Robert Elsmere

'_This do in remembrance of Me._'

The rest was soon over. The audience woke from the trance in which it had been held with a sudden burst of talk and movement. In the midst of it, and as the majority of the audience were filing out into the adjoining rooms, the gasfitter's tall companion Andrews mounted the platform, while the gasfitter himself, with an impatient shrug, pushed his way into the outgoing crowd. Andrews went slowly and deliberately to work, dealing out his long cantankerous sentences with a nasal _sang froid_ which seemed to change in a moment the whole aspect and temperature of things. He remarked that Mr. Elsmere had talked of what great scholars had done to clear up this matter of Christ and Christianity. Well, he was free to maintain that old Tom Paine was as good a scholar as any of 'em, and most of them in that hall knew what _he_ thought about it. Tom Paine hadn't anything to say against Jesus Christ, and he hadn't. He was a workman and a fine sort of man, and if he'd been alive now he'd have been a Socialist, 'as most of us are,' and he'd have made it hot for the rich loafers, and the sweaters, and the middlemen, 'as we'd like to make it hot for 'em.' But as for those people who got up the Church--Mythologists Tom Paine called 'em--and the miracles, and made an uncommonly good thing out of it, pecuniarily speaking, he didn't see what they'd got to do with keeping up, or mending, or preserving _their_ precious bit of work. The world had found 'em out, and serve 'em right.

And he wound up with a fierce denunciation of priests, not without a harsh savour and eloquence, which was much clapped by the small knot of workmen amongst whom he had been standing.

Then there followed a Socialist--an eager, ugly, black-bearded little fellow, who preached the absolute necessity of doing without 'any cultus whatsoever,' threw scorn on both the Christians and the Positivists for refusing so to deny themselves, and appealed earnestly to his group of hearers 'to help in bringing religion back from heaven to earth, where it belongs.' Mr. Elsmere's new church, if he ever got it, would only be a fresh instrument in the hands of the _bourgeoisie_. And when the people had got their rights and brought down the capitalists, they were not going to be such fools as put their necks under the heel of what were called 'the educated cla.s.ses.' The people who wrote the newspapers Mr. Elsmere objected to, knew quite enough for the working-man--and people should not be too smooth-spoken; what the working cla.s.s wanted beyond everything just now was _grit_.

A few other short speeches followed, mostly of the common Secularist type, in defence of the newspapers attacked. But the defence, on the whole, was shuffling and curiously half-hearted. Robert, sitting by with his head on his hand, felt that there, at any rate, his onslaught had told.

He said a few words in reply, in a low husky voice, without a trace of his former pa.s.sion, and the meeting broke up. The room had quickly filled when it was known that he was up again; and as he descended the steps of the platform, after shaking hands with the chairman, the hundreds present broke into a sudden burst of cheering. Lady Charlotte pressed forward to him through the crowd, offering to take him home.

'Come with us, Mr. Elsmere: you look like a ghost.' But he shook his head, smiling. 'No, thank you, Lady Charlotte--I must have some air,'

and he took her out on his arm, while Flaxman followed with Rose.

It once occurred to Flaxman to look round for the priest he had seen come in. But there were no signs of him. 'I had an idea he would have spoken,' he thought. 'Just as well, perhaps. We should have had a row.'

Lady Charlotte threw herself back in the carriage as they drove off, with a long breath, and the inward reflection, 'So his wife wouldn't come and hear him! Must be a woman with a character that--a Strafford in petticoats!'

Robert turned up the street to the City, the tall slight figure seeming to shrink together as he walked. After his pa.s.sionate effort, indescribable depression had overtaken him.

'Words--words!' he said to himself, striking out his hands in a kind of feverish protest, as he strode along, against his own powerlessness, against that weight of the present and the actual which seems to the enthusiast alternately light as air, or heavy as the ma.s.s of aetna on the breast of Enceladus.

Suddenly, at the corner of a street, a man's figure in a long black robe stopped him and laid a hand on his arm.

'Newcome!' cried Robert, standing still.

'I was there,' said the other, bending forward and looking close into his eyes. 'I heard almost all. I went to confront, to denounce you!'

By the light of a lamp not far off Robert caught the attenuated whiteness and sharpness of the well-known face, to which weeks of fasting and mystical excitement had given a kind of unearthly remoteness. He gathered himself together with an inward groan. He felt as though there were no force in him at that moment wherewith to meet reproaches, to beat down fanaticism. The pressure on nerve and strength seemed unbearable.

Newcome, watching him with eagle eye, saw the sudden shrinking and hesitation. He had often in old days felt the same sense of power over the man who yet, in what seemed his weakness, had always escaped him in the end.

'I went to denounce,' he continued, in a strange tense voice, 'and the Lord refused it to me. He kept me watching for you here. These words are not mine I speak. I waited patiently in that room till the Lord should deliver His enemy into my hand. My wrath was hot against the deserter that could not even desert in silence--hot against his dupes. Then suddenly words came to me--they have come to me before, they burn up the very heart and marrow in me--"_Who is he that saith, and it cometh to pa.s.s, and the Lord commandeth it not?_" There they were in my ears, written on the walls--the air----'

The hand dropped from Robert's arm. A dull look of defeat, of regret, darkened the gleaming eyes. They were standing in a quiet deserted street, but through a side opening the lights, the noise, the turbulence of the open-air market came drifting to them through the rainy atmosphere which blurred and magnified everything.

'Ay, after days and nights in His most blessed sanctuary,' Newcome resumed slowly, 'I came by His commission, as I thought, to fight His battle with a traitor! And at the last moment His strength, which was in me, went from me. I sat there dumb; His hand was heavy upon me. His will be done!'

The voice sank; the priest drew his thin shaking hand across his eyes, as though the awe of a mysterious struggle were still upon him. Then he turned again to Elsmere, his face softening, radiating.

'Elsmere, take the sign, the

Never had Robert seen any mortal face so persuasively beautiful; never surely did saint or ascetic plead with a more penetrating gentleness.

After the storm of those opening words the change was magical. The tears stood in Elsmere's eyes. But his quick insight, in spite of himself, divined the subtle natural facts behind the outburst, the strained physical state, the irritable brain--all the consequences of a long defiance of physical and mental law. The priest repelled him, the man drew him like a magnet.

'What can I say to you, Newcome?' he cried despairingly. 'Let me say nothing, dear old friend! I am tired out; so, I expect, are you. I know what this week has been to you. Walk with me a little. Leave these great things alone. We cannot agree. Be content--G.o.d knows! Tell me about the old place and the people. I long for news of them.'

A sort of shudder pa.s.sed through his companion. Newcome stood wrestling with himself. It was like the slow departure of a possessing force. Then he sombrely a.s.sented, and they turned towards the City. But his answers, as Robert questioned him, were sharp and mechanical, and presently it became evident that the demands of the ordinary talk to which Elsmere rigorously held him were more than he could bear.

As they reached St. Paul's, towering into the watery moonlight of the clouded sky, he stopped abruptly and said good-night.

'You came to me in the spirit of war,' said Robert, with some emotion, as he held his hand; 'give me instead the grasp of peace!'

The spell of his manner, his presence, prevailed at last. A melancholy quivering smile dawned on the priest's delicate lip.

'G.o.d bless you--G.o.d restore you!' he said sadly, and was gone.

CHAPTER XLI

A week later Elsmere was startled to find himself detained, after his story-telling, by a trio of workmen, asking on behalf of some thirty or forty members of the North R---- Club that he would give them a course of lectures on the New Testament. One of them was the gasfitter Charles Richards; another was the watchmaker Lestrange, who had originally challenged Robert to deliver himself; and the third was a tough old Scotchman of sixty with a philosophical turn, under whose spoutings of Hume and Locke, of Reid and Dugald Stewart, delivered in the shrillest of cracked voices, the Club had writhed many an impatient half-hour on debating nights. He had an unexpected artistic gift, a kind of 'sport'

as compared with the rest of his character, which made him a valued designer in the pottery works; but his real interests were speculative and argumentative, concerned with 'common nawtions and the praimary elements of reason,' and the appearance of Robert in the district seemed to offer him at last a foeman worthy of his steel. Elsmere shrewdly suspected that the last two looked forward to any teaching he might give mostly as a new and favourable exercising ground for their own wits; but he took the risk, gladly accepted the invitation, and fixed Sunday afternoons for a weekly New Testament lecture.

His first lecture, which he prepared with great care, was delivered to thirty-seven men a fortnight later. It was on the political and social state of Palestine and the East at the time of Christ's birth; and Robert, who was as fervent a believer in 'large maps' as Lord Salisbury, had prepared a goodly store of them for the occasion, together with a number of drawings and photographs which formed part of the collection he had been gradually making since his own visit to the Holy Land. There was nothing he laid more stress on than these helps to the eye and imagination in dealing with the Bible. He was accustomed to maintain in his arguments with Hugh Flaxman that the orthodox traditional teaching of Christianity would become impossible as soon as it should be the habit to make a free and modern use of history and geography and social material in connection with the Gospels. Nothing tends so much, he would say, to break down the irrational barrier which men have raised about this particular tract of historical s.p.a.ce, nothing helps so much to let in the light and air of scientific thought upon it, and therefore nothing prepares the way so effectively for a series of new conceptions.

By a kind of natural selection Richards became Elsmere's chief helper and adjutant in the Sunday lectures,--with regard to all such matters as beating up recruits, keeping guard over portfolios, handing round maps and photographs, etc.,--supplanting in this function the jealous and sensitive Mackay, who, after his original opposition, had now arrived at regarding Robert as his own particular property, and the lecturer's quick smile of thanks for services rendered as his own especial right.

The bright, quicksilvery, irascible little workman, however, was irresistible and had his way. He had taken a pa.s.sion for Robert as for a being of another order and another world. In the discussions which generally followed the lecture he showed a receptiveness, an intelligence, which were in reality a matter not of the mind but of the heart. He loved, therefore he understood. At the club he stood for Elsmere with a quivering spasmodic eloquence, as against Andrews and the Secularists. One thing only puzzled Robert. Among all the little fellow's sallies and indiscretions, which were not infrequent, no reference to his home life was ever included. Here he kept even Robert absolutely at arm's length. Robert knew that he was married and had children, nothing more.

The old Scotchman, Macdonald, came out after the first lecture somewhat crestfallen.

'Not the sort of stooff I'd expected!' he said, with a shade of perplexity on the rugged face. 'He doosn't talk eneuf in the _aa_bstract for me.'

But he went again, and the second lecture, on the origin of the Gospels, got hold of him, especially as it supplied him with a whole armoury of new arguments in support of Hume's doctrine of conscience, and in defiance of 'that blatin' creetur, Reid.' The thesis with which Robert, drawing on some of the stores supplied him by the squire's book, began his account--_i.e._ the gradual growth within the limits of history of man's capacity for telling the exact truth--fitted in, to the Scotchman's thinking, so providentially with his own favourite experimental doctrines as against the 'intueetion' folks, 'who will have it that a babby's got as moch mind as Mr. Gladstone, ef it only knew it!' that afterwards he never missed a lecture.

Lestrange was more difficult. He had the inherited temperament of the Genevese _frondeur_, which made Geneva the headquarters of Calvinism in the sixteenth century, and bids fair to make her the headquarters of continental radicalism in the nineteenth. Robert never felt his wits so much stretched and sharpened as when after the lecture Lestrange was putting questions and objections with an acrid subtlety and persistence worthy of a descendant of that burgher cla.s.s which first built up the Calvinistic system and then produced the destroyer of it in Rousseau.

Robert bore his heckling, however, with great patience and adroitness.

He had need of all he knew, as Murray Edwardes had warned him. But luckily he knew a great deal; his thought was clearing and settling month by month, and whatever he may have lost at any moment by the turn of an argument, he recovered immediately afterwards by the force of personality, and of a single-mindedness in which there was never a trace of personal grasping.

Week by week the lecture became more absorbing to him, the men more pliant, his hold on them firmer. His disinterestedness, his brightness and resource, perhaps, too, the signs about him of a light and frail physical organisation, the novelty of his position, the inventiveness of his method, gave him little by little an immense power in the place.

After the first two lectures Murray Edwardes became his constant and enthusiastic hearer on Sunday afternoons, and, catching some of Robert's ways and spirit, he gradually brought his own chapel and teaching more and more into line with the Elgood Street undertaking. So that the venture of the two men began to take ever larger proportions; and, kindled by the growing interest and feeling about him, dreams began to rise in Elsmere's mind which as yet he hardly dared to cherish; which came and went, however, weaving a substance for themselves out of each successive incident and effort.

Meanwhile he was at work on an average three evenings in the week besides the Sunday. In West End drawing-rooms his personal gift had begun to tell no less than in this crowded, squalid East; and as his aims became known, other men, finding the thoughts of their own hearts revealed in him, or touched with that social compunction which is one of the notes of our time, came down and became his helpers. Of all the social projects of which that Elgood Street room became the centre, Elsmere was, in some sense, the life and inspiration. But it was not these projects themselves which made this period of his life remarkable.

London at the present moment, if it be honeycombed with vice and misery, is also honeycombed with the labour of an ever-expanding charity. Week by week men and women of like gifts and energies with Elsmere spend themselves, as he did, in the constant effort to serve and to alleviate.

What _was_ noticeable, what _was_ remarkable in this work of his, was the spirit, the religious pa.s.sion which, radiating from him, began after a while, to kindle the whole body of men about him. It was from his Sunday lectures and his talks with the children, boys and girls, who came in after the lecture to spend a happy hour and a half with him on Sunday afternoons, that in later years hundreds of men and women will date the beginnings of a new absorbing life. There came a time, indeed, when, instead of meeting criticism by argument, Robert was able simply to point to accomplished facts. 'You ask me,' he would say in effect, 'to prove to you that men can love, can make a new and fruitful use, for daily life and conduct, of a merely human Christ. Go amongst our men, talk to our children, and satisfy yourself. A little while ago scores of these men either hated the very name of Christianity or were entirely indifferent to it. To scores of them now the name of the teacher of Nazareth, the victim of Jerusalem, is dear and sacred; his life, his death, his words, are becoming once more a constant source of moral effort and spiritual hope. See for yourself!'

However, we are antic.i.p.ating. Let us go back to May.

One beautiful morning Robert was sitting working in his study, his windows open to the breezy blue sky and the budding plane-trees outside, when the door was thrown open and 'Mr. Wendover' was announced.

The squire entered; but what a shrunken and aged squire! The gait was feeble, the bearing had lost all its old erectness, the bronzed strength of the face had given place to a waxen and ominous pallor. Robert, springing up with joy to meet the great gust of Murewell air which seemed to blow about him with the mention of the squire's name, was struck, arrested. He guided his guest to a chair with an almost filial carefulness.

'I don't believe, Squire,' he exclaimed, 'you ought to be doing this--wandering about London by yourself!'

But the squire, as silent and angular as ever when anything personal to himself was concerned, would take no notice of the implied anxiety and sympathy. He grasped his umbrella between his knees with a pair of brown twisted hands, and, sitting very upright, looked critically round the room. Robert, studying the dwindled figure, remembered with a pang the saying of another Oxford scholar, _a propos_ of the death of a young man of extraordinary promise, '_What learning has perished with him! How vain seems all toil to acquire!_'--and the words, as they pa.s.sed through his mind, seemed to him to ring another death-knell.