was baptized into the congregation of the Free United Evangelicals. That incident decided his career; he became destined for the ministry.

Thus out of evil comes good.

When the matter was first decided Mr. Trimblerigg himself knew nothing about it. It was the elders of the family, the parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts—sitting together in conclave for the adjustment of ways to narrow means, who foresaw the convenience of the call which in due time came to him.

Mr. Trimblerigg himself was then making other plans of his own. A sense of his abilities had begun to stir his mind to the prospects of life. He had become conscious that a career was awaiting him—or, to put it more accurately, several careers—of which he had only to choose. One day, in a weak moment of expansiveness, when Davidina by a histrionic show of sisterly sympathy had led him on, he confided to her the sparkling alternatives which he had in mind. And she, when her first admiration had become tempered with criticism, passed word of them carefully on to the ears of his Uncle Jonah. Jonah, who was anti-romantic by temperament, made it his duty to strip these pretensions bare before the eyes of the assembled family—doing it no doubt for his nephew’s good. ‘Jonathan is thinking,’ said he, ‘that he would like to be Prime Minister; and well he might be if he had the ability to be consistent in his principles. Seems also he’d like to be President to the Free Church Conference; but for that he needs to be spiritual and one that speaks nothing but the truth. Failing that he’s for being Lord Chief Justice and Master of the Rolls; but Jonathan hasn’t the judicial mind. And to be Field-Marshal rising from the ranks (which is another flea he has in his bonnet) God in His great mercy hasn’t given him sufficient inches to meet the military requirements. You’ll do well, Jonathan; for you’re quick in the turnover, and your convictions don’t trouble you; and you’ve a wonderful courage for thinking yourself right when all the evidence is against you. But what you’ll do if you’re wise is find a master who’ll let you hide behind his back and be clever for him in the ways that don’t show; one who’ll take over all the responsibility for your mistakes, for the sake of all the times when you’ve guessed right. Given he’s got the patience to put up with you, you’ll be worth it to him, and a credit to your family. But there’s a deal of practice you’ve to get before you can do the thing well. Don’t spread yourself.’

But Uncle Jonah, being an undertaker by trade, had narrow and confining views; and the shadow of his daily occupation, entailing a too-frequent wearing of black, caused him to set foot on life sombrely, especially on life that was young. This also was said before the time when nephew Jonathan had become conspicuously good.

With his higher aspirations thus blown upon, Mr. Trimblerigg, after watering Davidina’s pet fern with strong tea which it did not like, diverted his invention to more practical ends, and for a time wished to be a conjurer, having read accounts of the wonders performed at the Egyptian Hall, London, by Messrs. Maskelyne & Cooke. But as ill-luck would have it, his first sight of conjuring came to him at a village fair; and there, while others stared and were amazed, he with his sharp eyes saw how everything was done, and found the entertainment dull. Now had he only been interested and stirred to emulation thus early, I am quite convinced that Mr. Trimblerigg could have become a conjurer such as the world has never seen. If his parents could only have afforded to take him to London, and to the Egyptian Hall, the world’s history might have been different. It was not to be.

JONATHAN TRIMBLERIGG
(aged 7) with his Mother & Sister Davidina

Mr. Trimblerigg’s attention was first attracted to the career his elders designed for him, not so much by the habitual goodness with which the rivalry of Davidina had imbued his character, as by his observation of the sensation caused in his native village by the missionizing efforts of a certain boy-preacher, then known to fame as ‘The Infant Samuel Samuel,’ whose call, beginning at his baptism in that strange invocative reduplication of the family name imposed by his godparents, went on till it suddenly passed in silence to an obscurity from which the veil has never been lifted. What happened then nobody knows, or nobody chooses to tell. But between the ages of seven and fifteen, while sustained by the call, Samuel Samuel never saw a vacant seat, or an uncrowded aisle, or had sitting under him a congregation unrent by sobs in the hundreds of chapels to which the spirit bore him.

When Mr. Trimblerigg heard him, Samuel Samuel at the age of ten was still in the zenith of his powers; and it has been credibly reported that, in the mining villages which he passed through, publicans went bankrupt and committed suicide because of him, and pit-ponies, their ears robbed of the familiar expletives to which they had been trained, no longer obeyed orders; and that alongside of these manifestations of grace, the illegitimate birth-rates went up and struck a record; till, six months later, things settled back and became the same; birth-rates went down, pit-ponies obeyed a restored vocabulary, and ruined publicans were vindicated in the prosperity of their successors.

But these things only happened after; and when Mr. Trimblerigg heard the cry of the Infant Samuel Samuel, he discerned a kindred spirit, and saw a way opening before his feet, under a light which thereafter continued to shine. And so at the age of twelve the designs which Mr. Trimblerigg’s elders had on him, and the designs which he had on himself, coalesced and became one; and even Davidina, borne down by the sense of the majority, had to accept the fact that her brother Jonathan had received a call.

Thus early did the conversion of souls enter into the life and calculations of Mr. Trimblerigg. A striking justification of his chosen calling followed immediately, when, without in the least intending it, he converted an almost lost soul in a single day—the soul of an Uncle, James Hubback by name, the only uncle upon his mother’s side left over from a large family—who while still clinging to the outward respectability of a Free Church minister, had taken secretly to drink.

Mr. Trimblerigg had been born and brought up in a household where the idea that spirits were anything to drink had never been allowed to enter his head. He only knew of spirit as of something that would catch fire and boil a kettle, or embrace death in a bottle and preserve it from decay. These aspects of its beneficence he had gathered first in the back kitchen of his own home, and secondly in the natural history department of the County Museum, to which as a Sunday-school treat he had been taken. Returning therefrom, he had been bitten for a short while with a desire to catch, kill, and preserve frogs, bats, beetles, snakes, and other low forms of existence, and make a museum of his own—his originality at that time being mainly imitative. To this end he clamoured to his mother to release his saved pennies which she held in safe-keeping for him, in order that he might buy spirit for collecting purposes; and so pestered her that at last she promised that if for a beginning he could find an adder, he should have a bottle of spirit to keep it in.

Close upon that his Uncle James arrived for a stay made sadly indefinite by the low water in which he found himself. He still wore his clerical garb but was without cure of souls: Bethel and he had become separated, and his family in consequence was not pleased with him. Nevertheless as a foretaste of reformation he wore a blue ribbon, and was prevented thereby from letting himself be seen on licensed premises; while a totally abstaining household, and a village with only one inn which had been warned not to serve him, and no shop that sold liquor, seemed to provide a safe environment for convalescence.

It is at this point that Mr. Trimblerigg steps in. One day, taking down a book from the shelf in the little study, he discovered behind it a small square bottle of spirits: he did not have to taste or smell it—the label ‘old brandy’ was enough; and supposing in his innocence the word ‘old’ to indicate that it had passed its best use, at once his volatile mind was seized with the notion that here was a mother’s surprise waiting for him, and that he had only to provide the adder for the bottle and its contents to become his. And so with that calculating larkishness which made him do audacious things that when done had to be swallowed, he determined to give his mother a surprise in return.

Going off in search of his adder and failing to get it himself, he gave another boy a penny for finding him a dead one. An hour later the adder was inside the brandy bottle behind the books; and an hour after that his Uncle James had achieved complete and lifelong conversion to total abstinence.

The dénouement presented itself to Mr. Trimblerigg at first with a shock of disappointment in the form of smashed glass, and his dead adder lying in a spent pool of brandy on the study floor; and only gradually did it dawn upon him after a cautious survey of the domestic situation that this was not as he had at first feared his mother’s angry rejection of the surprise he had prepared for her: on the contrary she was pleased with him. His uncle, he learned, was upstairs lying down, without appetite either for tea or supper. Mr. Trimblerigg heard him moaning in the night, and he came down to breakfast the next day a changed character. Within a year he had secured reinstatement in the ministry, and was become a shining light on the temperance platform, telling with great fervour anecdotes which give hope. There was, however, one story of a drunkard’s reformation which he never told: perhaps because, on after-reflection, though he had accepted their testimony against him, he could not really believe his eyes, perhaps because there are certain experiences which remain too deep and sacred and mysterious ever to be told.

But to Mr. Trimblerigg the glory of what he had done was in a while made plain. More than ever it showed him destined for the ministry: it also gave colour to his future ministrations, opening his mind in the direction of a certain school of thought in which presently he became an adept. ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is taken by tricks,’ became the subconscious foundation of his belief; and when he entered the pulpit at the age of twenty-one, he was by calculative instinct that curious combination of the tipster, the thimblerigger, and the prophet, the man of vision and the man of lies, which drew to itself the adoration of one half and the detestation of the other half of the Free United Evangelical Connection, eventually dividing that great body into two unequal portions, and driving its soul into a limbo of spiritual frustration and ineffectiveness till it found itself again under new names.

CHAPTER TWO
The Early Worm

THOUGH Mr. Trimblerigg had not at the time taken the advice of his Uncle Jonah in very good part, he did eventually accept a large part of it—good or otherwise—in the shaping of his career. His wish to become a great functionary of State gradually faded away, giving place to others. But his intention to be President of the Free Church Conference remained and grew strong. And to that end—spirituality being required—he accepted faithfully Uncle Jonah’s last bit of advice, and seeking a master behind whose back he could hide and be clever in ways that didn’t show—have responsibility taken for his mistakes, and get adequate recognition for the many things which he did right—seeking for such a master, he found him to his own satisfaction in the oldest of old ways; and never from that day on did the suspicion enter his head, that the master whom he chose under so devout an alias was himself.

If, in the process, he received a call, so did I; and it was at this stage of his career that I began to watch him with real interest. His calls became frequent; and though there was not always an apparent answer there was always an attentive ear.

It may well be that when human nature appears, to those whose business is to understand it, most unexpected and incalculable, is the very time when it is or ought to be most instructive to eyes which are open. And certainly at this preliminary period—before I got accustomed to him—Mr. Trimblerigg did make me open my eyes wider and wider, till he got me to the point when nothing that he did surprised me. But that was not because I became able to anticipate his reactions to any given circumstance or tight hole in which he might find himself: but merely that experience of him caused me to give up all rules based on the law of averages: he was a law by himself. What at first baffled me was the passionate sincerity with which he was always able to deceive himself—doing it mainly, I admit, by invoking my assistance: that is to say, by prayer.

To see him fall upon his knees and start busily lighting his own little lamp for guidance through the perils immediately surrounding him—while firmly convinced all the time that the lamp was not his lighting but mine—gave me what I can only describe as an extraordinary sense of helplessness. The passionate fervour of his prayer to whatever end he desired, put him more utterly beyond reach of instruction than a conscious plunge into sin. Against that there might have been a natural reaction; but against the spiritual avidity with which he set to work saving his own skin day by day, no reaction was possible. The day-spring from on high visited him with a light-heeled nimbleness which cleared not only all obstacles of a material kind but all qualms of conscience as well. In the holy of holies of his inmost being self-interest sat rapturously enshrined; there lay its ark of the covenant, and over it the twin cherubim of faith and hope stretched their protecting wings. Mr. Trimblerigg might bow himself in single spirit when first his prayer began; but always, before it ended, his spirits had got the better of him, and he would rise from his knees as beautifully unrepentant as a puppy that has dodged a whipping, his face radiant with happiness, having found an answer to his prayer awaiting him in the direction to which from the first it had been set, much as your Arctic explorer finds the North Pole by a faithful following of his nose after having first pointed it to the north.

I date my completed understanding of Mr. Trimblerigg, and of the use he had made of me, to the day when—faced with an exposure which would have gone far to reduce his ministerial career to a nullity—he put up a prayer which (had I been a mere mortal) would have made me jump out of my skin. I will not skin him retributively by quoting him in full, but the gist of it all was that, much to his perplexity he found himself suffering from a strange temptation, out of keeping with his whole character, and threatening destruction to that life of energetic usefulness in the service of others which he was striving to lead. And so he prayed to be kept (‘kept’ was the very word)—‘humble, and honest, and honourable.’ It was no change that he desired; but only a continuance in that narrow and straight path of acquired virtue down which (since the truth must be told) he had hitherto danced his way more like a cat on hot bricks, than the happily-banded pilgrim he believed himself to be. ‘Kept’ was the word; and as I heard him I thought of it in all its meanings—and wondered which. I thought of how dead game ‘keeps’ up to a point, and is better in flavour for the keeping; but how, after that point is reached, the keeping defeats itself, and the game is game no longer, but mere offal. Was it in that sense that he wished to be ‘kept’? For certainly I had found him good game, quick in the uptake, and brisk on the wing.

It is difficult in this record to remain consecutive. Those who would follow with accuracy the career of Mr. Trimblerigg, must jump to and fro with the original—one of whom it has to be said that though he denied himself many times (even in the face of the clearest evidence) he denied himself nothing that held out any prospect of keeping his fortunes on the move; and the stitch in time with which he so often and so nimbly saved himself ran in no straight line of machine-made regularity, but rather in a series of diversions this way and that, stepping sideways and back preparatory to the next forward leap; and in this feather-stitching along life’s road he covered more ground, and far more ornamentally, than do those who go merely upon their convictions, holding to one opinion and doing only one thing at a time.

Yet it would be wrong to say that he was ever false to his convictions, for these he seldom knew. Enough that so long as they lasted his intuitions were sacred to him; and as it is the very essence of intuitions that at any moment they may change, his changeableness had about it a sort of truth, of consistency, to which slower minds cannot attain.

But why call it ‘intuition’; why not ‘vision’? Well, if a camera of powerful lens and stocked with highly sensitive films may be said to have vision, vision he had in abundance. Adjusting his focus to the chosen point of view, he clicked the switch of his receptivity, snapt a picture, wound it off upon its wheel, and was ready for another. In the space of a few minutes he had as many pictures stored as he had a mind for. ‘Vision’? You may grant it him, if you will, so long as you remember that that was the process. I would rather be inclined to call it ‘optics’; and I see his career now rather as a series of optical delusions, through every one of which he remained quite convinced that he was right, and that the truth had come to him by way of revelation. An early example will serve.

The small hill-side village in which Mr. Trimblerigg first learned to escape the limitations of ordinary life was a place where things seldom happened; and there were times in his early upbringing when he found himself at a loose end, a rose wasting its sweetness to the desert air; there was nothing doing in the neighbourhood on which he could decisively set his mark. This was to live in vain; and often he searched through his small world of ideas to find inspiration. Should he run away from home, and be found wandering with his memory a blank? Should he be kidnapped by gipsies and escape in nothing but his shirt? Should a sheep fall into the stone quarry so that he might rescue it, or a lamb get lost in the snow during the lambing-season, that he might go out, and find, and return bearing it in his bosom? Or should he go forth and become famous as a boy-missionary, preaching to the heathen in an unknown tongue? These were all possibilities, only the last suggested any difficulty.

Whenever in doubt, adopting the method of old Uncle Trimblerigg, he turned to the Scriptures: he did not search them, for that would have been self-willed and presumptuous; he merely opened them, putting a blind finger to the spot where divine guidance awaited him. It was in this way that Uncle Trimblerigg had become rich; forty years ago he had invested his savings in house property all through having set thumb to the text, ‘I have builded an house to Thy name.’ And without searching the Scriptures further he had built twenty of them. At a later date, slate-quarrying having started in the district, their value was doubled.

So one day, in a like faith, our own Mr. Trimblerigg committed himself to the same experiment. His first point on opening drew a startling reply, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan, for thou savourest not the things which be of God, but the things which be of men.’ Very right and proper, of course: Satan thus safely disposed of, he tried again. ‘Remember Lot’s wife,’ failed for the moment to convey any meaning; he knew that it could not refer to him: it seemed rather to indicate that his Bible had not yet given him its thorough attention. To warm it to its task he lifted it as a heave-offering, administered to it the oath, as he had seen done in a police court, kissed it, and set it down again. This time it answered sharply, but still not to the point: ‘Ye generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?’ Evidently the Lord was trying him. He turned from the New Testament to the old: perhaps it was only the old he should have consulted, for he had an idea that this was an Old Testament method. That would account for the delay.

The Old Testament made a better response to his appeal. ‘The zeal of Thy House hath eaten me up,’ suggested something at any rate, but did not make the way quite clear; ‘Down with it, down with it, even unto the ground!’ was practical in its bearing upon the Lord’s House, but puzzling; ‘Behold how great a matter a little fire kindleth’ gave him the light he sought.

For at that time Bethesda, the chapel of the Free Evangelicals, had fallen lamentably into disrepair, and since Uncle Trimblerigg, the only man of substance in the district, had retired from the innovation of hymn-singing to a stricter Bethel of his own, there seemed little chance of raising the necessary funds for demolition and restoration. And so decay went on, while still, from old habit, the chapel continued to be insured.

Now whether we call it ‘vision’ or ‘optical illusion,’ there can be no doubt that, thus aided by Scripture, Mr. Trimblerigg visualized rapidly and clearly the means to an end which so many desired. And so it came about one Saturday night, while frost held the village water-supply firmly in its grip, and the road running up from the valley slipped with ice, that Bethesda, through a supposed leakage in her heating apparatus, caught fire; and only the fact that Mr. Trimblerigg fetched the fire-engine from the town four miles away, saved it from utter destruction. He had been sent into the town by his mother to do errands, when at the foot of the hill he suddenly remembered Lot’s wife, and looking back saw the chapel windows gustily ablaze, and interpreting the peradventure aright had sped on with the news. The miraculous arrival of the fire-engine with him on it, only half an hour after the villagers’ discovery of an already well-established insurance claim in swift operation, had caused an immense sensation and some inquiry.

But Mr. Trimblerigg had a case on which no suspicion could rest; that the fire was fought expeditiously, though under difficulties, was largely owing to him, and the subsequent inquiries of the insurance office agent who came to inspect the damage were only of a formal kind. Every effort had been made, and a half-saved chapel was the result; but its previous dilapidation made it easier to rebuild than to restore, and when a new Bethesda rose from the ruins of the old, the insurance company paid for it.

It was two days after the happy catastrophe, that Davidina remarked (when, to be sure, he was taking them to light the lamp in another room), ‘I wish you wouldn’t always go taking away the matches!’

‘I’m bringing them back,’ said Jonathan correctively.

‘You didn’t the last time,’ Davidina retorted. And at the word and the tone of her voice, Jonathan trepidated and fled.

Was it ‘vision’ that made him do so, or only optical illusion on the mental plane? For as far as I have been able to probe into Davidina’s mind, which is not always clear to me, she knew nothing. It was merely her way: the hunting instinct was strong in her, and he her spiritual quarry: never in all their born days together was she to let him go.

Of course Mr. Trimblerigg did not go on doing things like that. It was an act of crude callow youth, done at a time when the romantic instinct takes unbalanced forms; yet in a way it was representative of him, and helped me to a larger insight into his character and motives. For here was Mr. Trimblerigg, thus early, genuinely anxious to have guidance from above for the exploitation of his superabundant energies; and when, at first showing, the guidance seemed rather to head him off from being energetic at all, he persisted till his faith in himself found ratification, and thereafter went his way with the assurance that what he decided to do must almost necessarily be right.

Mr. Trimblerigg did not in after days actually set fire to anything in order that he might come running to the rescue when rescue was too late; but he did inflame many a situation seven times more than it was wont to be inflamed, setting people by the ears, and causing many an uprooting in places where no replanting could avail. And when he had got matters thus thoroughly involved, he would apply thereto his marvellous powers of accommodation and persuasion, and, if some sort of peace and order did thereafter emerge, regard himself quite genuinely as the deliverer.

At a later date his zeal for the Lord’s House broke up the Free United Evangelicals into separate groups of an unimportant size, which when they seemed about to disappear wholly from view, he reunited again; and having for the moment redoubled what was left, regarded his work as good, though in the religious world the Free Evangelicals had forfeited thenceforth their old priority of place, a circumstance from which (when convinced of its permanence) he made his personal escape by embracing second Adventism. And though doubtless he carried his Free Evangelism with him into the field of modern prophecy, the Free Evangelicals within their own four walls knew him no more. Very effectively he had burnt them out, and in their case no insurance policy provided for the rebuilding: in that seat of the mighty, probed by the beams of a new day, only the elderly grey ashes remained of men whose word once gave light.

CHAPTER THREE
Trial and Error

AT a very early stage in his career, before his theological training had overtly begun, the moral consciousness of Mr. Trimblerigg was far more accurately summed up in the words, ‘Thou, Davidina, seest me,’ than in the more generally accepted text which shone with symbolic rays from an illuminated scroll hung over his bed. That text with its angel faces and gold edgings did not pierce the joints of his harness, to the discovery of vulnerable spots, with the same sharp efficiency as did the dark watchful eye of Davidina.

As he entered into his ’teens with the instinct for spiritual adventure growing strong, he had an uncomfortable sense of transparency where Davidina was concerned—or rather where she was not concerned but chose to intrude—which made him cease to feel a self-contained person. If there was anyone in the world who knew him—not as he wished to be known, but as in his more disconcerted moments he sometimes suspected himself to be—it was Davidina. Under the fixture of her eye he lost confidence; its calm quizzical gaze tripped his thoughts, and checked the flow of his words: initiative and invention went out of him.

The result was truly grievous, for though he could do without self-respect for quite long intervals, self-complacency was the necessary basis for every action. Davidina deprived him of that.

Her power was horrible; she could do it in a momentary look, in a single word; it seemed to be her mission in life, whenever he whitewashed the window of his soul for better privacy, to scratch a hole and look through.

When, for instance, he first experimented in kissing outside the routine of family life, Davidina seemed by instinct to know of it. Secretively, in the presence of their elders, she held him with her eye, pursed her lips, and made the kissing sound; then, before he could compose a countenance suitable to meet the charge, her glance shot off and left him. For Davidina was a sleek adept in giving that flick of the eye which does not wait for the repartee; though on other occasions, when her eye definitely challenged him, there was no bearing it down; it stabbed, it stuck, it went in, and came at his back.

It was in these wordless encounters that she beat him worst; till Mr. Trimblerigg, conscious of his inferiority, went and practised at the glass a gesture which he hoped thereby to make more effective—a lifting of the nose, a slight closing of the eyelids, a polished putting-off of the hands, deprecatory but bland; and a smile to show that he was not hurt. But the first time he used it upon her was also the last.

‘Did you practise that in the glass?’ said Davidina; and the gesture died the death.

Truly at that time of her life he wanted her to die, and slightly damped her shoes on the inside after they had been cleaned, that they might help her to do so. But it was no good; without saying anything, she damped his also, rather more emphatically, so that there could be no mistake; whereas his damping was so delicately done that she ought not to have found it out.

The most afflictive thing about these encounters was his constant failure to score a victory; only once, in the affair of the pocket-money already narrated, had he succeeded in holding his own. Perhaps it was all for the good of his soul; for in matters of finance his sense of probity remained in after years somewhat defective; victory over Davidina in that respect had apparently done him no good. But in other directions she continued to do her best to save his soul; and though he was now committed to the ministry, and was himself to become a soul-saving apparatus, he did not like her way of doing it; temperamentally (and was there ever a character more largely composed of temperament?) he would much rather have gone his own way and been damned, than saved by Davidina on the lines she chose. She stung him like a gad-fly in his weakest spots, till the unerring accuracy of her aim filled him with a superstitious dread; and though never once uttered in words, ‘Thou, Davidina, seest me,’ was the motive force which thus early drove him so deeply and deviously into subterfuge that it became an infection of his blood. And though against her it availed little, in other directions, pricked to it by her incessant skill, he had a quite phenomenal success, and was—up to a point—the nimblest being that ever skipped from cover to open and from open to cover, till, in the development of speed, he ceased to distinguish which was which; and what he told would tell with the most complete conviction that, if it told to his advantage, it must be truth; and then, on occasion, would avail himself of the truth to such dazzling effect that, lost in the blaze of his rectitude, he forgot those other occasions when he had been truer to himself.

Of Davidina’s inspired pin-pricks here is an example, notable for the early date of its delivery, when they were at the respective ages of twelve and eleven. Brother and sister had fallen out in guessing at an event as to which with probability all the other way, Davidina proved to be right. Not believing this to be a guess, ‘You knew!’ he cried indignantly.

‘I didn’t,’ she replied smoothly, ‘I only knew better.’

This was superfluous: it enabled Mr. Trimblerigg to get in with a retort. ‘Even very conceited people,’ he said, ‘do sometimes manage to guess right.’

Davidina recovered her ground. ‘I’m not as conceited as you,’ she replied, ‘I never think myself good.’ It was the sticking-out of her tongue, and adding ‘so there’! which gave the barb to those words.

At the earliest opportunity Mr. Trimblerigg retired to consider them. It was evident that Davidina had penetrated another of his secrets; she had discovered that he thought himself good. Many years after, when asked by an American reporter what it felt like to be the greatest man in the world, he replied that it made him feel shy, and then was ready to bite his tongue out for having so aimed at modesty and missed. He saw twenty reporters writing down the words, ‘It makes me feel shy’; and within twelve hours it was all over the world—a mistake which he couldn’t explain away. That was to be one of the worst moments of his life; and this was another, that Davidina should have unearthed so hidden and central a truth. He was deeply annoyed, partly with her for having discovered it, much more with himself for having let it appear.

Yet his cogitations brought him in the end to a conclusion which had in it a measure of comfort. ‘After all,’ he said to himself, ‘I am good sometimes.’

It was that ‘sometimes,’ and the consciousness of it, that in the future was to work havoc with his soul. He did know desperately well that he was good sometimes; and the fervour of it used to spread so far beyond the appointed limit that he ceased to know where his goodness began, and where it left off. As from an oasis in the wilderness exhales fragrance from the blossom of the rose, regaling the dusty nostrils of sand-bound travellers, as into its airy horizon ascends mirage from waters, and palm-trees, and temples, that are real somewhere—but not in the place where they so phenomenally display themselves—so from parts of him excellent, into other parts less excellent, went the sense that he was ‘somehow good’; and he never perceived, in spite of the very genuine interest he took in himself that what made him more interesting than anyone else was the extraordinary division of his character into two parts, a good and a bad, so dexterously allied that they functioned together as one, endowing him with that curious gift of sincerity to each mood while it lasted, which kept him ever true to himself and the main chance, even as the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope always shape to patterns, however varied, having the same fixed centre—a haphazard orderliness which no amount of shaking can destroy.

As has been hinted already, a time unavoidable for youth came in Mr. Trimblerigg’s life when kisses began to have an attraction for him: in his case it came rather early, and the attraction grew strong. But so also grew his fear of them—or perhaps it would be more true to say his fear lest Davidina should get wind of them. Davidina had an unlovable scorn for kisses, which she paraded to the world; she kissed nobody except her parents, and them only from a sense of duty, and became known, in a country-side where kisses were easily come by, as the girl from whom nobody could get a kiss.

Few tried; the first who did so had been made a warning for others.

It is likely enough—since moral emblems have their contrary effect—that the impregnable barrier set up by Davidina was responsible for the thing becoming so much a vogue in other quarters; and Lizzie Seebohm, the prettiest small wench of the village, in pure derision of Davidina’s aloofness, and under her very eyes, made open sale of her kisses at a price which, starting from chocolates, rose to a penny and thence to twopence.

For this amiable weakness she got from Davidina the nickname of ‘Tuppenny,’ and in view of the feud which thence arose, Mr. Trimblerigg was instinctively advised of danger to his peace of mind if he put himself on Tuppenny’s list. And so it came about that, whatever his natural inclinations in the matter, he saved his pocket-money and did not apply for her favours.

In this Lizzie Seebohm saw the influence of Davidina; for which reason and sheer spitefulness, Mr. Trimblerigg became her quarry.

So one day a communication reached him, artfully told by the small maiden commissioned thereto as a breach of confidence. She had heard Lizzie say that Jonathan might have a kiss of her not merely for nothing; she would give twopence to get it. A sense that he was really attractive made him fail to see deep enough, and when the offer rose to sixpence he succumbed.

Within an hour—Lizzie Seebohm had seen to it—Davidina got the news. Her wrath and sense of humiliation were deep; in the great battle of life which lay ahead for the possession of her brother’s soul, she had lost a point, and that to an opponent whom she regarded as insignificant. It was not a case for silence. Davidina descended upon him before the sixpence in his pocket had had time to get warm. ‘You’ve been kissing Tuppenny!’ she cried.

‘Who says?’ he demanded, scared at discovery so swift. Then, bettering his defence: ‘Tuppenny, indeed! she’s not worth it. I haven’t given her tuppence; I haven’t given her a penny. I haven’t given her anything, so there! If she says I have, she’s a liar.’

This seemed almost conclusive; Davidina’s faith in the report wavered. But whenever Jonathan was voluble she distrusted him; so now.

‘It isn’t her word I’m going by,’ she said. ‘Somebody saw you.’

Mr. Trimblerigg’s mind made an alert movement—very characteristic. He was not ashamed of what he had done; he only didn’t like being caught.

‘You said Tuppenny,’ he retorted. ‘And I say—I didn’t give her tuppence.’

Davidina pressed him along the track, as he meant her to. ‘Then what did you give her?’

‘I didn’t give her anything; I’ve told you so already. She gave me sixpence.’

His tone was triumphant, for now, in his own time and in his own way, he had made a clean breast of it. Davidina’s face was a study.

‘Sold again!’ he said, watching the effect; and curiously he did not mean himself, or his virtue, or anything else belonging to him; he meant Davidina. Having got ahead of her with the facts, he considered himself top-dog for that once at least.

But within a few hours of that avowal an amazing thing happened. It happened during the night; for when he went to bed the sixpence was in his trouser pocket, and when he got up in the morning it was gone; nor did he dare to tax Davidina with the theft.

In chapel, the next Sunday, when the plate came round for foreign missions, Davidina with ostentation put sixpence into it. Is it to be wondered that, before the week was over, he had got sixpence back from somewhere, and took care that Davidina should see him spending it. Davidina meant well, I am sure; but it is to be questioned whether her method of clipping his wings was the right one. He became tangential to the orbit of her spells; they touched, but they did not contain him.

Meanwhile, without Davidina’s aid, even without her approval, Mr. Trimblerigg’s call to the ministry was becoming more assured. And the question mainly was whether, in that family of cramped means, money could be found in the years lying immediately ahead to provide the necessary training. It meant two years spent mainly away from home at the Free Evangelical Training College; two years of escape from Davidina for whole months at a time; it meant leaving home a boy and coming back very nearly a man. Even had the ministry not appealed to him, it would have been worth it for the peculiar attraction of those circumstances.

Whether this could become practically possible depended mainly upon old Uncle Trimblerigg—Uncle Trimblerigg whose investments in house property had been inspired by holy scripture, but whose theological tenets were of a kind for which up-to-date Free Evangelicalism no longer provided the college or the training. Nor did he believe that either college or training were necessary for the preaching of the Word. He had done it himself for fifty years, merely by opening the book where it wished to be opened and pondering what was thus presented. The verbal inspiration of Scripture, not merely in its writing but in its presentation to the sense of the true believer, was the very foundation of his faith. The sect of ‘the True Believers’ had of late years sadly diminished; for as all True Believers believed that while they believed truly they could never make a mistake in their interpretations of Scripture, it became as time went on dangerous for them to meet often or to exchange pulpits, since, where one was found differing from another, mutual excommunication of necessity followed and they walked no more in each other’s ways. Only at their great annual congress did they meet to reaffirm the foundation of their faith and thunder with a united voice the Word which did not change.

Thus it came about that dotted over the country were many chapels of True Believers cut off from friendly intercourse with any other by mutual interdict; and the hill-side chapel of Uncle Trimblerigg—built by himself for a congregation of some twenty families all told, his tenants, or his dependents in the building trade—was one of them.

So among the True Believers there was small prospect of a career for the budding Mr. Trimblerigg; and yet it was upon the financial aid and favour of one of them that he depended for theological training in a direction which they disapproved.

It speaks well for the sanguine temperament and courage of our own Mr. Trimblerigg that the prospect did not dismay him, or even, in the event, present much difficulty.

CHAPTER FOUR
The Beard of the Prophet

UNCLE PHINEAS, the uncle of Mr. Trimblerigg’s father, lived at an elevation, both physical and spiritual, among the stone quarries a-top of the village. His house and the chapel where he ministered stood adjoining, both of his own building; and in the days when Jonathan knew him he was seldom seen leaving the one except to go to the other. For he was now very old, and having made his money and retired from business, he had only one interest left in life, the preaching of the strict tenets of True Belief to the small congregation which had trickled under him for the last fifty years.

The True Believers had a worship which was all their own; they flocked by themselves, never going elsewhere, though others sometimes came to them. No instrument of music was allowed within their dwelling, nor did they sing—anything that could be called a tune. When their voices were lifted in praise they bleated upon a single note, which now and again they changed, going higher and higher, and when they could go no higher they stopped.

To our own Mr. Trimblerigg this form of worship was terrible; he liked music and he liked tunes; diversity attracted him; and here, by every possible device, diversity was ruled out. But the importance of Uncle Phineas, both present and prospective, obliged certain members of the Trimblerigg family to ascend once at least every Sunday, to hear him preach and pray, and though none of them professed an exclusive conversion to the teaching of the True Believers, they kept an open mind about it, and listened respectfully to all that Uncle Phineas had to say.

Lay-preaching and the ministry of the Word ran strong in the Trimblerigg family, also in that of the Hubbacks, to which on his mother’s side Jonathan belonged; and had he cared to divide himself spiritually among his relations there were five sects from which to choose—a division of creeds which did not amount to much, except in the case of the True Believers. Grandfather Hubback, between whom and Uncle Phineas there was theological war, ministered to the Free Evangelicals at the Bethesda which Jonathan had helped to renovate; Uncle James was a Primitive Brother; Uncle Jonah a First Resurrectionist; his Sunday exercise—the practising of the Last Trump—a welcome relief perhaps, from his weekday occupation of undertaker. Mr. Trimblerigg, during his childhood, had sat under all of them; the difference being that under his Uncle Phineas he had been made to sit. Then came the question of his own call to the ministry, and the further question as to ways and means. It was from then on that Mr. Trimblerigg went more constantly and willingly to hear the doctrine of the True Believers, and began to display towards it something wider than an open mind. At the age of fifteen he had got into the habit of going to see and hear his uncle on weekdays as well, and very quietly he would endure for hours together while the old man expounded his unchangeable theology.

Everything about Uncle Phineas was long, including his discourses. He had a long head, a long nose, a long upper lip and a long chin. To these his beard served as a corrective; long also, it stuck out at right angles from his face, till with the weight of its projection it began to droop; at that point he trimmed it hard and square, making no compromise, and if none admired it except its owner, it was at least in character. With such a beard you could not kiss people, and Phineas Trimblerigg was not of a mind to kiss anybody. In spite of old age, it retained a hue which suggested a too hasty breakfast of under-boiled egg; while trying to become grey it remained reminiscently golden.

And the beard symbolized the man; square, blunt and upright, patriarchal in mind and character, he lived in a golden age of the past—the age of romantic theology before science had come to disturb it. His only Tree of Knowledge was the Bible, and this not only in matters of doctrine; it was his tree of genealogy and history as well. From its topmost branch he surveyed a world six thousand years old, of six days making, and all the wonders that followed,—the Flood, the Tower whose height had threatened Heaven, and the plagues, pestilences and famines, loosed by an outraged Deity on a stubborn but chosen people, and the sun and the moon which stood still to assist in tribal slaughter, and the special vehicles provided for prophets, at one time a chariot of fire, at another a great fish, at another a talking ass,—all these things gave him no mental trouble whatever; but joy rather, and confidence, and an abiding faith. He believed them literally, and had required that his family should believe them too. And truly he could say that, in one way or another, he had to begin with made them all God-fearing. If in the process five had died young, and one run away to sea and got drowned, and another fallen into evil courses from which he had not returned alive, so that Phineas in his old age was left childless—all this had but made him more patriarchal in outlook than ever, turning his attention upon nephews and nieces of the second generation, especially upon one; which, indeed, is the reason why here he becomes an important character.

Fortified by fifty years of prudent investment based upon revelation, and with a comfortable balance at his bank, he cast his other cares upon the Lord; lived frugally, gave a just tithe of all he possessed to the foreign and home missions of the True Believers, drank no wine or strong drink—except tea, denounced the smoking of tobacco, but took it as snuff, believed firmly in Hell, war, and corporal punishment for men, women and children alike, was still an elected, though a non-attending, member of all local bodies, but in the parliamentary election (regarding it as the evil thing) would take no part. To him life, in the main, meant theology.

At the now sharply dividing ways he stood with old Pastor Hubback (or rather against him) a leading and a rival light among the local Free Churches; and because he had money to give and to leave he was still a power in the district as well as in his own family. This was the oracle to which Mr. Trimblerigg, in his fifteenth year, began to give up his half-holidays.

Uncle Phineas was always at home; he had legs which never allowed him to get farther than his own gate, except once a week to the Tabernacle of True Belief, of which he was minister and owner. The larger chapel in the village lower down had not known him for thirty years when the youthful Jonathan first became aware of his importance, and began under parental direction to pay a weekly call at ‘Pisgah,’ and there learn from the old patriarch things about himself and others, including God, to which he listened with an air of great respect and interest.

Jonathan’s way with him was wily but simple: he would ask a great number of intelligent questions, and receiving unintelligent answers would appear satisfied. Now and then, upon his birthday, or when revivalism was in the air, the old man would give him sixpence, sometimes even a shilling, advising him to bestow it upon the foreign missions of the stricter Evangelicals, especially those to the native races of Central Africa and America, where the undiluted truth of the Word had still necessarily to be taught. For those primitive minds the taint of modernism had no effect; Heaven had so shaped them to the divine purpose that nothing short of literal True Belief could touch their hearts and soften their understandings. And the old man would talk wondrously to Jonathan of how, in the evil days to come, these black races were destined to become the repository of the true faith and reconvert the world to the purer doctrine.

Uncle Phineas was on the look-out for punishment on a world-wide scale, and had he lived to see it, the War of Versailles would have gladdened his heart. For he wanted all the Nations to be punished, including his own,—a point on which Mr. Trimblerigg ventured privately to differ from him; being in that matter a Free Evangelical, and preferring Heaven to Hell. Uncle Phineas preferred Hell; punishment was owing, and the imaginary infliction of it was what in the main attracted him to religion.

Punishment: first and foremost for man’s breaking of the Sabbath; then followed in order drink, horse-racing, gambling, the increase of divorces, modernism, and the higher criticism, with all its resultant forms of infidelity, the agitation for Women’s Suffrage, and finally the impious attempt of Labour to depose Capital.

All these things were of the Devil and must be fought; and in the discussion of them Jonathan began—not to be in a difficulty because some of them made an appeal to his dawning intelligence, but to become agile. Luckily for him Uncle Phineas’s information was very nearly as narrow as his intelligence, and Mr. Trimblerigg was able to jump to and fro across his sedentary and parochial mind with small fear of discovery. But the repeated interviews made him brisk, supple, and conversationally adaptable; and once when the old man remarked half-approvingly, ‘Aye, Jonathan, you’ve got eyes in your head, but don’t let ’em out by the back door,’ he had a momentary qualm lest behind that observation dangerous knowledge might lurk.

But it was only his uncle’s constitutional disapproval of a mind that could move; and of Jonathan’s outside doings and opinions he had at that time heard nothing to rouse suspicion. But clearly when Mr. Trimblerigg was called to the ministry and began to preach there would be a difficulty; for what would go down at Bethesda among the Free Evangelicals, where his obvious career was awaiting him, would not do up at Horeb, the chapel on the hill; and it was well within the bounds of possibility that owing to his family connections Mr. Trimblerigg might find it advantageous to preach at both.

That, however, was a problem still lying some few years away; meanwhile Uncle Phineas might very reasonably die; and it was just about this time that I heard Mr. Trimblerigg beginning to pray for peace to the old man in his declining years, that he might not be kept unduly on the rack of this tough world after so good a life.

And indeed it was a life in which he had accomplished much; for a man of his small beginnings he had become of notable substance, and his income derived from quarries and the houses he had built for his workers was reckoned to amount to anything from six to eight hundred a year, of which, in spite of generous gifts to foreign missions, he did not spend one-half.

His expectant relatives did not talk among themselves about the matter where, of necessity, interests were divided; but they thought much, and occasionally they had their fears.

‘I shouldn’t wonder,’ said Jonathan’s father one day, ‘if when Uncle dies it isn’t found that he had an unsound mind.’

It was to obviate such a calamity that Jonathan was sent to pay his weekly visit, and that one or another of the family, at least once every Sunday, went up to Horeb to pray.

Quite early in his examination of the tenets of True Belief, anxious that she should keep him in countenance, Mr. Trimblerigg asked Davidina what she thought of them.

‘My belief is,’ said Davidina, ‘that we can all believe what we want to believe; and if you only believe it enough, it comes true—for you, at any rate. You can believe every word of the Bible is true, or that every word of it is false; and either way, you can live up to it. The True Believers are right there, anyway. And if,’ she added, ‘you’ve got nothing else to believe, you can believe in yourself: and you can smile at yourself in the glass, and look at your teeth, and think they are milestones on the road to Heaven, till they all drop out. Believing’s easy; it’s choosing what you mean to believe that matters. I believe the kettle’s boiling over.’

She went, leaving Mr. Trimblerigg to his meditations, also to a doubt whether she had taken him quite seriously.

With his Uncle Phineas it was all the other way; they were nothing if not serious together; but it often puzzled his ingenuous mind how his uncle managed to believe all the things he did.

One day: ‘Uncle Phineas,’ he said, ‘how did you come to be a True Believer?’

‘When I felt the need of conversion as a young man,’ replied Uncle Phineas, ‘I started reading the Scriptures. Every day, before I opened the book, I said, “Lord, help me to believe!” And by the time I’d read ’em three times through, I believed every word.’

‘I’ve only read them twice yet,’ said Jonathan in meek admission, but glad to get hold of the excuse.

‘Read ’em again,’ said his uncle.

‘And all the genealogies, too, Uncle?’ he inquired, for all the world as though he felt genuinely committed to the task if the other should say ‘yes.’

‘Why would you leave them out?’ queried his uncle. ‘It’s the sowing of the seed. When you sow a field, you’ve not to care about this grain or that, picking and choosing: it’s the sowing that matters. Sow your mind with the seed of the Word, and don’t leave gaps. You never know how you may come to need it hereafter. “Abram begat Isaac; and Isaac married Rebecca, and begat Jacob:”—that was the text the Lord showed me when He would have me choose a wife, whose name was Rebecca.’ He fetched a sigh. ‘And I did,’ he said. ‘She was a poor weak wife to me, and the children took after her; so now not one of them is left. It was the Lord’s will.’

‘But if you had married some one else, wouldn’t it have been the Lord’s will too?’ inquired Jonathan.

‘That we won’t discuss,’ said his uncle. ‘I shouldn’t have chosen without first looking to Scripture. There was only one Rebecca in the village, and I hadn’t thought of her till then. ’Twas a marvellous showing, and she on a bed of sickness at the time.’

Mr. Trimblerigg was properly impressed; but he doubted whether he would choose his own wife that way, even should he become a True Believer. So, not to linger on doubtful ground, he changed the subject and began to ask about missionaries; having a wish to see the world, they attracted him.

‘If I become a True Believer,’ he said, ‘I shan’t stay and preach in one place; I shall go out and preach everywhere.’

‘You’ll do as the Lord tells you,’ said his uncle. ‘It’s no good one that’s not a True Believer talking of what he’ll do when he becomes one.’

‘No, Uncle,’ said Jonathan meekly, still out to do business; ‘but living at home makes it very hard for me. I’m much nearer to being a True Believer than Mother is, or Father, or Davidina. Davidina says you can believe anything if you’ll only make yourself. She says she could make herself believe that the Bible was all false, if she were to try.’

‘Has she tried, does she mean?’ inquired Uncle Phineas grimly.

‘I don’t know,’ replied Jonathan ingenuously. ‘It would be very wicked if anyone did try, wouldn’t it?’

‘It would,’ said his uncle. ‘I’ve known men struck down dead for less. I knew a man once who tore a leaf out of his Bible to light his pipe with, and he was struck by lightning for it the same day. Yet his sin was only against one leaf, one chapter. How much greater the sin if you sin against the whole of it. She thought that, did she? When you go home, send Davidina up to me: I’ll talk to her.’

Then Mr. Trimblerigg had a divided mind; for his fear of Davidina was not less but rather more than his fear of Uncle Phineas. Indeed he only feared Uncle Phineas for what he might fail to do for him in the near future, but Davidina he feared for what she was, here and now.

‘I think, perhaps, Davidina only meant—anybody who was wicked enough. But please don’t tell Davidina that I said anything!’

‘Heh?’ cried Uncle Phineas, his eye suspicious: ‘That so? We’ll see.’

He got up, went slowly to his Bible and opened it and without looking put down his thumb.

‘Listen to this, Jonathan,’ he said; and in solemn tone and with long pauses, he read:

“She put her hand to the nail ... and her right hand to the workman’s hammer ... and with the hammer she smote Sisera, she smote off his head ... when she had pierced and stricken through his temples.”... You hear that, Jonathan?’

‘Yes, Uncle,’ he replied, not yet understanding the application of the text.

‘You see, Jonathan,’ said his uncle, ‘Davidina was getting at you.’

Being a True Believer’s interpretation, it was not open to discussion, not for Jonathan at any rate. Uncle Phineas was a mighty hunter of the Scriptures before the Lord: the true interpretation never escaped him.

It was a curious and unexplained fact that Davidina was a great favourite of Uncle Phineas, so far as one so entirely without affection could be said to have favourites. Davidina was far from being a True Believer, yet he trusted her; and he did not yet quite trust Jonathan. But he saw well enough that Jonathan had in him the makings of a prophet and of a preacher; if only he could trust him, he would help him to go far. But the testing process took time.

So, day by day, Mr. Trimblerigg laboured to win his trust, and often, after long hours of boredom in his uncle’s company, success seemed near; for intellectually he was now growing fast, and to the cultivation of an agile brain added the cultivation of a wily tongue, and even where his future career did not depend upon it he loved to sustain an argument.

But he never got the better of Uncle Phineas; for when Phineas could not answer him, the Book did. He began to loathe the Book—that particular copy of it, I mean—and to make faces at it behind his uncle’s back. But a day came when he loved it like a brother.

At the right time for the forwarding of his plans, Mr. Trimblerigg professed a desire for larger book-learning; he wanted to study theology, and that not from one point of view alone. Ready to satisfy him, up to a point, Uncle Phineas plied him with books containing the true doctrine, some he would make him sit down and read aloud upon the spot while he expounded them; others he let him take away to study and return, questioning him closely thereafter to discover how well he had read them. They were all good books—good in the moral sense, that is to say—books written to inculcate the principles of True Belief; but all, from the contemporary point of view utterly useless, and all deadly dull.

One day Mr. Trimblerigg asked his uncle, ‘Where all the other books were—the bad ones, which taught false doctrine.’

Why did he want to know? inquired Uncle Phineas.

‘I want to read them,’ said Jonathan greatly daring. ‘If one doesn’t read them, how is one to know how to answer them? I want to read them because they deceive people.’

‘Not True Believers,’ said his uncle.

‘No,’ replied Jonathan, ‘but people who might become True Believers.’

‘They should read their Bibles. There you find the answer to everything.’

‘Yes. So I did; I did it last night as I was going to bed: I opened it, just as you do, Uncle, and there it was—written: the thing I was wanting to know.’

‘What was it?’

‘It was this, Uncle: “Oh, that mine adversary had written a book. Surely I would take it upon my shoulder and bind it as a crown unto me.”’

‘That doesn’t say read it,’ objected his uncle.

‘No, but it means it. It means that if wicked books are written we’ve got to do with them, we’ve not just got to let them alone.’

‘We’ll see,’ replied the other; ‘we’ll ask the Lord to show us.’ He got the Book and opened it. ‘There, Jonathan, listen to this:

‘“What profiteth the graven image that the maker thereof hath graven it; the molten image, the teacher of lies, that the maker of his work trusteth therein to make dumb idols” ... God’s answered you, Jonathan.’

‘But that’s about the man who wrote it,’ objected Jonathan. ‘He trusts in his work, but I don’t; he’s not going to make a dumb idol of me.’

‘You’re running your head into danger, Jonathan. If you are not a True Believer, the Book may be only a trap set for you by the Devil. He can quote Scripture when it suits him, as well as any.’

‘But I prayed first,’ said Jonathan. ‘And I’m trying to become a True Believer.’

‘When you’ve become a True Believer, we’ll talk about it,’ said his uncle.

After that for a whole week his uncle saw no more of him. Then one day, waking up from his afternoon nap, the old man found Jonathan sitting and looking at him.

It was quite five minutes since Jonathan had crept in, and during that time he had not been idle. He had gone to the Book, and arranged a marker, and three and four times he had opened and without looking had put his finger to the exact place; just a finger’s length from the bottom on the right-hand side, it was easy to find. Then, sitting far away from the Book, he had waited for his uncle to wake.

He did not allow the haze of sleep to disperse before he made his announcement.

‘Uncle,’ he said, ‘I’ve become a True Believer. I’ve had a call: God has shown me the way.’

‘How do you know you’re a True Believer?’ questioned the old man cautiously.

‘I’ve His Word for it. Every time I open the Book it speaks to me—so plain, that at first it frightened me. Then I felt a great joy and a light filling me. And everything in the world is different to what it was.’

‘Aye,’ replied his uncle, ‘that sounds the real thing. What has He called you to do?’

‘To go out and preach, Uncle. And He’s told me I’m to go to college.’

‘How has He told you that?’ inquired Phineas, sceptical again.

‘I asked Him to show me what I was to do, where I was to go; I opened the Book and put my finger on the page; and there—college was the very word!’

‘You tell me that you found the word “college” in the Bible?’ inquired his uncle incredulously.

‘It was found for me,’ said Jonathan: ‘Hilkiah the priest, and Achbor, and Shaphan, went unto Huldah the prophetess, the wife of Shallum; and she dwelt in Jerusalem in the college; and they communed with her.’

So, by the mouth of his nephew, Phineas stood corrected in his knowledge of the Scriptures. But he did not quite yield yet. ‘Fetch me the Book, Jonathan,’ he said.

‘No, Uncle,’ replied his nephew, ‘the Lord is calling to me now, not to you. This is my affair.’

And so saying he opened the Book, drew out the marker, and set his finger upon the page. Then he brought it across to his uncle. ‘You read it, Uncle,’ he said; and his uncle read: ‘Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee.’

Mr. Trimblerigg did not wait for his uncle to speak, he grasped his nettle tight. ‘Will you take the responsibility now, Uncle, of telling me that the Lord has not called me; and that I have not plainly heard His Word?’

Uncle Phineas could not quite do that. All he said was: ‘Nineveh? Nineveh might mean anything.’

‘Yes,’ said Mr. Trimblerigg, ‘it might; but it doesn’t. If the Lord is calling me—and you can’t say that He isn’t—will He not also make me sure what the call means?’

‘We will ask Him again, Jonathan.’

‘We will not,’ said Jonathan. ‘That would be sin, for it would be tempting Him, trying to make Him think that we have not heard Him already—in our hearts.’

‘Spoken like a True Believer,’ said Uncle Phineas, convinced at last. ‘Jonathan, you shall go.’

Very earnestly that night did Mr. Trimblerigg return thanks that I had opened the eyes of his Uncle Phineas and made him see light. And all the while that he prayed, how helpless he made me feel! Lost in the delight of the end, he forgot the means: and never once did it occur to him that he was really giving thanks to himself.

CHAPTER FIVE
The Moving Spirit

SO Mr. Trimblerigg went to college to learn tribal divinity as falsely taught by the Free Evangelicals; and his Uncle Phineas paid for it.

He went there as a True Believer; and his fellow-students viewed with wonder so coming-on a disposition confined to so strait and narrow an interpretation of things spiritual. For at that time a great wave of Liberalism had entered the larger bodies of the Free Church Movement, and the Free Evangelicals led the way. They had even gone so far as to admit women students to their University and to its theological studies, though not of course to the ministry; and because of this and similar tendencies, the wider and easier interpretation of Scripture concerned them greatly.

In this large and tolerant atmosphere, where modernism was beginning to lift its head, Mr. Trimblerigg stood all alone. It was a challenge that delighted him. He had no illusions as to the lack of a future outlook afforded by adherence to the strict tenets of True Belief: but he had the sense to realize that what a student believes, or thinks he believes, in his teens under the unavoidable influence of the parental upbringing, matters nothing to his future career. Only when he comes to man’s estate, and the full and free possession of his faculties do his opinions and pronouncements begin to measure his qualification for advancement. In the meantime he could sharpen his wits, acquire knowledge, and develop his resources for dialectic and for oratory just as well by maintaining the improbable side of the argument as the probable; what better test indeed for his powers? Convictions could come later, what he wanted now was training; and though as yet unconvinced himself, he might on the way convince others, if only a few, even of the truth of tenets which he meant presently to discard.

There were three hundred students at the college, fifty of them women, and he himself the only ‘True Believer,’ with the additional drawback that in most of the points distinguishing his branch of the Free Church body from others he did not truly believe. Yet he never doubted that in free debate he could profess a belief that would sound plausible, and put up at least an attractive fight even though eventual defeat awaited him.

But though his calculating mind gave a silver lining to the cloud which hung over him, it was, I maintain, an act of courage when he stepped so buoyantly into the arena to face a three-years’ process of defeat, and by defeat to learn the ways of victory. And though presently the buffetings which he had to endure were tremendous, he was able in letters, and in conversation when he went home, to convey to his uncle the impression that True Belief was not only holding its own, but winning its way in the strongholds of infidelity. Had he not already made converts, for proof? Three of the students, two male, one female, had become True Believers.

One day he brought them over and exhibited them to his uncle, and when his uncle had examined them thoroughly in their new-found faith his trust in Mr. Trimblerigg became almost complete. But still not quite. Uncle Phineas was a cautious character, and not for nothing had caution, assisted by revelation, been his companion for eighty-four years.

It was at this time that he re-made his will, re-made it in a curious way and let the family know of it. He executed two wills on the same day with the same witnesses; and laying both by, waited for time to decide which of the two should survive him.

‘I have great hopes of you, Jonathan,’ he said. ‘I’m watching you, often when you don’t think; and when I’m not quite clear in my own mind the Book tells me.’

That was Uncle Phineas’s strong point in his reading of character: the Book could not lead him astray. It was upon that point that Mr. Trimblerigg felt himself most vulnerable. He might trace and traverse to stand in his uncle’s good graces, he might abundantly deserve his confidence and all that should go with it or follow from it after his death; but nothing that he could do would prevent the Book opening in the wrong place at the last critical moment, or prevent Phineas from believing that whatever it then told him was true.

And so though Mr. Trimblerigg did in those three years by all his contemporary acts if not by his calculations, deserve that his uncle should think well of him, he could never be quite sure.

During his second year he heard from Davidina that she had fallen out of her uncle’s favour,—an event which, having the two wills in mind he did not disapprove; but when he heard later that a hitherto unconsidered great-niece had appeared upon the scene and was keeping house for his uncle, his mind grew troubled. This was a cousin whom he had never seen, named Caroline; the circumstance that she had lately become an orphan made her available as a house-companion for one who, needing an arm to lean on, did not yet require a nurse. She was older than Jonathan by three years, and had managed from her mother’s side to be of fair complexion.

Davidina nicknamed her ‘the dream-cow’; and when Mr. Trimblerigg saw her for the first time on his return home during vacation he had to admit that the name suited. She was a large creamy creature, slightly mottled with edges of pink; vague, equable, good-tempered, taking things as they came; rather stupid to talk to, but not uncomely to look upon.

As he gazed on her at their first meeting, Mr. Trimblerigg’s calculating mind got ahead of him before he could prevent; and ‘Shall I have to marry her?’ was the thought which suddenly presented itself. With equal suddenness came another, ‘If I do, what will Isabel Sparling say? There’ll be trouble.’

Isabel Sparling was the woman student whom he had converted to True Belief; and the conversion had been of an emotional character.

She was an ardent believer in the ministry of women, and having the prophetess of Scripture upon her side—Huldah the prophetess who dwelt in the college at Jerusalem for one, as Mr. Trimblerigg was quick to remember—had no difficulty in persuading him that the ministry of women was compatible with ‘True Belief.’

Mr. Trimblerigg had seized on it, indeed, with avidity as a forward point for him to score in discussions which forced him generally to take the reactionary line. There was also among True Believers a more obvious opening for women than elsewhere. The ministry of the connection was diminishing together with its funds; and there does come a point, in spiritual work as well as industry, when what cannot support a man will support a woman. In exchange, therefore, for the allegiance of a new convert for theological debates which left him so often in a minority of one, Mr. Trimblerigg blithely gave in his adherence to the ministry of women; and in the College debate on the subject, which took place in his second year, they won an unexpected victory, all but three of the women students, and more than a third of the men students voting in the affirmative.

It is symptomatic, however, that of this particular victory over the powers of evil Mr. Trimblerigg said not a word to his Uncle Phineas. It was a point over which he apprehended that True Believers of the older school might differ from the new. Uncle Phineas, sedentary in a small hill-side village and a chapel of which he himself was the proprietor, was scarcely in a position to appreciate the claim of women to spiritual equality; in the field of politics Mr. Trimblerigg knew that he was decisively against them; nor was Cousin Caroline, his house-companion, the sort of person to suggest a quiver of revolt.

And so, while pledged to Isabel Sparling and her fellow-aspirants to become their champion when membership of the Synod should give him a voice, Mr. Trimblerigg for the present allowed the question to sleep. In his own time and in his own way he would make it his policy, but not probably so long as his Uncle Phineas was alive, and his own financial future unassured. He must first himself become a minister.

It was during his third vacation that Uncle Phineas showed faith, by an overt sign, in his future qualification for the calling. Jonathan was invited, at the next Wednesday meeting, to put up a prayer, and give an address. The invitation was made on the Sunday, giving him half a week’s notice; and announcement was made to the congregation.

Local interest in the preaching ability of Mr. Trimblerigg had already been roused. Word had come down from College that in the debates he had become a shining light, and there was regret among the Free Evangelicals that the burning oratory of which he gave promise should become the exclusive possession of the narrowest and most disunited connection in the union of the Free Churches. In the course of the next two days many told him that they were coming to hear him.

This helped to make the occasion important; for if he could fill the chapel and continue filling it on future occasions, Uncle Phineas’s recognition of his vocation would become more assured. Mr. Trimblerigg was now eighteen, his uncle was eighty-six; and he could not regard as unpropitious this timing by Providence of their respective lives. Two or three more years in the propaganda of True Belief would not unduly hold up a career for which wider spheres were waiting. Suppose he could, for a couple of years or so, kindle True Believers into new life, make himself indispensable: and then—!

He began to see why possibly he had been called to devote himself temporarily to so narrow a field of service. If he could come bringing his sheaves with him, he would count in the Evangelical world more than if he had merely started as one among many, with no spiritual adventure to single him from the crowd.

Thus his sanguine mind addressed itself to Wednesday’s meeting and the possibilities which lay beyond.

It would be doing him an injustice to say that, in regarding the occasion as propitious, he did not also regard it as a solemn one. He made preparation for it—I might indeed say that we made preparation for it together—with frequency and assiduity; and what I was supposed to hear for the first time on Wednesday evening, I heard in various stages of development more times than a few, during the two days preceding. Davidina, it appeared, heard it also: not, I think, by a wilful listening at keyholes, but with a general awareness that rehearsals were taking place. She paid him the compliment of coming to hear ‘how he got on’, which was her matter-of-fact way of putting it. All the rest of the family did the same: the meeting was well attended.

Mr. Trimblerigg, in spite, or perhaps because, of previous rehearsal, managed to deliver himself with a great air of spontaneity. He got to the point when he knew that he was making a success of it, and was then sufficiently moved and uplifted to launch out into parentheses which were not only unpremeditated but quite happily expressed.

People pray in different ways; some moan, some become tremulous, some voluble, some halting and inarticulate, some repeat themselves many times as though they suspected one of inattention to their requests. There are very few who say what they want to say in the fewest possible words. I wish they did.

Mr. Trimblerigg was not one of the few; but his prayer had undeniable merit; it was quick, spirited, cheerful, a little shrill and high-flown in a few of its passages, and in its peroration there was a touch of poetry. He said yea, several times instead of yes; a trick which later grew into a habit whenever poetry was his aim; but in spite of small drawbacks it was a highly creditable performance well-pleasing to both of us; and that it was so Mr. Trimblerigg knew as well as I or anyone else.

At the porch-gathering afterwards many praised him; Uncle Phineas had said little, not praising him at all, but Jonathan had been told that he might take Wednesday meeting till further notice. Cousin Caroline had looked at him with her mild dewy eyes, saying nothing but meaning much, as much, at least, as so indeterminate a character could mean. Only Davidina, impenetrable of look, gave him no inkling of what was in her mind.

On the way home, in order to show a proper attitude of detachment from praise for a gift that was spiritual, and perhaps also indifference to her blighting silence, Mr. Trimblerigg inquired airily what they were going to have for supper; whereupon Davidina replied in a dry indifferent tone: ‘Same as we’ve just had in chapel, bubble-and-squeak warmed up again.’

It was the sort of thing to which there was no answer; it was true, yet it was so unjust; no doubt she intended it for his soul’s health, but can anything so cruel be also sanitary? ‘Bubble-and-squeak,’ he could not fail to see, in caricature, the likeness to his ebullient enthusiasm which had so moved and uplifted the hearts of his hearers, his own also; and as he let the wound go home he felt (without counting) how many times he could have killed her!

And yet, if I can see truly into Davidina’s mind, all that she meant was that Jonathan’s prayers would be made much better by his not preparing them.

I am not sure that she was right; I have heard both; and I do not think that there was much to choose. Prepared and unprepared alike they always moved his audiences more than they moved me.

CHAPTER SIX
A Closed Incident

A WEEK later he very nearly did kill her. The good which men imagine, and the diminished version of it which, when it actually takes place, has so little recognizable likeness to the thing desired, found exemplification in this event. For though Mr. Trimblerigg had often wished Davidina out of life, it was a serious shock to him when by sheer accident he one day pushed her into the water, and was forced for a considerable while to believe that she was drowned.

It happened late one evening, on the edge of night, as brother and sister were returning from a shopping expedition, upon which, rather against his will, he had been forced to accompany her to help carry parcels. Taking the short way back, they came by a wood to the home fields at a point where a deep flowing stream was crossed by a narrow foot-bridge. There had been rain; the plank was slippery, the stream in flood; it was getting dark. Mr. Trimblerigg thought that he was carrying more than his share of the parcels, and the unappreciative companionship of Davidina had made him cross. Embarked upon the plank Davidina suddenly stopped to change over her parcels so as to get help of the hand-rail; and Mr. Trimblerigg coming close behind gave her an impatient nudge harder than he knew.

With an exasperated scream Davidina missing the hand-rail toppled and swung sideways. With quaint heroism she threw him her parcels as she descended streamwards. Two of them Mr. Trimblerigg managed to field; the third made the lethal plunge after her, and being of lighter substance jaunted gaily along the swift current into which she had wholly disappeared.

For a few ghastly seconds that seemed like the threshold of eternity, Mr. Trimblerigg, encumbered with his parcels, stood fixed. The thought flashed that here and now he had done something that he could not help, for he remembered that he did not swim; and though it was a pure accident, he had a swift apprehension that this would be a difficult and also a humiliating matter to explain truthfully. It was a very serious drawback for any young man at the beginning of his ministerial career to push his sister into the water and then have her drown; stated in the mildest terms it showed incompetence; and Mr. Trimblerigg had already begun to pride himself more than most on his efficiency in an emergency.

Luckily, however, nobody had actually seen him give the push; so, if the worst came to the worst, the story would be his own to tell. In the meantime he could but do his best to put matters right. ‘I’m really awfully sorry!’ he said to himself.

While these or similar thoughts were dividing his swift mind in the couple of seconds that had ensued, there was no reappearance of Davidina. Although the fact that he could not swim made direct action difficult, to attempt her rescue was a debt of honour which did not brook delay. Fleet-footed he crossed the plank, deposited his parcels, and began to race down-stream. If he could not actually rescue her, he must at least keep her in sight and give her all the encouragement in his power. Sight of the floating parcel bobbing against a willow bough seemed to suggest her present whereabouts.

Casting off his coat as he stumbled along the bank to outpace the current, he clutched at an overhanging bough and plunged boldly in. His feet touched bottom: he came up again and crying, ‘Davidina, where are you?’ felt about him in all directions with his disengaged hand for the life which had so unexpectedly become dear to him. He encountered the parcel, captured it as a small proof of his efficiency and threw it to land. The stream seemed otherwise quite unoccupied. He called again but got no answer.

In order to be thorough, he took another plunge higher up and two others lower down where boughs offered suitable assistance. Each time his feet touched bottom and his hand found emptiness. Had it then struck him to venture further and try walking across the stream, it might have puzzled him how so capable a person as Davidina should have managed to get drowned. But this he did not do; he continued to call upon her in loud appealing tones, and to repeat his dip, approximating to total immersion, at various points up and down stream.

He could not but feel that these scattered attempts were of a somewhat desultory and speculative character, and that the drowning Davidina, could she have known of them, would not have been satisfied. But Davidina’s standard was always an exacting one, and as he had failed to live up to it in the past, so he must needs fail now. Nevertheless these repeated immersions in water that was so astonishingly cold did at least give his conscience the absolution it required. He could say at the inquest, and afterwards, that he had done his best; what a poor best that happened to be was nobody’s concern but his own.

And so, here and there, up and down, he probed for the dear departed; and only when quite convinced that his universe was empty of Davidina did he quit the scene of the disaster and run off to fetch help.

Poles, ropes, lanterns, and presently a drag-net gave to subsequent efforts a surface appearance of efficiency which his own had lacked; but below the surface, where lay all that mattered, they were attended with no more success. No body was found.

Going home to his bereaved family the gasping youth told a tale which was readily believed. His exhaustion, his lively distress, his drenched condition, and his chattering teeth gave evidence of the ordeal he had passed through, and verification to a story which nobody had any reason to doubt. He told how Davidina had lost her footing and tumbled in, and he, plunging after, had twice caught hold of her clothing; and how one garment had come off in his hand, and another had given way. Only when she sank from view, after diving for her repeatedly in vain, did he relinquish his saving efforts.

This was the story in its second telling; others down by the stream, in the intervals of their search work, had heard it all before; and there was so little to alter from the facts, so little to leave out, that at second hearing he had already become convinced of its truth; and only the sight of Davidina standing at the door, carrying the parcels he had forgotten, reminded him, with ‘that sinking feeling’ out of which patent medicines make their fortune, that another version of the story existed and would probably be told.

In the next few minutes he got the surprise of his life: Davidina did not tell it. She had, it is true, something of her own to tell which was a departure from fact; for she said the stream had carried her down a mile and over the weir, at which point she had got upon her feet and waded out; whereas having fallen from the bridge on the upstream side she had become entangled in its central timbers, and after keeping low for a while and watching her brother safely out of sight along the further bank, had climbed out again and gone back into the wood. And there, I regret to say, she had wilfully stayed—warming herself with sharp exercise the while—listening to Mr. Trimblerigg’s intermittent cries of distress, watching the flit of lanterns, hearing the harsh shouts of the search-party, and calculating coolly how long they would take to give up quest for the body that was not there.

And her motive for all this? Her motive was to give Mr. Trimblerigg his chance: his chance to tell the truth, or to do otherwise, just as he chose.

Now was this charitable of her? I do not know. I only know that she genuinely thought it would do him good: to give him the chance, just once, of his own accord, to tell something against himself, bad for his moral credit, bad for his future prospects, and bad for his self-esteem. And yet, though that may have been her motive, I doubt whether it was not practically overborne by her sharp appreciative foresight of the actual shaping of the event.

After waiting for well over an hour to give her brother all the rope he needed to tie himself up in glory, she crossed the bridge, collected the parcels, his as well as hers, and went home. And so well had she timed herself that it was just as the second telling finished that she entered.

It took the family some moments to get over their surprise; but Mrs. Trimblerigg, an eminently practical woman, did not let them wait for questions now. She ran them up to their rooms, got them out of their wet clothes, then brought them down again, bundled in hot blankets to sit opposite each other by the fire; and now to be heard once more, telling their tale more fully each in their own way.

And since Mr. Trimblerigg pleaded exhaustion, his proud mother told it herself; and Davidina listened gratefully, fixing upon her brother Jonathan a kind and considerate regard. Her mother told it all accurately, just as she had heard it from Jonathan; and when it had all been rehearsed in her ears—our own Mr. Trimblerigg sitting opposite the while and furtively regarding her, rather like a Skye terrier that has just been washed and whipped—she said not a word to question the accuracy of the story. She accepted it; and when her mother said that she ought to feel most grateful to brother Jonathan for all he had done in trying to save her at the risk of his own life, she said that she was. She said also that the last thing she remembered was his voice calling, ‘Davidina, where are you?’ And as, weary and weak of tone, she thus corroborated his story, she gave him a friendly look and a faint smile; and then shut her eyes at him, as if to say, ‘The incident is now closed.’

And so upon Davidina’s side, as far as words went, it was. But with the mere shutting of her eyes she gave Mr. Trimblerigg a sleepless night; and for many nights and days after, she held him in a grip from which there was no escape. And then some of her answers to the maternal inquiries would flash into his memory with a horribly disturbing effect. ‘But Davidina, however did you come to bring the parcels along?’ ‘I went back for them: I thought Jonathan might have forgotten them; and so he had.’ And when Mr. Trimblerigg defended such forgetfulness as being only natural under the circumstances, Davidina replied, ‘He didn’t forget the other parcel, he saved that.’

‘Which parcel?’

‘The one that fell in. He saw that, and thought it was me, and swam after it; and it must have been a sort of satisfaction saving that, as he couldn’t get me.’

Such clairvoyance was horrible; it was as if her eye had flown with him like a firefly in the night watching every movement not of his body only but of his mind as well? And what made it so much more terrible was that he could not understand her motive, or how it was to end.

But day followed day, and no revelation was made; his story stood uncorrected; neighbours came to call and congratulate and at each occasion the story was told again. Sometimes Mr. Trimblerigg himself was made to tell it, in spite of a modest reluctance which grew and grew; and there always sat Davidina listening with kind eyes and a friendly smile. Then the eyes would shut suddenly, and the smile would remain.

When she had done this to him two or three times, Mr. Trimblerigg was ready to scream; and when she also did it to him the first time they were alone together, he wanted either to die or to murder her. Then, finding he could do neither, he gathered up his courage and was about to speak. But it was no good. Davidina opened her eyes again.

‘I’ve god a horrid gold,’ she said, flattening her consonants in comic imitation of a stage Jew. ‘Dat cubs of falling indo de warder.’

She blew her nose meticulously (as certain modern writers would say), creating an atmosphere which made confession impossible. Mr. Trimblerigg had not a word left that he could utter.

Now, that Mr. Trimblerigg should have been puzzled by Davidina’s acquiescence in the story he had told—that he should have been puzzled, that is to say, after perceiving what use she put it to—reveals the irreflective streak which was always dividing him from self-knowledge, and was presently to do him so much more mischief.

Holding her tongue had given Davidina a power over him which no exposure of his face-saving art of tale-telling could have equalled. The ignominy of that would have blown over; or he could stoutly have denied the push altogether, declaring it a figment of her imagination; and had she forced him to denial often enough he would have come to believe it true. But by saying nothing Davidina stewed him in his own juice without a bubble to show for it; and the tender mercy of her eyes made him sensitive where the accusation of her tongue would only have hardened him.