THE MAKING OF A BIGOT

THE
MAKING OF A BIGOT

BY
ROSE MACAULAY
Author of “The Lee Shore,” “Views and Vagabonds,” etc.
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO

TO D. F. C.

“How various is man! How multiplied his experience, his outlook, his conclusions!”—H. Belloc.

“And every single one of them is right.”—R. Kipling.

“The rational human faith must armour itself with prejudice in an age of prejudices.”—G. K. Chesterton.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I.
CAMBRIDGE.

IT was Trinity Sunday, full of buttercups and cuckoos and the sun. In Cambridge it was a Scarlet Day. In colleges, people struggling through a desert of Tripos papers or Mays rested their souls for a brief space in a green oasis, and took their lunch up the river. In Sunday schools, teachers were telling of the shamrock, that ill-considered and peculiarly inappropriate image conceived by a hard-pressed saint. Everywhere people were being ordained.

Miss Jamison met Eddy Oliver in Petty Cury, while she was doing some house-to-house visiting with a bundle of leaflets that looked like tracts. She looked at him vaguely, then suddenly began to take an interest in him.

“Of course,” she said, with decision, “you’ve got to join, too.”

“Rather,” he said. “Tell me what it is. I’m sure it’s full of truth.”

“It’s the National Service League. I’m a working associate, and I’m persuading people to join. It’s a good thing, really. Were you at the meeting yesterday?”

“No, I missed that. I was at another meeting, in point of fact. I often am, you know.” He said it with a touch of mild perplexity. It was so true.

She was turning over the sheaf of tracts.

“Let me see: which will meet your case? Leaflet M, the Modern Sisyphus—that’s a picture one, and more for the poor; so simple and graphic. P is better for you. Have you ever thought what war is, and what it would be like to have it raging round your own home? Have you ever thought what your feelings would be if you heard that an enemy had landed on these shores, and you knew that you were ignorant of the means by which you could help to defend your country and your home? You probably think that if you are a member of a rifle club, and know how to shoot, you have done all that is needed. But—well, you haven’t, and so on, you know. You’d better take P. And Q. Q says ‘Are you a Liberal? Then join the League, because, etc. Are you a Democrat? Are you a Socialist? Are you a Conservative? Are you——’ ”

“Yes,” said Eddy, “I’m everything of that sort. It won’t be able to think of anything I’m not.”

She thought he was being funny, though he wasn’t; he was speaking the simple truth.

“Anyhow,” she said, “you’ll find good reasons there why you should join, whatever you are. Just think, you know, suppose the Germans landed.” She supposed that for a little, then got on to physical training and military discipline, how important they are.

Eddy said when she paused, “Quite. I think you are utterly right.” He always did, when anyone explained anything to him; he was like that; he had a receptive mind.

“You can become,” said Miss Jamison, getting to the gist of the matter, “a guinea member, or a penny adherent, or a shilling associate, or a more classy sort of associate, that pays five shillings and gets all kinds of literature.”

“I’ll be that,” said Eddy Oliver, who liked nearly all kinds of literature.

So Miss Jamison got out her book of vouchers on the spot, and enrolled him, receiving five shillings and presenting a blue button on which was inscribed the remark, “The Path of Duty is the Path of Safety.”

“So true,” said Eddy. “A jolly good motto. A jolly good League. I’ll tell everyone I meet to join.”

“There’ll be another meeting,” said Miss Jamison, “next Thursday. Of course you’ll come. We want a good audience this time, if possible. We never have one, you know. There’ll be lantern slides, illustrating invasion as it would be now, and invasion as it would be were the National Service League Bill passed. Tremendously exciting.”

Eddy made a note of it in his Cambridge Pocket Diary, a small and profusely inscribed volume without which he never moved, as his engagements were numerous, and his head not strong.

He wrote below June 8th, “N.S.L., 8 p.m., Guildhall, small room.” For the same date he had previously inscribed, “Fabians, 7.15, Victoria Assembly Rooms,” “E.C.U. Protest Meeting, Guildhall, large room, 2.15,” and “Primrose League Fête, Great Shelford Manor, 3 p.m.” He belonged to all these societies (they are all so utterly right) and many others more esoteric, and led a complex and varied life, full of faith and hope. With so many right points of view in the world, so many admirable, if differing, faiths, whither, he demanded, might not humanity rise? Himself, he joined everything that came his way, from Vegetarian Societies to Heretic Clubs and Ritualist Guilds; all, for him, were full of truth. This attitude of omni-acceptance sometimes puzzled and worried less receptive and more single-minded persons; they were known at times even to accuse him, with tragic injustice, of insincerity. When they did so, he saw how right they were; he entirely sympathised with their point of view.

At this time he was nearly twenty-three, and nearly at the end of his Cambridge career. In person he was a slight youth, with intelligent hazel eyes under sympathetic brows, and easily ruffled brown hair, and a general air of receptive impressionability. Clad not unsuitably in grey flannels and the soft hat of the year (soft hats vary importantly from age to age), he strolled down King’s Parade. There he met a man of his own college; this was liable to occur in King’s Parade. The man said he was going to tea with his people, and Eddy was to come too. Eddy did so. He liked the Denisons; they were full of generous enthusiasm for certain things—(not, like Eddy himself, for everything). They wanted Votes for Women, and Liberty for Distressed Russians, and spinning-looms for everyone. They had inspired Eddy to want these things, too; he belonged, indeed, to societies for promoting each of them. On the other hand, they did not want Tariff Reform, or Conscription, or Prayer Book Revision (for they seldom read the Prayer Book), and if they had known that Eddy belonged also to societies for promoting these objects, they would have remonstrated with him.

Professor Denison was a quiet person, who said little, but listened to his wife and children. He had much sense of humour, and some imagination. He was fifty-five. Mrs. Denison was a small and engaging lady, a tremendous worker in good causes; she had little sense of humour, and a vivid, if often misapplied, imagination. She was forty-six. Her son Arnold was tall, lean, cynical, intelligent, edited a university magazine (the most interesting of them), was president of a Conversation Society, and was just going into his uncle’s publishing house. He had plenty of sense of humour (if he had had less, he would have bored himself to death), and an imagination kept within due bounds. He was twenty-three. His sister Margery was also intelligent, but, notwithstanding this, had recently published a book of verse; some of it was not so bad as a great many people’s verse. She also designed wall-papers, which on the whole she did better. She had an unequal sense of humour, keen in certain directions, blunt in others, like most people’s; the same description applies to her imagination. She was twenty-two.

Eddy and Arnold found them having tea in the garden, with two brown undergraduates and a white one. The Denisons belonged to the East and West Society, which tries to effect a union between the natives of these two quarters of the globe. It has conversazioni, at which the brown men congregate at one end of the room and the white men at the other, and both, one hopes, are happy. This afternoon Mrs. Denison and her daughter were each talking to a brown young man (Downing and Christ’s), and the white young man (Trinity Hall) was being silent with Professor Denison, because East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, and really, you can’t talk to blacks. Arnold joined the West; Eddy, who belonged to the above-mentioned society, helped Miss Denison to talk to her black.

Rather soon the East went, and the West became happier.

Miss Denison said, “Dorothy Jamison came round this afternoon, wanting us to join the National Service League or something.”

Mrs. Denison said, snippily, “Dorothy ought to know better,” at the same moment that Eddy said, “It’s a jolly little League, apparently. Quite full of truth.”

The Hall man said that his governor was a secretary or something at home, and kept having people down to speak at meetings. So he and the Denisons argued about it, till Margery said, “Oh, well, of course, you’re hopeless. But I don’t know what Eddy means by it. You don’t want to encourage militarism, surely, Eddy.”

Eddy said surely yes, shouldn’t one encourage everything? But really, and no ragging, Margery persisted, he didn’t belong to a thing like that?

Eddy showed his blue button.

“Rather, I do. Have you ever thought what war is, and what it would be like to have it raging round your own home? Are you a democrat? Then join the League.”

“Idiot,” said Margery, who knew him well enough to call him so.

“He believes in everything. I believe in nothing,” Arnold explained. “He accepts; I refuse. He likes three lumps of sugar in his tea; I like none. He had better be a journalist, and write for the Daily Mail, the Clarion, and the Spectator.”

“What are you going to do when you go down?” Margery asked Eddy, suspiciously.

Eddy blushed, because he was going for a time to work in a Church settlement. A man he knew was a clergyman there, and had convinced him that it was his duty and he must. The Denisons did not care about Church settlements, only secular ones; that, and because he had a clear, pale skin that showed everything, was why he blushed.

“I’m going to work with some men in Southwark,” he said, embarrassed. “Anyhow, for a time. Help with boys’ clubs, you know, and so on.”

“Parsons?” inquired Arnold, and Eddy admitted it, where upon Arnold changed the subject; he had no concern with Parsons.

The Denisons were so shocked at Eddy, that they let the Hall man talk about the South African match for quite two minutes. They were probably afraid that if they didn’t Eddy might talk about the C.I.C.C.U., which would be infinitely worse. Eddy was perhaps the only man at the moment in Cambridge who belonged simultaneously to the C.I.C.C.U., the Church Society, and the Heretics. (It may be explained for the benefit of the uninitiated that the C.I.C.C.U. is Low Church, and the Church Society is High Church, and the Heretics is no church at all. They are all admirable societies).

Arnold said presently, interrupting the match, “If I keep a second-hand bookshop in Soho, will you help me, Eddy?”

Eddy said he would like to.

“It will be awfully good training for both of us,” said Arnold. “You’ll see much more life that way, you know, than at your job in Southwark.”

Arnold had manfully overcome his distaste for alluding to Eddy’s job in Southwark, in order to make a last attempt to snatch a brand from the burning.

But Eddy, thinking he might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, said,

“You see, my people rather want me to take Orders, and the Southwark job is by way of finding out if I want to or not. I’m nearly sure I don’t, you know,” he added, apologetically, because the Denisons were looking so badly disappointed in him.

Mrs. Denison said kindly, “I think I should tell your people straight out that you can’t. It’s a tiresome little jar, I know, but honestly, I don’t believe it’s a bit of use members of a family pretending that they see life from the same angle when they don’t.”

Eddy said, “Oh, but I think we do, in a way. Only——”

It was really rather difficult to explain. He did indeed see life from the same angle as the rest of his family, but from many other angles as well, which was confusing. The question was, could one select some one thing to be, clergyman or anything else, unless one was very sure that it implied no negations, no exclusions of the other angles? That was, perhaps, what his life in Southwark would teach him. Most of the clergy round his own home—and, his father being a Dean, he knew many—hadn’t, it seemed to him, learnt the art of acceptance; they kept drawing lines, making sheep and goat divisions, like the Denisons.

The Hall man, feeling a little embarrassed because they were getting rather intimate and personal, and probably would like to get more so if he were not there, went away. He had had to call on the Denisons, but they weren’t his sort, he knew. Miss Denison and her parents frightened him, and he didn’t get on with girls who dressed artistically, or wrote poetry, and Arnold Denison was a conceited crank, of course. Oliver was a good sort, only very thick with Denison for some reason. If he was Oliver, and wanted to do anything so dull as slumming with parsons in Southwark, he wouldn’t be put off by anything the Denisons said.

“Why don’t you get your tie to match your socks, Eddy?” Arnold asked, with a yawn, when Egerton had gone.

His mother, a hospitable lady, and kind to Egertons and all others who came to her house, told him not to be disagreeable. Eddy said, truly, that he wished he did, and that it was a capital idea and looked charming.

“Egertons do look rather charming, quite often,” Margery conceded. “I suppose that’s something after all.”

Mrs. Denison added, (exquisite herself, she had a taste for neatness): “Their hair and their clothes are always beautifully brushed; which is more than yours are, Arnold.”

Arnold lay back with his eyes shut, and groaned gently. Egerton had fatigued him very much.

Eddy thought it was rather nice of Mrs. Denison and Margery to be kind about Egerton because he had been to tea. He realised that he himself was the only person there who was neither kind nor unkind about Egerton, because he really liked him. This the Denisons would have hopelessly failed to understand, or, probably, to believe; if he had mentioned it they would have thought he was being kind, too. Eddy liked a number of people who were ranked by the Denisons among the goats; even the rowing men of his own college, which happened to be a college where one didn’t row.

Mrs. Denison asked Eddy if he would come to lunch on Thursday to meet some of the Irish players, whom they were putting up for the week. The Denisons, being intensely English and strong Home Rulers, felt, besides the artistic admiration for the Abbey Theatre players common to all, a political enthusiasm for them as Nationalists, so putting three of them up was a delightful hospitality. Eddy, who shared both the artistic and the political enthusiasm, was delighted to come to lunch. Unfortunately he would have to hurry away afterwards to the Primrose League Fête at Great Shelford, but he did not mention this.

Consulting his watch, he found he was even now due at a meeting of a Sunday Games Club to which he belonged, so he said goodbye to the Denisons and went.

“Mad as a hatter,” was Arnold’s languid comment on him when he had gone; “but well-intentioned.”

“But,” said Margery, “I can’t gather that he intends anything at all. He’s so absurdly indiscriminate.”

“He intends everything,” her father interpreted. “You all, in this intense generation, intend much too much; Oliver carries it a little further than most of you, that’s all. His road to his ultimate destination is most remarkably well-paved.”

“Oh, poor boy,” said Mrs. Denison, remonstrating. She went in to finish making arrangements for a Suffrage meeting.

Margery went to her studio to hammer jewellery for the Arts and Crafts Exhibition.

Professor Denison went to his study to look over Tripos papers.

Arnold lay in the garden and smoked. He was the least energetic of his family, and not industrious.

CHAPTER II.
ST. GREGORY’S.

PROBABLY, Eddy decided, after working for a week in Southwark, the thing to be was a clergyman. Clergymen get their teeth into something; they make things move; you can see results, which is so satisfactory. They can point to a man, or a society, and say, “Here you are; I made this. I found him a worm and no man, and left him a human being,” or, “I found them scattered and unmoral units, and left them a Band of Hope, or a Mothers’ Union.” It is a great work. Eddy caught the spirit of it, and threw himself vigorously into men’s clubs and lads’ brigades, and boy scouts, and all the other organisations that flourished in the parish of St. Gregory, under the Reverend Anthony Finch and his assistant clergy. Father Finch, as he was called in the parish, was a stout, bright man, shrewd, and merry, and genial, and full of an immense energy and power of animating the inanimate. He had set all kinds of people and institutions on their feet, and given them a push to start them and keep them in motion. So his parish was a live parish, in a state of healthy circulation. Father Finch was emphatically a worker. Dogma and ritual, though certainly essential to his view of life, did not occupy the prominent place given to them by, for instance, his senior curate, Hillier. Hillier was the supreme authority on ecclesiastical ceremonial. It was he who knew, without referring to a book, all the colours of all the festivals and vigils; and what cere-cloths and maniples were; it was he who decided how many candles were demanded at the festal evensong of each saint, and what vestments were suitable to be worn in procession, and all the other things that lay people are apt to think get done for themselves, but which really give a great deal of trouble and thought to some painstaking organiser.

Hillier had genial and sympathetic manners with the poor, was very popular in the parish, belonged to eight religious guilds, wore the badges of all of them on his watch-chain, and had been educated at a county school and a theological college. The junior curate, James Peters, was a jolly young cricketer of twenty-four, and had been at Marlborough and Cambridge with Eddy; he was, in fact, the man who had persuaded Eddy to come and help in St. Gregory’s.

There were several young laymen working in the parish. St. Gregory’s House, which was something between a clergy house and a settlement, spread wide nets to catch workers. Hither drifted bank clerks in their leisure hours, eager to help with clubs in the evenings and Sunday school classes on Sundays. Here also came undergraduates in the vacations, keen to plunge into the mêlée, and try their hands at social and philanthropic enterprises; some of them were going to take Orders later, some were not; some were stifling with ardent work troublesome doubts as to the object of the universe, others were not; all were full of the generous idealism of the first twenties. When Eddy went there, there were no undergraduates, but several visiting lay workers.

Between the senior and junior curates came the second curate, Bob Traherne, an ardent person who belonged to the Church Socialist League. Eddy joined this League at once. It is an interesting one to belong to, and has an exciting, though some think old-fashioned, programme. Seeing him inclined to join things, Hillier set before him, diplomatically, the merits of the various Leagues and Guilds and Fraternities whose badges he wore, and for which new recruits are so important.

“Anyone who cares for the principles of the Church,” he said, shyly eager, having asked Eddy into his room to smoke one Sunday evening after supper, “must support the objects of the G.S.C.” He explained what they were, and why. “You see, worship can’t be complete without it—not so much because it’s a beautiful thing in itself, and certainly not from the æsthetic or sensuous point of view, though of course there’s that appeal too, and particularly to the poor—but because it’s used in the other branches, and we must join up and come into line as far as we conscientiously can.”

“Quite,” said Eddy, seeing it. “Of course we must.”

“You’ll join the Guild, then?” said Hillier, and Eddy said, “Oh, yes, I’ll join,” and did so. So Hillier had great hopes for him, and told him about the F.I.S., and the L.M.G.

But Traherne said afterwards to Eddy, “Don’t you go joining Hillier’s little Fraternities and Incense Guilds. They won’t do you any good. Leave them to people like Robinson and Wilkes.” (Robinson and Wilkes were two young clerks who came to work in the parish and adored Hillier.) “They seem to find such things necessary to their souls; in fact, they tell me they are starved without them; so I suppose they must be allowed to have them. But you simply haven’t the time to spend.”

“Oh, I think it’s right, you know,” said Eddy, who never rejected anything or fell in with negations. That was where he drew his line—he went along with all points of view so long as they were positive: as soon as condemnation or rejection came in, he broke off.

Traherne puffed at his pipe rather scornfully.

“It’s not right,” he grunted, “and it’s not wrong. It’s neuter. Oh, have it as you like. It’s all very attractive, of course; I’m entirely in sympathy with the objects of all these guilds, as you know. It’s only the guilds themselves I object to—a lot of able-bodied people wasting their forces banding themselves together to bring about relatively trivial and unimportant things, when there’s all the work of the shop waiting to be done. Oh, I don’t mean Hillier doesn’t work—of course he’s first-class—but the more of his mind he gives to incense and stoles, the less he’ll have to give to the work that matters—and it’s not as if he had such an immense deal of it altogether—mind, I mean.”

“But after all,” Eddy demurred, “if that sort of thing appeals to anybody....”

“Oh, let ’em have it, let ’em have it,” said Traherne wearily. “Let ’em all have what they like; but don’t you be dragged into a net of millinery and fuss. Even you will surely admit that things don’t all matter equally—that it’s more important, for instance, that people should learn a little about profit-sharing than a great deal about church ornaments; more important that they should use leadless glaze than that they should use incense. Well, then, there you are; go for the essentials, and let the incidentals look after themselves.”

“Oh, let’s go for everything,” said Eddy with enthusiasm. “It’s all worth having.”

The second curate regarded him with a cynical smile, and gave him up as a bad job. But anyhow, he had joined the Church Socialist League, whose members according to themselves, do go for the essentials, and, according to some other people, go to the devil; anyhow go, or endeavour to go, somewhere, and have no superfluous energy to spend on toys by the roadside. Only Eddy Oliver seemed to have energy to spare for every game that turned up. He made himself rather useful, and taught the boys’ clubs single-stick and boxing, and played billiards and football with them.

The only thing that young James Peters wanted him to join was a Rugby football club. Teach the men and boys of the parish to play Rugger like sportsmen and not like cads, and you’ve taught them most of what a boy or man need learn, James Peters held. While the senior curate said, give them the ritual of the Catholic Church, and the second curate said, give them a minimum wage, and the vicar said, put into them, by some means or another, the fear of God, the junior curate led them to the playing-field hired at great expense, and tried to make sportsmen of them; and grew at times, but very seldom, passionate like a thwarted child, because it was the most difficult thing he had ever tried to do, and because they would lose their tempers and kick one another on the shins, and walk off the field, and send in their resignations, together with an intimation that St. Gregory’s Church would see them no more, because the referee was a liar and didn’t come it fair. Then James Peters would throw back their resignations and their intimations in their faces, and call them silly asses and generally manage to smooth things down in his cheerful, youthful, vigorous way. Eddy Oliver helped him in this. He and Peters were great friends, though more unlike even than most people are. Peters had a very single eye, and herded people very easily and completely into sheep and goats; his particular nomenclature for them was “sportsmen” and “rotters.” He took the Catholic Church, so to speak, in his swing, and was one of her most loyal and energetic sons.

To him, Arnold Denison, whom he had known slightly at Cambridge, was decidedly a goat. Arnold Denison came, at Eddy’s invitation, to supper at St. Gregory’s House one Sunday night. The visit was not a success. Hillier, usually the life of any party he adorned, was silent, and on his guard. Arnold, at times a tremendous talker, said hardly a word through the meal. Eddy knew of old that he was capable, in uncongenial society, of an unmannerly silence, which looked scornful partly because it was scornful, and partly because of Arnold’s rather cynical physiognomy, which sometimes unjustly suggested mockery. On this Sunday evening he was really less scornful than simply aloof; he had no concern with these people, nor they with him; they made each other mutually uncomfortable. Neither could have anything to say to the other’s point of view. Eddy, the connecting link, felt unhappy about it. What was the matter with the idiots, that they wouldn’t understand each other? It seemed to him extraordinarily stupid. But undoubtedly the social fault lay with Arnold, who was being rude. The others, as hosts, tried to make themselves pleasant—even Hillier, who quite definitely didn’t like Arnold, and who was one of those who as a rule think it right and true to their colours to show disapproval when they feel it. The others weren’t like that (the difference perhaps was partly between the schools which had respectively reared them), so they were agreeable with less effort.

But the meal was not a success. It began with grace, which, in spite of its rapidity and its decent cloak of Latin, quite obviously shocked and embarrassed Arnold. (“Stupid of him,” thought Eddy; “he might have known we’d say it here.”) It went on with Peters talking about his Rugger club, which bored Arnold. This being apparent, the Vicar talked about some Cambridge men they both knew. As the men had worked for a time in St. Gregory’s parish, Arnold had already given them up as bad jobs, so hadn’t much to say about them, except one, who had turned over a new leaf, and now helped to edit a new weekly paper. Arnold mentioned this paper with approbation.

“Did you see last week’s?” he asked the Vicar. “There were some extraordinarily nice things in it.”

As no one but Eddy had seen last week’s, and everyone but Eddy thought The Heretic in thoroughly bad taste, if not worse, the subject was not a general success. Eddy referred to a play that had been reviewed in it. That seemed a good subject; plays are a friendly, uncontroversial topic. But between Arnold and clergymen no topic seemed friendly. Hillier introduced a popular play of the hour which had a religious trend. He even asked Arnold if he had seen it. Arnold said no, he had missed that pleasure. Hillier said it was grand, simply grand; he had been three times.

“Of course,” he added, “one’s on risky ground, and one isn’t quite sure how far one likes to see such marvellous religious experiences represented on the stage. But the spirit is so utterly reverent that one can’t feel anything but the rightness of the whole thing. It’s a rather glorious triumph of devotional expression.”

And that wasn’t a happy topic either, for no one but he and Eddy liked the play at all. The Vicar thought it cheap and tawdry; Traherne thought it sentimental and revolting; Peters thought it silly rot; and Arnold had never thought about it at all, but had just supposed it to be absurd, the sort of play to which one would go, if one went at all, to laugh; like “The Sins of Society,” or “Everywoman,” only rather coarse, too.

Hillier said to Eddy, who had seen the play with him, “Didn’t you think it tremendously fine, Oliver?”

Eddy said, “Yes, quite. I really did. But Denison wouldn’t like it, you know.”

Denison, Hillier supposed, was one of the fools who have said in their hearts, etc. In that case the play in question would probably be an eye-opener for him, and it was a pity he shouldn’t see it.

Hillier told him so. “You really ought to see it, Mr. Denison.”

Arnold said, “Life, unfortunately, is short.”

Hillier, nettled, said, “I’d much rather see ‘The Penitent’ than all your Shaws put together. I’m afraid I can’t pretend to owe any allegiance there.”

Arnold, who thought Shaw common, not to say Edwardian, looked unresponsive. Then Traherne began to talk about ground-rents. When Traherne began to talk he as a rule went on. Neither Hillier nor Arnold, who had mutually shocked one another, said much more. Arnold knew a little about rents, ground and other, and if Traherne had been a layman he would have been interested in talking about them. But he couldn’t and wouldn’t talk to clergymen; emphatically, he did not like them.

After supper, Eddy took him to his own room to smoke. With his unlit pipe in his hand, Arnold lay back and let out a deep breath of exhaustion.

“You were very rude and disagreeable at supper,” said Eddy, striking a match. “It was awkward for me. I must apologise to-morrow for having asked you. I shall say it’s your country manners, though I suppose you would like me to say that you don’t approve of clergymen.... Really, Arnold, I was surprised you should be so very rustic, even if you don’t like them.”

Arnold groaned faintly.

“Chuck it,” he murmured. “Come out of it before it is too late, before you get sucked in irrevocably. I’ll help you; I’ll tell the vicar for you; yes, I’ll interview them all in turn, even Hillier, if it will make it easier for you. Will it?”

“No,” said Eddy. “I’m not going to leave at present. I like being here.”

“That,” said Arnold, “is largely why it’s so demoralising for you. Now for me it would be distressing, but innocuous. For you it’s poison.”

“Well, now,” Eddy reasoned with him, “what’s the matter with Traherne, for instance? Of course, I see that the vicar’s too much the practical man of the world for you, and Peters too much the downright sportsman, and Hillier too much the pious ass (though I like him, you know). But Traherne’s clever and all alive, and not in the least reputable. What’s the matter with him, then?”

Arnold grunted. “Don’t know. Must be something, or he wouldn’t be filling his present position in life. Probably he labours under the delusion that life is real, life is earnest. Socialists often do.... Look here, come and see Jane one day, will you? She’d be a change for you.”

“What’s Jane like?”

“I don’t know.... Not like anyone here, anyhow. She draws in pen and ink, and lives in a room in a little court out of Blackfriars Road, with a little fat fair girl called Sally. Sally Peters; she’s a cousin of young James here, I believe. Rather like him, too, only rounder and jollier, with bluer eyes and yellower hair. Much more of a person, I imagine; more awake to things in general, and not a bit rangée, though quite crude. But the same sort of cheery exuberance; personally, I couldn’t live with either; but Jane manages it quite serenely. Sally isn’t free of the good-works taint herself, though we hope she is outgrowing it.”

“Oh, I’ve met her. She comes and helps Jimmy with the children’s clubs sometimes.”

“I expect she does. But, as I say, we’re educating her. She’s young yet.... Jane is good for her. So are Miss Hogan, and the two Le Moines, and I. We should also be good for you, if you could spare us some of your valuable time between two Sunday school classes. Good night. I’m going home now, because it makes me rather sad to be here.”

He went home.

The clergy of St. Gregory’s thought him (respectively) an ill-mannered and irritating young man, probably clever enough to learn better some day; an infidel, very likely too proud ever to learn better at all, this side the grave; a dilettante slacker, for whom the world hadn’t much use; and a conceited crank, for whom James Peters had no use at all. But they didn’t like to tell Eddy so.

James Peters, a transparent youth, threw only a thin veil over his opinions, however, when he talked to Eddy about his cousin Sally. He was, apparently, anxious about Sally. Eddy had met her at children’s clubs, and thought her a cheery young person, and admired the amber gold of her hair, and her cornflower-blue eyes, and her power of always thinking of a fresh game at the right moment.

“I’m supposed to be keeping an eye upon her,” James said. “She has to earn her living, you know, so she binds books and lives in a room off the Blackfriars Road with another girl.... I’m not sure I care about the way they live, to say the truth. They have such queer people in, to supper and so on. Men, you know, of all sorts. I believe Denison goes. They sit on a bed that’s meant to look like a sofa and doesn’t. And they’re only girls—Miss Dawn’s older than Sally, but not very old—and they’ve no one to look after them; it doesn’t seem right. And they do know the most extraordinary people. Miss Dawn’s rather a queer girl herself, I think; unlike other people, somehow. Very—very detached, if you understand; and doesn’t care a rap for the conventions, I should say. That’s all very well in its way, and she’s a very quiet-mannered person—can’t think how she and Sally made friends—but it’s a dangerous plan for most people. And some of their friends are ... well, rather rotters, you know. Look like artists, or Fabians, without collars, and so on.... Oh, I forgot—you’re a Fabian, aren’t you?... Well, anyhow, I should guess that some of them are without morals either; in my experience the two things are jolly apt to go together. There are the Le Moines, now. Have you ever come across either of them?”

“I’ve just met Cecil Le Moine. He’s rather charming, isn’t he?”

“The sort of person,” said James Peters, “for whom I have no use whatever. No, he doesn’t appear to me charming. An effeminate ass, I call him. Oh, I know he calls himself frightfully clever and all that, and I suppose he thinks he’s good-looking ... but as selfish as sin. Anyhow, he and his wife couldn’t live together, so they parted before their first year was over. Her music worried him or something, and prevented him concentrating his precious brain on his literary efforts; and I suppose he got on her nerves, too. I believe they agreed quite pleasantly to separate, and are quite pleased to meet each other about the place, and are rather good friends. But I call it pretty beastly, looking at marriage like that. If they’d hated each other there’d have been more excuse. And she’s a great friend of Miss Dawn’s, and Sally’s developed what I consider an inordinate affection for her; and she and Miss Dawn between them have simply got hold of her—Sally, I mean—and are upsetting her and giving her all kinds of silly new points of view. She doesn’t come half as often to the clubs as she used. And she was tremendously keen on the Church, and—and really religious, you know—and she’s getting quite different. I feel sort of responsible, and it’s worrying me rather.”

He puffed discontentedly at his pipe.

“Pity to get less keen on anything,” Eddy mused. “New points of view seem to me all to the good; it’s losing hold of the old that’s a mistake. Why let anything go, ever?”

“She’s getting to think it doesn’t matter,” James complained; “Church, and all that. I know she’s given up things she used to do. And really, the more she’s surrounded by influences such as Mrs. Le Moine’s, the more she needs the Church to pull her through, if only she’d see it. Mrs. Le Moine’s a wonderful musician, I suppose, but she has queer ideas, rather; I shouldn’t trust her. She and Hugh Datcherd—the editor of Further, you know—are hand and glove. And considering he has a wife and she a husband ... well, it seems pretty futile, doesn’t it?”

“Does it?” Eddy wondered. “It depends so much on the special circumstances. If the husband and the wife don’t mind——”

“Rot,” said James. “And the husband ought to mind, and I don’t know that the wife doesn’t. And, anyhow, it doesn’t affect the question of right and wrong.”

That was too difficult a proposition for Eddy to consider; he gave it up.

“I’m going to the Blackfriars Road flat with Denison one day, I believe,” he said. “I shall be one of the Fabians that sit on the bed that doesn’t look like a sofa.”

James sighed. “I wish, if you get to know Sally at all, you’d encourage her to come down here more, and try to put a few sound ideas into her head. She’s taking to scorning my words of wisdom. I believe she’s taken against parsons.... Oh, you’re going with Denison.”

“Arnold won’t do anyone any harm,” Eddy reassured him. “He’s so extraordinarily innocent. About the most innocent person I know. We should shock him frightfully down here if he saw much of us; he’d think us indecent and coarse. Hillier and I did shock him rather, by liking “The Penitent.”

“I wonder if you like everything,” grumbled Peters.

“Most things, I expect,” said Eddy. “Well, most things are rather nice, don’t you think?”

“I suppose you’ll like the Le Moines and Miss Dawn if you get to know them. And all the rest of that crew.”

Eddy certainly expected to do so.

Six o’clock struck, and Peters went to church to hear confessions, and Eddy to the Institute to play billiards with the Church Lads’ Brigade, of which he was an officer. A wonderful life of varied active service, this Southwark life seemed to Eddy; full and splendid, and gloriously single-eyed. Arnold, in sneering at it, showed himself a narrow prig. More and more it was becoming clear to Eddy that nothing should be sneered at and nothing condemned, not the Catholic Church, nor the Salvation Army, nor the views of artists, Fabians, and Le Moines, without collars and without morals.

CHAPTER III.
PLEASANCE COURT.

ONE evening Arnold took Eddy to supper with his cousin Jane Dawn and James Peters’ cousin Sally. They lived in Pleasance Court, a small square with a garden. After supper they were all going to a first performance of a play by Cecil Le Moine, called “Squibs.”

“You always know which their window is,” Arnold told Eddy as they turned into the square, “by the things on the sill. They put the food and drink there, to keep cool, or be out of the way, or something.” Looking up, they saw outside an upper window a blue jug and a white bowl, keeping cool in the moonlight. As they rang at the door, the window was pushed up, and hands reached out to take the jug and bowl in. A cheerful face looked down at the tops of their heads, and a cheerful voice said clearly, “They’ve come, Jane. They’re very early, aren’t they? They’ll have to help buttering the eggs.”

Arnold called up, “If you would prefer it, we will walk round the square till the eggs are buttered.”

“Oh, no, please. We’d like you to come up and help, if you don’t mind.” The voice was a little doubtful because of Eddy, the unknown quantity. The door was opened by an aged door-keeper, and they climbed breathlessly steep stairs to the room.

In the room was the smell of eggs buttering over a spirit-lamp, and of cocoa boiling over a fire. There was also a supper-table, laid with cups and plates and oranges and butter and honey, and brown, green-wainscotted walls, and various sorts of pictures hanging on them, and various sorts of pots and jugs from various sorts of places, such as Spain, New Brighton, and Bruges, and bronze chrysanthemums in jars, and white shoots of bulbs pricking up out of cocoa-nut fibre in bowls, and a book-case with books in it, and a table in a corner littered with book-binding plant, and two girls cooking. One of them was soft and round like a puppy, and had fluffy golden hair and a cornflower-blue pinafore to match cornflower-blue eyes. The other was small, and had a pale, pointed face and a large forehead and brown hair waving back from it, and a smile of wonderfully appealing sweetness, and a small, gentle voice. She looked somehow as if she had lived in a wood, and had intimately and affectionately known all the little live wild things in it, both birds and beasts and flowers: a queer unearthliness there was about her, that suggested the morning winds and the evening stars. Eddy, who knew some of her drawings, had noted that chaste, elfin quality in them; he was rather pleased to find it meet him so obviously in her face and bearing. Seeing the two girls, he was disposed to echo James Peters’ comment, “Can’t think how she and Sally made friends,” and to set it down tritely to that law of contrasts which some people, in the teeth of experience, appear to believe in as the best basis of friendship.

Sally Peters was stirring the buttered egg vigorously, lest it should stand still and burn. Jane Dawn was watching the cocoa, lest it should run over and burn. Arnold wandered round the room peering at the pictures—mostly drawings and etchings—with his near-sighted eyes, to see if there was anything new. Jane had earned a little money lately, so there were two new Duncan Grants and a Muirhead Bone, which he examined with critical approval.

“You’ve still got this up,” he remarked, tapping Beardsley’s “Ave Atque Vale” with a disparaging finger. “The one banal thing Beardsley ever.... Besides, anyhow Beardsley’s passé.”

Jane Dawn, who looked as if she belonged not to time at all, seemed peacefully undisturbed by this fact. Only Sally, in her young ingenuousness, looked a little concerned.

“I love the Ave,” Jane murmured over the saucepan, and then looked up at Eddy with her small, half-affectionate smile—a likeable way she had with her.

He said, “I do too,” and Arnold snorted.

“You don’t know him yet, Jane. He loves everything. He loves ‘Soap-bubbles,’ and ‘The Monarch of the Glen,’ and problem pictures in the Academy. Not to mention ‘The Penitent,’ which, Jane, is a play of which you have never heard, but to which you and I will one day go, to complete our education. Only we won’t take Sally; it would be bad for her. She isn’t old enough for it yet and it might upset her mind; besides, it isn’t proper, I believe.”

“I’m sure I don’t want to go,” said Sally, pouring out the egg into a dish. “It must be idiotic. Even Jimmy thinks so.”

Arnold’s eyebrows went up. “In that case I may revise my opinion of it,” he murmured. “Well, anyhow Eddy loves it, like everything else. Nothing is beyond the limit of his tolerance.”

“Does he like nice things too?” Sally naïvely asked. “Will he like ‘Squibs’?”

“Oh, yes, he’ll like ‘Squibs.’ His taste is catholic; he’ll probably be the only person in London who likes both ‘Squibs’ and ‘The Penitent.’ ... I suppose we shan’t see Eileen to-night; she’ll have been given one of the seats of the great. She shall come and talk to us between the acts, though.”

“We wanted Eileen and Bridget to come to supper,” said Sally. “It’s quite ready now, by the way; let’s have it. But they were dining with Cecil, and then going on to the theatre. Do you like cocoa, Mr. Oliver? Because if you don’t there’s milk, or lemonade.”

Eddy said he liked them all, but would have cocoa at the moment. Jane poured it out, with the most exquisitely-shaped thin small hands he had ever seen, and passed it to him with her little smile, that seemed to take him at once into the circle of her accepted friends. A rare and delicate personality she seemed to him, curiously old and young, affectionate and aloof, like a spring morning on a hill. There was something impersonal and sexless about her. Eddy felt inclined at once to call her Jane, and was amused and pleased when she slipped unconsciously once or twice into addressing him as Eddy. The ordinary conventions in such matters would never, one felt, weigh with her at all, or even come into consideration, any more than with a child.

“I was to give you James’ love,” Eddy said to Sally, “and ask you when you are coming to St. Gregory’s again. The school-teachers, he tells me to inform you, cannot run the Band of Hope basket-making class without you.”

Sally got rather pink, and glanced at Arnold, who looked cynically interested.

“What is the Band of Hope?” he inquired.

“Temperance girls, temperance boys, always happy, always free,” Eddy answered, in the words of their own song.

“Oh, I see. Fight the drink. And does making baskets help them to fight it?”

“Well, of course if you have a club and it has to meet once a week, it must do something,” said Sally, stating a profound and sad truth. “But I told Jimmy I was frightfully busy; I don’t think I can go, really.... I wish Jimmy wouldn’t go on asking me. Do tell him not to, Mr. Oliver. Jimmy doesn’t understand; one can’t do everything.”

“No,” said Eddy dubiously, thinking that perhaps one could, almost, and that anyhow the more things the more fun.

“It’s a pity one can’t,” he added, from his heart.

Arnold said that doing was a deadly thing, doing ends in death. “Only that, I believe, is the Evangelical view, and you’re High Church at St. Gregory’s.”

Jane laughed at him. “Imagine Arnold knowing the difference! I don’t believe he does in the least. I do,” she added, with a naïve touch of vanity, “because I met a clergyman once, when I was drawing in the Abbey, and he told me a lot about it. About candles, and ornaments, and robes that priests wear in church. It must be much nicer than being Low Church, I should think.” She referred to Eddy, with her questioning smile.

“They’re both rather nice,” Eddy said. “I’m both, I think.”

Sally looked at him inquiringly with her blue eyes under their thick black lashes. Was he advanced, this plausible, intelligent-looking young man, who was a friend of Arnold Denison’s and liked “The Penitent,” and, indeed, everything else? Was he free and progressive and on the side of the right things, or was he merely an amiable stick-in-the-mud like Jimmy? She couldn’t gather, from his alert, expressive face and bright hazel eyes and rather sensitive mouth: they chiefly conveyed a capacity for reception, an openness to all impressions, a readiness to spread sails to any wind. If he were a person of parts, if he had a brain and a mind and a soul, and if at the same time he were an ardent server of the Church—that, Sally thought unconsciously, might be a witness in the Church’s favour. Only here she remembered Jimmy’s friend at St. Gregory’s, Bob Traherne; he was all that and more, he had brain and mind and soul and an ardent fire of zeal for many of the right things (Sally, a little behind the times here, was a Socialist by conviction), and yet in spite of him one was sure that somehow the Church wouldn’t do, wouldn’t meet all the requirements of this complex life. Sally had learnt that lately, and was learning it more and more. She was proud of having learnt it; but still, she had occasional regrets.

She made a hole in an orange, and put a lump of sugar in it and sucked it.

“The great advantage of that way,” she explained, “is that all the juice goes inside you, and doesn’t mess the plates or anything else. You see, Mrs. Jones is rather old, and not fond of washing up.”

So they all made holes and put in sugar, and put the juice inside them. Then Jane and Sally retired to exchange their cooking pinafores for out-door things, and then they all rode to “Squibs” on the top of a bus. They were joined at the pit door by one Billy Raymond, a friend of theirs—a tall, tranquil young man, by trade a poet, with an attractive smile and a sweet temper, and a gentle, kind, serenely philosophical view of men and things that was a little like Jane’s, only more human and virile. He attracted Eddy greatly, as his poems had already done.

To remove anxiety on the subject, it may be stated at once that the first night of “Squibs” was neither a failure nor a triumphant success. It was enjoyable, for those who enjoyed the sort of thing—(fantastic wit, clever dialogue, much talk, little action, and less emotion)—and dull for those who didn’t. It would certainly never be popular, and probably the author would have been shocked and grieved if it had been. The critics approved it as clever, and said it was rather lengthy and highly improbable. Jane, Sally, Arnold, Billy Raymond, and Eddy enjoyed it extremely. So did Eileen Le Moine and her companion Bridget Hogan, who watched it from a box. Cecil Le Moine wandered in and out of the box, looking plaintive. He told Eileen that they were doing it even worse than he had feared. He was rather an engaging-looking person, with a boyish, young-Napoleonic beauty of face and a velvet smoking-jacket, and a sweet, plaintive voice, and the air of an injured child about him. A child of genius, perhaps; anyhow a gifted child, and a lovable one, and at the same time as selfish as even a child can be.

Eileen Le Moine and Miss Hogan came to speak to their friends in the pit before taking their seats. Eddy was introduced to them, and they talked for a minute or two. When they had gone, Sally said to him, “Isn’t Eileen attractive?”

“Very,” he said.

“And Bridget’s a dear,” added Sally, childishly boasting of her friends.

“I can imagine she would be,” said Eddy. Miss Hogan had amused him during their short interview. She was older than the rest of them; she was perhaps thirty-four, and very well dressed, and with a shrewd, woman-of-the-world air that the others quite lacked, and dangling pince-nez, and ironic eyes, and a slight stutter. Eddy regretted that she was not sitting among them; her caustic comments would have added salt to the evening.

“Bridget’s worldly, you know,” Sally said. “She’s the only one of us with money, and she goes out a lot. You see how smartly she’s dressed. She’s the only person I’m really friends with who’s like that. She’s awfully clever, too, though she doesn’t do anything.”

“Doesn’t she do anything?” Eddy asked sceptically, and Arnold answered him.

“Our Bridget? Sally only means she’s a lily of the field. She writes not, neither does she paint. She only mothers those who do, and hauls them out of scrapes. Eileen lives with her, you know, in a flat in Kensington. She tries to look after Eileen. Quite enough of a job, besides tending all the other ingenuous young persons of both sexes she has under her wing.”

Eddy watched her as she talked to Eileen Le Moine; a vivid, impatient, alive person, full of quips and cranks and quiddities and a constant flow of words. He could see, foreshortened, Eileen Le Moine’s face—very attractive, as Sally had said; broad brows below dark hair, rounded cheeks with deep dimples that came and went in them, great deep blue, black-lashed eyes, a wide mouth of soft, generous curves, a mouth that could look sulky but always had amusement lurking in it, and a round, decisive chin. She was perhaps four or five and twenty; a brilliant, perverse young person, full of the fun of living, an artist, a pleasure-lover, a spoilt child, who probably could be sullen, who certainly was wayward and self-willed, who had genius and charm and ideas and a sublime independence of other people’s codes, and possibly an immense untapped spring of generous self-sacrifice. She had probably been too like Cecil Le Moine (only more than he was, every way) to live with him; each would need something more still and restful as a permanent companion. They had no doubt been well advised to part, thought Eddy, who did not agree with James Peters about that way of regarding marriage.

“Isn’t Miss Carruthers ripping as Myra,” whispered Sally. “Cecil wrote it for her, you know. He says there’s no one else on the stage.”

Jane put up a hand to silence her, because the curtain had risen.

At the end the author was called and had a good reception; on the whole “Squibs” had been a success. Eddy looked up and saw Eileen Le Moine looking pleased and smiling as they clapped her boyish-looking husband—an amused, sisterly, half ironic smile. It struck Eddy as the smile she must inevitably give Cecil, and it seemed to illumine their whole relations. She couldn’t, certainly, be the least in love with him, and yet she must like him very much, to smile like that now that they were parted.

As Jane and Sally and Eddy and Billy Raymond rode down Holborn on their bus (Arnold had walked to Soho, where he lived) Eddy, sitting next Jane, asked “Did you like it?” being curious about Jane’s point of view.

She smiled. “Yes, of course. Wouldn’t anyone?” Eddy could have answered the question, instancing Hillier or James Peters, or his own parents or, indeed, many other critics. But Jane’s “anyone” he surmised to have a narrow meaning; anyone, she meant, of our friends; anyone of the sort one naturally comes into contact with. (Jane’s outlook was through a narrow gate on to woods unviolated by the common tourist; her experience was delicate, exquisite, and limited).

She added, “Of course it’s just a baby’s thing. He is just a baby, you know.”

“I should like to get to know him,” said Eddy. “He’s extraordinarily pleasing,” and she nodded.

“Of course you’ll get to know him. Why not? And Eileen, too.” In Jane’s world, the admitted dwellers all got to know each other, as a matter of course.

“A lot of us are going down into the country next Sunday,” Jane added. “Won’t you come?”

“Oh, thanks; if I’m not needed in the parish I’d love to. Yes, I’m almost sure I can.”

“We all meet at Waterloo for the nine-thirty. We shall have breakfast at Heathermere (but you can have had some earlier, too, if you like), and then walk somewhere from there. Bring a thick coat, because we shall be sitting about on the heath, and it’s not warm.”

“Thanks awfully, if you’re sure I may come.”

Jane wasted no more words on that; she probably never asked people to come unless she was sure they might. She merely waved an appreciative hand, like a child, at the blue night full of lights, seeking his sympathy in the wonder of it. Then she and Sally had to change into the Blackfriars Bridge bus, and Eddy sought London Bridge and the Borough on foot. Billy Raymond, who lived in Beaufort Street, but was taking a walk, came with him. They talked on the way about the play. Billy made criticisms and comments that seemed to Eddy very much to the point, though they wouldn’t have occurred to him. There was an easy ability, a serene independence of outlook, about this young man, that was attractive. Like many poets, he was singularly fresh and unspoilt, though in his case (unlike many poets) it wasn’t because he had nothing to spoil him; he enjoyed, in fact, some reputation among critics and the literary public. He figured in many an anthology of verse, and those who gave addresses on modern poetry were apt to read his things aloud, which habit annoys some poets and gratifies others. Further, he had been given a reading all to himself at the Poetry Bookshop, which had rather displeased him, because he had not liked the voice of the lady who read him. But enough has been said to indicate that he was a promising young poet.

When Eddy got in, he found the vicar and Hillier smoking by the common-room fire. The vicar was nodding over Pickwick, and Hillier perusing the Church Times. The vicar, who had been asleep, said, “Hullo, Oliver. Want anything to eat or drink? Had a nice evening?”

“Very, thanks. No, I’ve been fed sufficiently.”

“Play good?”

“Yes, quite clever.... I say, would it be awfully inconvenient if I was to be out next Sunday? Some people want me to go out for the day with them. Of course there’s my class. But perhaps Wilkes.... He said he wouldn’t mind, sometimes.”

“No; that’ll be all right. Speak to Wilkes, will you.... Shall you be away all day?”

“I expect so,” said Eddy, feeling that Hillier looked at him askance, though the vicar didn’t. Probably Hillier didn’t approve of Sunday outings, thought one should be in church.

He sat down and began to talk about “Squibs.”

Hillier said presently, “He’s surely rather a mountebank, that Le Moine? Full of cheap sneers and clap-trap, isn’t he?”

“Oh, no,” said Eddy. “Certainly not clap-trap. He’s very genuine, I should say; expresses his personality a good deal more successfully than most play writers.”

“Oh, no doubt,” Hillier said. “It’s his personality, I should fancy, that’s wrong.”

Eddy said, “He’s delightful,” rather warmly, and the vicar said, “Well, now, I’m going to bed,” and went, and Eddy went, too, because he didn’t want to argue with Hillier, a difficult feat, and no satisfaction when achieved.

CHAPTER IV.
HEATHERMERE.

SUNDAY was the last day but one of October. They all met at Waterloo in a horrid fog, and missed the nine-thirty because Cecil Le Moine was late. He sauntered up at 9.45, tranquil and at ease, the MS. of his newest play under his arm (he obviously thought to read it to them in the course of the day—“which must be prevented,” Arnold remarked). So they caught a leisured train at 9.53, and got out of it at a little white station about 10.20, and the fog was left behind, and a pure blue October sky arched over a golden and purple earth, and the air was like iced wine, thin and cool and thrilling, and tasting of heather and pinewoods. They went first to the village inn, on the edge of the woods, where they had ordered breakfast for eight. Their main object at breakfast was to ply Cecil with food, lest in a leisure moment he should say, “What if I begin my new play to you while you eat?”

“Good taste and modesty,” Arnold remarked, à propos of nothing, “are so very important. We have all achieved our little successes (if we prefer to regard them in that light, rather than to take the consensus of the unintelligent opinion of our less enlightened critics). Jane has some very well-spoken of drawings even now on view in Grafton Street, and doubtless many more in Pleasance Court. Have you brought them, or any of them, with you, Jane? No? I thought as much. Eileen last night played a violin to a crowded and breathless audience. Where is the violin to-day? She has left it at home; she does not wish to force the fact of her undoubted musical talent down our throats. Bridget has earned deserved recognition as an entertainer of the great; she has a social cachet that we may admire without emulation. Look at her now; her dress is simplicity itself, and she deigns to play in a wood with the humble poor. Even the pince-nez is in abeyance. Billy had a selection from his works read aloud only last week to the élite of our metropolitan poetry-lovers by a famous expert, who alluded in the most flattering terms to his youthful promise. Has he his last volume in his breast-pocket? I think not. Eddy has made a name in proficiency in vigorous sports with youths; he has taught them to box and play billiards; does he come armed with gloves and a cue? I have written an essay of some merit that I have every hope will find itself in next month’s English Review. I am sorry to disappoint you, but I have not brought it with me. When the well-bred come out for a day of well-earned recreation, they leave behind them the insignia of their several professions. For the time being they are merely individuals, without fame and without occupation, whose one object is to enjoy what is set before them by the gods. Have some more bacon, Cecil.”

Cecil started. “Have you been talking, Arnold? I’m so sorry—I missed it all. I expect it was good, wasn’t it?”

“No one is deceived,” Arnold said, severely. “Your ingenuous air, my young friend, is overdone.”

Cecil was looking at him earnestly. Eileen said, “He’s wondering was it you that reviewed ‘Squibs’ in Poetry and Drama, Arnold. He always looks like that when he’s thinking about reviews.”

“The same phrases,” Cecil murmured—“(meant to be witty, you know)—that Arnold used when commenting on ‘Squibs’ in private life to me. Either he used them again afterwards, feeling proud of them, to the reviewer (possibly Billy?) or the reviewer had just used them to him before he met me, and he cribbed them, or.... But I won’t ask. I mustn’t know. I prefer not to know. I will preserve our friendship intact.”

“What does the conceited child expect?” exclaimed Miss Hogan. “The review said he was more alive than Barker, and wittier than Wilde. The grossest flattery I ever read!”

“A bright piece,” Cecil remarked. “He said it was a bright piece. He did, I tell you. A bright piece.”

“Well, lots of the papers didn’t,” said Sally, consoling him. “The Daily Comment said it was long-winded, incoherent, and dull.”

“Thank you, Sally. That is certainly a cheering memory. To be found bright by the Daily Comment would indeed be the last stage of degradation.... I wonder what idiocy they will find to say of my next.... I wonder——”

“Have we all finished eating?” Arnold hastily intercepted. “Then let us pay, and go out for a country stroll, to get an appetite for lunch, which will very shortly be upon us.”

“My dear Arnold, one doesn’t stroll immediately after breakfast; how crude you are. One smokes a cigarette first.”

“Well, catch us up when you’ve smoked it. We came out for a day in the country, and we must have it. We’re going to walk several miles now without a stop, to get warm.” Arnold was occasionally seized with a fierce attack of energy, and would walk all through a day, or more probably a night, to get rid of it, and return cured for the time being.

The sandy road led first through a wood that sang in a fresh wind. The cool air was sweet with pines and bracken and damp earth. It was a glorious morning of odours and joy, and the hilarity of the last days of October, when the end seems near and the present poignantly gay, and life a bright piece nearly played out. Arnold and Bridget Hogan walked on together ahead, both talking at once, probably competing as to which could get in most remarks in the shortest time. After them came Billy Raymond and Cecil Le Moine, and with them Jane and Sally hand-in-hand. Eddy found himself walking in the rear side by side with Eileen Le Moine.

Eileen, who was capable, ignoring all polite conventions, of walking a mile with a slight acquaintance without uttering a word, because she was feeling lazy, or thinking of something interesting, or because her companion bored her, was just now in a conversational mood. She rather liked Eddy; also she saw in him an avenue for an idea she had in mind. She told him so.

“You work in the Borough, don’t you? I wish you’d let me come and play folk-music to your clubs sometimes. It’s a thing I’m rather keen on—getting the old folk melodies into the streets, do you see, the way errand boys will whistle them. Do you know Hugh Datcherd? He has musical evenings in his Lea-side settlement; I go there a good deal. He has morris dancing twice a week and folk-music once.”

Eddy had heard much of Hugh Datcherd’s Lea-side settlement. According to St. Gregory’s, it was run on very regrettable lines. Hillier said, “They teach rank atheism there.” However, it was something that they also taught morris dancing and folk-music.

“It would be splendid if you’d come sometimes,” he said, gratefully. “Just exactly what we should most like. We’ve had a little morris dancing, of course—who hasn’t?—but none of the other thing.”

“Which evening will I come?” she asked. A direct young person; she liked to settle things quickly.

Eddy, consulting his little book, said, “To-morrow, can you?”

She said, “No, I can’t; but I will,” having apparently a high-handed method of dealing with previous engagements.

“It’s the C.L.B. club night,” said Eddy. “Hillier—one of the curates—is taking it to-morrow, and I’m helping. I’ll speak to him, but I’m sure it will be all right. It will be a delightful change from billiards and boxing. Thanks so much.”

“And Mr. Datcherd may come with me, mayn’t he? He’s interested in other people’s clubs. Do you read Further? And do you like his books?”

“Yes, rather,” Eddy comprehensively answered all three questions. All the same he was smitten with a faint doubt as to Mr. Datcherd’s coming. Probably Hillier’s answer to the three questions would have been “Certainly not.” But after all, St. Gregory’s didn’t belong to Hillier but to the vicar, and the vicar was a man of sense. And anyhow anyone who saw Mrs. Le Moine must be glad to have a visit from her, and anyone who heard her play must thank the gods for it.

“I do like his books,” Eddy amplified; “only they’re so awfully sad, and so at odds with life.”

A faint shadow seemed to cloud her face.

“He is awfully sad,” she said, after a moment. “And he is at odds with life. He feels it hideous, and he minds. He spends all his time trying and trying can he change it for people. And the more he tries and fails, the more he minds.” She stopped abruptly, as if she had gone too far in explaining Hugh Datcherd to him. Eddy had a knack of drawing confidences; probably it was his look of intelligent sympathy and his habit of listening.

He wondered for a moment whether Hugh Datcherd’s sadness was all altruistic, or did he find his own life hideous too? From what Eddy had heard of Lady Dorothy, his wife, that might easily be so, he thought, for they didn’t sound compatible.

Instinctively, anyhow, he turned away his eyes from the queer, soft look of brooding pity that momentarily shadowed Hugh Datcherd’s friend.

From in front, snatches of talk floated back to them through the clear, thin air. Miss Hogan’s voice, with its slight stutter, seemed to be concluding an interesting anecdote.

“And so they both committed suicide from the library window. And his wife was paralysed from the waist up—is still, in fact. Most unwholesome, it all was. And now it’s so on Charles Harker’s mind that he writes novels about nothing else, poor creature. Very natural, if you think what he went through. I hear he’s another just coming out now, on the same.”

“He sent it to us,” said Arnold, “but Uncle Wilfred and I weren’t sure it was proper. I am engaged in trying to broaden Uncle Wilfred’s mind. Not that I want him to take Harker’s books, now or at any time.... You know, I want Eddy in our business. We want a new reader, and it would be so much better for his mind and moral nature than messing about as he’s doing now.”

Cecil was saying to Billy and Jane, “He wants me to put Lesbia behind the window-curtain, and make her overhear it all. Behind the window-curtain, you know! He really does. Could you have suspected even our Musgrave of being so banal, Billy? He’s not even Edwardian—he’s late-Victorian....”

Arnold said over his shoulder, “Can’t somebody stop him? Do try, Jane. He’s spoiling our day with his egotistic babbling. Bridget and I are talking exclusively about others, their domestic tragedies, their literary productions, and their unsuitable careers; never a word about ourselves. I’m sure Eileen and Eddy are doing the same; and sandwiched between us, Cecil flows on fluently about his private grievances and his highly unsuitable plays. You’d think he might remember what day it is, to say the least of it. I wonder how he was brought up, don’t you, Bridget?”

“I don’t wonder; I know,” said Bridget. “His parents not only wrote for the Yellow Book, but gave it him to read in the nursery, and it corrupted him for life. He would, of course, faint if one suggested that he carried the taint of anything so antiquated, but infant impressions are hard to eradicate. I know of old that the only way to stop him is to feed him, so let’s have lunch, however unsuitable the hour and the place may be.”

Sally said, “Hurrah, let’s. In this sand-pit.” So they got into the sand-pit and produced seven packets of food, which is to say that they each produced one except Cecil, who had omitted to bring his, and undemurringly accepted a little bit of everyone else’s. They then played hide and seek, dumb crambo, and other vigorous games, because as Arnold said, “A moment’s pause, and we are undone,” until for weariness the pause came upon them, and then Cecil promptly seized the moment and produced the play, and they had to listen. Arnold succumbed, vanquished, and stretched himself on the heather.

“You have won; I give in. Only leave out the parts that are least suitable for Sally to hear.”

So, like other days in the country, the day wore through, and they caught the 5.10 back to Waterloo.

At supper that evening Eddy told the vicar about Mrs. Le Moine’s proposal.

“So she’s coming to-morrow night, with Datcherd.”

Hillier looked up sharply.

“Datcherd! That man!” He caught himself up from a scornful epithet.

“Why not?” said the vicar tolerantly. “He’s very keen on social work, you know.”

Peters and Hillier both looked cross.

“I know personally,” said Hillier, “of cases where his influence has been ruinous.”

Peters said, “What does he want down here?”

Eddy said, “He won’t have much influence during one evening. I suppose he wants to watch how they take the music, and, generally, to see what our clubs are like. Besides, he and Mrs. Le Moine are great friends, and she naturally likes to have someone to come with.”

“Datcherd’s a tremendously interesting person,” said Traherne. “I’ve met him once or twice; I should like to see more of him.”

“A very able man,” said the vicar, and said grace.

CHAPTER V.
DATCHERD AND THE VICAR.

DATCHERD looked ill; that was the predominant impression Eddy got of him. An untidy, pale, sad-eyed person of thirty-five, with a bad temper and an extraordinarily ardent fire of energy, at once determined and rather hopeless. The evils of the world loomed, it seemed, even larger in his eyes than their possible remedies; but both loomed large. He was a pessimist and a reformer, an untiring fighter against overwhelming odds. He was allied both by birth and marriage (the marriage had been a by-gone mistake of the emotions, for which he was dearly paying) with a class which, without intermission, and by the mere fact of its existence, incurred his vindictive wrath. (See Further, month by month.) He had tried and failed to get into Parliament; he had now given up hopes of that field of energy, and was devoting himself to philanthropic social schemes and literary work. He was not an attractive person, exactly; he lacked the light touch, and the ordinary human amenities; but there was a drawing-power in the impetuous ardour of his convictions and purposes, in his acute and brilliant intelligence, in his immense, quixotic generosity, and, to some natures, in his unhappiness and his ill-health. And his smile, which came seldom, would have softened any heart.

Perhaps he did not smile at Hillier on Monday evening; anyhow Hillier’s heart remained hard towards him, and his towards Hillier. He was one of the generation who left the universities fifteen years ago; they are often pronounced and thoughtful agnostics, who have thoroughly gone into the subject of Christianity as taught by the Churches, and decided against it. They have not the modern way of rejection, which is to let it alone as an irrelevant thing, a thing known (and perhaps cared) too little about to pronounce upon; or the modern way of acceptance, which is to embark upon it as an inspiring and desirable adventure. They of that old generation think that religion should be squared with science, and, if it can’t be, rejected finally. Anyhow Datcherd thought so; he had rejected it finally as a Cambridge undergraduate, and had not changed his mind since. He believed freedom of thought to be of immense importance, and, a dogmatic person himself, was anxious to free the world from the fetters of dogma. Hillier (also a dogmatic person; there are so many) preached a sermon the Sunday after he had met Datcherd about those who would find themselves fools at the Judgment Day. Further, Hillier agreed with James Peters that the relations of Datcherd and Mrs. Le Moine were unfitting, considering that everyone knew that Datcherd didn’t get on with his wife nor Mrs. Le Moine live with her husband. People in either of those unfortunate positions cannot be too careful of appearances.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Le Moine’s fiddling held the club spell-bound. She played English folk-melodies and Hungarian dances, and the boys’ feet shuffled in tune. Londoners are musical people, on the whole; no one can say that, though they like bad music, they don’t like good music, too; they are catholic in taste. Eddy Oliver, who liked anything he heard, from a barrel-organ to a Beethoven Symphony, was a typical specimen. His foot, too, tapped in tune; his blood danced in him to the lilt of laughter and passion and gay living that the quick bow tore from the strings. He knew enough, technically, about music, to know that this was wonderful playing; and he remembered what he had heard before, that this brilliant, perverse, childlike-looking person, with her great brooding eyes and half-sullen brows, and the fiddle tucked away under her round chin, was a genius. He believed he had heard that she had some Hungarian blood in her, besides the Irish strain. Certainly the passion and the fire in her, that was setting everyone’s blood stirring so, could hardly be merely English.

At the end of a wild dance tune, and during riotous applause, Eddy turned to Datcherd, who stood close to him, and laughed.

“My word!” was all he said.

Datcherd smiled a little at him, and Eddy liked him more than ever.

“They like it, don’t they?” said Datcherd. “Look how they like it. They like this; and then we go and give them husks; vulgarities from the comic operas.”

“Oh, but they like those, too,” said Eddy.

Datcherd said impatiently, “They’d stop liking them if they could always get anything decent.”

“But surely,” said Eddy, “the more things they like the better.”

Datcherd, looking round at him to see if he meant it, said, “Good heavens!” and was frowningly silent.

An intolerant man, and ill-tempered at that, Eddy decided, but liked him very much all the same.

Mrs. Le Moine was playing again, quite differently; all the passion and the wildness were gone now; she was playing a sixteenth century tune, curiously naïf and tender and engaging, and objective, like a child’s singing, or Jane Dawn’s drawings. The detachment of it, the utter self-obliteration, pleased Eddy even more than the passion of the dance; here was genius at its highest. It seemed to him very wonderful that she should be giving of her best so lavishly to a roomful of ignorant Borough lads; very wonderful, and at the same time very characteristic of her wayward, quixotic, self-pleasing generosity, that he fancied was neither based on any principle, nor restrained by any considerations of prudence. She would always, he imagined, give just what she felt inclined, and when she felt inclined, whatever the gifts she dealt in. Anyhow she had become immensely popular in the club-room. The admiration roused by her music was increased by the queer charm she carried with her. She stood about among the boys for a little, talking. She told them about the tunes, what they were and whence they came; she whistled a bar here and there, and they took it up from her; she had asked which they had liked, and why.

“In my Settlement up by the Lea,” said Datcherd to Eddy, “she’s got some of the tunes out into the streets already. You hear them being whistled as the men go to work.”

Eddy looked at Hillier, to see if he hadn’t been softened by this wonderful evening. Hillier, of course, had liked the music; anyone would. But his moral sense had a fine power of holding itself severely aloof from conversion by any but moral suasions. He was genially chatting with the boys, as usual—Hillier was delightful with boys and girls, and immensely popular—but Eddy suspected him unchanged in his attitude towards the visitors. Eddy, for music like that, would have loved a Mrs. Pendennis (had she been capable of producing it) let alone anyone so likeable as Eileen Le Moine. Hillier, less susceptible to influence, still sat in judgment.

Flushed and bright-eyed, Eddy made his way to Mrs. Le Moine.

“I say, thanks most awfully,” he said. “I knew it was going to be wonderful, but I didn’t know how wonderful. I shall come to all your concerts now.”

Hillier overheard that, and his brows rose a little. He didn’t see how Eddy was going to make the time to attend all Mrs. Le Moine’s concerts; it would mean missing club nights, and whole afternoons. In his opinion, Eddy, for a parish worker, went too much out of the parish already.

Mrs. Le Moine said, with her usual lack of circumlocution, “I’ll come again next Monday. Shall I? I would like to get the music thoroughly into their heads; they’re keen enough to make it worth while.”

Eddy said promptly, “Oh, will you really? How splendid.”

Hillier, coming up to them, said courteously, “This has been extremely good of you, Mrs. Le Moine. We have all had a great treat. But you really mustn’t waste more of your valuable time on our uncultivated ears. We’re not worth it, I’m afraid.”

Eileen looked at him with a glint of amusement in the gloomy blue shadowiness of her eyes.

“I won’t come,” she said, “unless you want me to, of course.”

Hillier protested. “It’s delightful for us, naturally—far more than we deserve. It was your time I was thinking of.”

“That will be all right. I’ll come, then, for half an hour, next Monday.” She turned to Eddy. “Will you come to lunch with us—Miss Hogan and me, you know—next Sunday? Arnold Denison’s coming, and Karl Lovinski, the violinist, and two or three other people. 3, Campden Hill Road, at 1.30.”

“Thanks; I should like to.”

Datcherd came up from the back of the room where he had been talking to Traherne, who had come in lately. They said goodbye, and the club took to billiards.

“Is Mr. Datcherd coming, too, next Monday?” Hillier inquired gloomily of Eddy.

“Oh, I expect so. I suppose it’s less of a bore for Mrs. Le Moine not to have to come all that way alone. Besides, he’s awfully interested in it all.”

“A first-class man,” said Traherne, who was an enthusiast, and had found in Datcherd another Socialist, though not a Church one.

Eddy and the curates walked back together later in the evening. Eddy felt vaguely jarred by Hillier to-night; probably because Hillier was, in his mind, opposing something, and that was the one thing that annoyed Eddy. Hillier was, he felt, opposing these delightful people who had provided the club with such a glorious evening, and were going to do so again next Monday; these brilliant people, who spilt their genius so lavishly before the poor and ignorant; these charming, friendly people, who had asked Eddy to lunch next Sunday.

What Hillier said was, “Shall you get Wilkes to take your class again on Sunday afternoon, Oliver?”

“Yes, I suppose so. He doesn’t mind, does he? I believe he really takes it a lot better than I do.”

Hillier believed so, too, and made no comment. Traherne laughed. “Wilkes! Oh, he means well, no doubt. But I wouldn’t turn up on Sunday afternoon if I was going to be taught by Wilkes. What an ass you are, Oliver, going to lunch parties on Sundays.”

With Traherne, work came first, and everything else, especially anything social, an immense number of lengths behind. With Eddy a number of things ran neck to neck all the time. He wouldn’t, Traherne thought, a trifle contemptuously, ever accomplish much in any sphere of life at that rate.

He said to the vicar that night, “Oliver’s being caught in the toils of Society, I fear. For such a keen person, he’s oddly slack about sticking to his job when anything else turns up.”

But Hillier said, at a separate time, “Oliver’s being dragged into a frightfully unwholesome set, vicar. I hate those people; that man Datcherd is an aggressive unbeliever, you know; he does more harm, I believe, than anyone quite realises. And one hears things said, you know, about him and Mrs. Le Moine—oh, no harm, I daresay, but one has to think of the effect on the weaker brethren. And Oliver’s bringing them into the parish, and I wouldn’t care to answer for the effects.... It made me a little sick, I don’t mind saying to you, to see Datcherd talking to the lads to-night; a word dropped here, a sneer there, and the seed is sown from which untold evil may spring. Of course, Mrs. Le Moine is a wonderful player, but that makes her influence all the more dangerous, to my mind. The lads were fascinated this evening; one saw them hanging on her words.”

“I don’t suppose,” said the vicar, “that she, or Datcherd either, would say anything to hurt them.”

Hillier caught him up sharply.

“You approve, then? You won’t discourage Oliver’s intimacy with them, or his bringing them into the parish?”

“Most certainly I shall, if it gets beyond a certain point. There’s a mean in all things.... But it’s their effect on Oliver rather than on the parish that I should be afraid of. He’s got to realise that a man can’t profitably have too many irons in the fire at once. If he’s going perpetually to run about London seeing friends, he’ll do no good as a worker. Also, it’s not good for his soul to be continually with people who are unsympathetic with the Church. He’s not strong enough or grown-up enough to stand it.”

But Eddy had a delightful lunch on Sunday, and Wilkes took his class.