Robert Elsmere

Leyburn. I gave her free leave to invent any fairy tale she pleased, but it was to be _her_ invention, not mine.

Neither Robert nor Catherine were very well pleased. But there was something rea.s.suring as well as comic in the stoicism with which Flaxman took his position. And clearly the matter must be left to manage itself.

Next morning the weather had improved. Robert, his hand on Flaxman's arm, got down to the beach. Flaxman watched him critically, did not like some of his symptoms, but thought on the whole he must be recovering at the normal rate, considering how severe the attack had been.

'What do you think of him?' Catherine asked him next day, with all her soul in her eyes. They had left Robert established in a sunny nook, and were strolling on along the sands.

'I think you must get him home, call in a first-rate doctor, and keep him quiet,' said Flaxman. 'He will be all right presently.'

'How _can_ we keep him quiet?' said Catherine, with a momentary despair in her fine pale face. 'All day long and all night long he is thinking of his work. It is like something fiery burning the heart out of him.'

Flaxman felt the truth of the remark during the four days of calm autumn weather he spent with them before the return journey. Robert would talk to him for hours, now on the sands, with the gray infinity of sea before them, now pacing the bounds of their little room till fatigue made him drop heavily into his long chair; and the burden of it all was the religious future of the working-cla.s.s. He described the scene in the Club, and brought out the dreams swarming in his mind, presenting them for Flaxman's criticism, and dealing with them himself, with that startling mixture of acute common-sense and eloquent pa.s.sion which had always made him so effective as an initiator. Flaxman listened dubiously at first, as he generally listened to Elsmere, and then was carried away, not by the beliefs, but by the man. _He_ found his pleasure in dallying with the magnificent _possibility_ of the Church; doubt with him applied to all propositions, whether positive or negative; and he had the dislike of the aristocrat and the cosmopolitan for the provincialisms of religious dissent. Political dissent or social reform was another matter. Since the Revolution, every generous child of the century has been open to the fascination of political or social Utopias.

But religion! _What--what is truth?_ Why not let the old things alone?

However, it was through the social pa.s.sion, once so real in him, and still living, in spite of disillusion and self-mockery, that Robert caught him, had in fact been slowly gaining possession of him all these months.

'Well,' said Flaxman one day, 'suppose I grant you that Christianity of the old sort shows strong signs of exhaustion, even in England, and in spite of the Church expansion we hear so much about; and suppose I believe with you that things will go badly without religion--what then?

Who can have a religion for the asking?'

'But who can have it without? _Seek_, that you may find. Experiment; try new combinations. If a thing is going that humanity can't do without, and you and I believe it, what duty is more urgent for us than the effort to replace it?'

Flaxman shrugged his shoulders.

'What will you gain? A new sect?'

'Possibly. But what we _stand_ to gain is a new social bond,' was the flas.h.i.+ng answer--'a new compelling force in man and in society. Can you deny that the world wants it? What are you economists and sociologists of the new type always pining for? Why, for that diminution of the self in man which is to enable the individual to see the _world's_ ends clearly, and to care not only for his own but for his neighbour's interest, which is to make the rich devote themselves to the poor, and the poor bear with the rich. If man only _would_, he _could_, you say, solve all the problems which oppress him. It is man's will which is eternally defective, eternally inadequate. Well, the great religions of the world are the stimulants by which the power at the root of things has worked upon this sluggish instrument of human destiny. Without religion you cannot make the will equal to its tasks. Our present religion fails us; we must, we will have another!'

He rose and began to pace along the sands, now gently glowing in the warm September evening, Flaxman beside him.

_A new religion!_ Of all words, the most tremendous! Flaxman pitifully weighed against it the fraction of force fretting and surging in the thin elastic frame beside him. He knew well, however--few better--that the outburst was not a mere dream and emptiness. There was experience behind it--a burning, driving experience of actual fact.

Presently Robert said, with a change of tone, 'I must have that whole block of warehouses, Flaxman.'

'Must you?' said Flaxman, relieved by the drop from speculation to the practical. 'Why?'

'Look here!' And sitting down again on a sand-hill overgrown with wild gra.s.ses and mats of sea-thistle, the poor pale reformer began to draw out the details of his scheme on its material side. Three floors of rooms brightly furnished, well lit and warmed; a large hall for the Sunday lectures, concerts, entertainments, and story-telling; rooms for the boys' club; two rooms for women and girls, reached by a separate entrance; a library and reading-room open to both s.e.xes, well stored with books, and made beautiful by pictures; three or four smaller rooms to serve as committee rooms and for the purposes of the Naturalist Club which had been started in May on the Murewell plan; and, if possible, a gymnasium.

'_Money!_' he said, drawing up with a laugh in mid-career. 'There's the rub, of course. But I shall manage it.'

To judge from the past, Flaxman thought it extremely likely that he would. He studied the cabalistic lines Elsmere's stick had made in the sand for a minute or two; then he said dryly, 'I will take the first

Robert turned upon him and grasped his hand.

'I do not thank you,' he said quietly, after a moment's pause; 'the work itself will do that.'

Again they strolled on, talking, plunging into details, till Flaxman's pulse beat as fast as Robert's; so full of infectious hope and energy was the whole being of the man before him.

'I can take in the women and girls now,' Robert said once. 'Catherine has promised to superintend it all.'

Then suddenly something struck the mobile mind, and he stood an instant looking at his companion. It was the first time he had mentioned Catherine's name in connection with the North R---- work. Flaxman could not mistake the emotion, the unspoken thanks in those eyes. He turned away, nervously knocking off the ashes of his cigar. But the two men understood each other.

CHAPTER XLIX

Two days later they were in London again. Robert was a great deal better, and beginning to kick against invalid restraints. All men have their pet irrationalities. Elsmere's irrationality was an aversion to doctors, from the point of view of his own ailments. He had an unbounded admiration for them as a cla.s.s, and would have nothing to say to them as individuals that he could possibly help. Flaxman was sarcastic; Catherine looked imploring in vain. He vowed that he was treating himself with a skill any professional might envy, and went his way. And for a time the stimulus of London and of his work seemed to act favourably upon him. After his first welcome at the Club he came home with bright eye and vigorous step, declaring that he was another man.

Flaxman established himself in St. James's Place. Town was deserted; the partridges at Greenlaws clamoured to be shot; the head-keeper wrote letters which would have melted the heart of a stone. Flaxman replied recklessly that any decent fellow in the neighbourhood was welcome to shoot his birds--a reply which almost brought upon him the resignation of the outraged keeper by return of post. Lady Charlotte wrote and remonstrated with him for neglecting a landowner's duties, inquiring at the same time what he meant to do with regard to 'that young lady.' To which Flaxman replied calmly that he had just come back from the Lakes, where he had done, not indeed all that he meant to do, but still something. Miss Leyburn and he were not engaged, but he was on probation for six months, and found London the best place for getting through it.

'So far,' he said, 'I am getting on well, and developing an amount of energy especially in the matter of correspondence, which alone ought to commend the arrangement to the relations of an idle man.

But we must be left "to dream our dream unto ourselves alone." One word from anybody belonging to me to anybody belonging to her on the subject, and---- But threats are puerile. _For the present_, dear aunt, I am your devoted nephew,

HUGH FLAXMAN.'

'_On probation!_'

Flaxman chuckled as he sent off the letter.

He stayed because he was too restless to be anywhere else, and because he loved the Elsmeres for Rose's sake and his own. He thought moreover that a cool-headed friend with an eye for something else in the world than religious reform might be useful just then to Elsmere, and he was determined at the same time to see what the reformer meant to be at.

In the first place, Robert's attention was directed to getting possession of the whole block of buildings, in which the existing school and lecture-rooms took up only the lowest floor. This was a matter of some difficulty, for the floors above were employed in warehousing goods belonging to various minor import trades, and were held on tenures of different lengths. However, by dint of some money and much skill, the requisite clearances were effected during September and part of October.

By the end of that month all but the top floor, the tenant of which refused to be dislodged, fell into Elsmere's hands.

Meanwhile, at a meeting held every Sunday after lecture--a meeting composed mainly of artisans of the district, but including also Robert's helpers from the West, and a small sprinkling of persons interested in the man and his work from all parts--the details of 'The New Brotherhood of Christ' were being hammered out. Catherine was generally present, sitting a little apart, with a look which Flaxman, who now knew her well, was always trying to decipher afresh--a sort of sweet aloofness, as though the spirit behind it saw, down the vistas of the future, ends and solutions which gave it courage to endure the present.

Murray Edwardes too was always there. It often struck Flaxman afterwards that in Robert's att.i.tude towards Edwardes at this time, in his constant desire to bring him forward, to a.s.sociate him with himself as much as possible in the government and formation of the infant society, there was a half-conscious prescience of a truth that as yet none knew, not even the tender wife, the watchful friend.

The meetings were of extraordinary interest. The men, the great majority of whom had been disciplined and moulded for months by contact with Elsmere's teaching and Elsmere's thought, showed a responsiveness, a receptivity, even a power of initiation which often struck Flaxman with wonder. Were these the men he had seen in the Club-hall on the night of Robert's address--sour, stolid, brutalised, hostile to all things in heaven and earth?

'And we go on prating that the age of saints is over, the role of the individual lessening day by day! Fool! go and _be_ a saint, go and give yourself to ideas; go and _live_ the life hid with Christ in G.o.d, and see,'--so would run the quick comment of the observer.

But incessant as was the reciprocity, the interchange and play of feeling between Robert and the wide following growing up around him, it was plain to Flaxman that although he never moved a step without carrying his world with him, he was never at the mercy of his world.

Nothing was ever really left to chance. Through all these strange debates, which began rawly and clumsily enough, and grew every week more and more absorbing to all concerned, Flaxman was convinced that hardly any rule or formula of the new society was ultimately adopted which had not been for long in Robert's mind--thought out and brought into final shape, perhaps, on the Pet.i.tes Dalles sands. It was an un.o.btrusive art, his art of government, but a most effective one.

At any moment, as Flaxman often felt, at any rate in the early meetings, the discussions as to the religious practices which were to bind together the new a.s.sociation might have pa.s.sed the line, and become puerile or grotesque. At any moment the jarring characters and ambitions of the men Elsmere had to deal with might have dispersed that delicate atmosphere of moral sympathy and pa.s.sion in which the whole new birth seemed to have been conceived, and upon the maintenance of which its fruition and development depended. But as soon as Elsmere appeared, difficulties vanished, enthusiasm sprang up again. The rules of the new society came simply and naturally into being, steeped and haloed, as it were, from the beginning, in the pa.s.sion and genius of one great heart.

The fastidious critical instinct in Flaxman was silenced no less than the sour, half-educated a.n.a.lysis of such a man as Lestrange.

In the same way all personal jars seemed to melt away beside him. There were some painful things connected with the new departure. Wardlaw, for instance, a conscientious Comtist, refusing stoutly to admit anything more than 'an unknowable reality behind phenomena,' was distressed and affronted by the strongly religious bent Elsmere was giving to the work he had begun. Lestrange, who was a man of great though raw ability, who almost always spoke at the meetings, and whom Robert was bent on attaching to the society, had times when the things he was half inclined to wors.h.i.+p one day he was much more inclined to burn the next in the sight of all men, and when the smallest failure of temper on Robert's part might have entailed a disagreeable scene, and the possible formation of a hara.s.sing left wing.

But Robert's manner to Wardlaw was that of a grateful younger brother.

It was clear that the Comtist could not formally join the Brotherhood.

But all the share and influence that could be secured him in the practical working of it was secured him. And what was more, Robert succeeded in infusing his own delicacy, his own compunctions on the subject, into the men and youths who had profited in the past by Wardlaw's rough self-devotion. So that if, through much that went on now, he could only be a spectator, at least he was not allowed to feel himself an alien or forgotten.

As to Lestrange, against a man who was as ready to laugh as to preach, and into whose ardent soul nature had infused a saving sense of the whimsical in life and character, cynicism and vanity seemed to have no case. Robert's quick temper had been wonderfully disciplined by life since his Oxford days. He had now very little of that stiff-neckedness, so fatal to the average reformer, which makes a man insist on all or nothing from his followers. He took what each man had to give. Nay, he made it almost seem as though the grudging support of Lestrange, or the critical half-patronising approval of the young barrister from the West who came down to listen to him, and made a favour of teaching in his night-school, were as precious to him as was the whole-hearted, the self-abandoning veneration, which the majority of those about him had begun to show towards the man in whom, as Charles Richards said, they had 'seen G.o.d.'

At last by the middle of November the whole great building, with the exception of the top floor, was cleared and ready for use. Robert felt the same joy in it, in its clean paint, the half-filled shelves in the library, the pictures standing against the walls ready to be hung, the rolls of bright-coloured matting ready to be laid down, as he had felt in the Murewell Inst.i.tute. He and Flaxman, helped by a voluntary army of men, worked at it from morning till night. Only Catherine could ever persuade him to remember that he was not yet physically himself.

Then came the day when the building was formally opened, when the gilt letters over the door, 'The New Brotherhood of Christ,' shone out into the dingy street, and when the first enrolment of names in the book of the Brotherhood took place.