In the Days of the Comet (15 page)

"Yes," he said, taking possession of the hearthrug, "the war had
to come sooner or later. If we smash their fleet for them now;
well, there's an end to the matter!"

He stood on his toes and then bumped down on his heels, and looked
blandly through his spectacles at a water-color by his sister—the
subject was a bunch of violets—above the sideboard which was his
pantry and tea-chest and cellar. "Yes," he said as he did so.

I coughed, and wondered how I might presently get away.

He invited me to smoke—that queer old practice!—and then when
I declined, began talking in a confidential tone of this "dreadful
business" of the strikes. "The war won't improve THAT outlook," he
said, and was very grave for a moment.

He spoke of the want of thought for their wives and children shown
by the colliers in striking merely for the sake of the union, and
this stirred me to controversy, and distracted me a little from my
resolution to escape.

"I don't quite agree with that," I said, clearing my throat. "If
the men didn't strike for the union now, if they let that be broken
up, where would they be when the pinch of reductions did come?"

To which he replied that they couldn't expect to get top-price
wages when the masters were selling bottom-price coal. I replied,
"That isn't it. The masters don't treat them fairly. They have to
protect themselves."

To which Mr. Gabbitas answered, "Well, I don't know. I've been in
the Four Towns some time, and I must say I don't think the balance
of injustice falls on the masters' side."

"It falls on the men," I agreed, wilfully misunderstanding him.

And so we worked our way toward an argument. "Confound this
argument!" I thought; but I had no skill in self-extraction, and
my irritation crept into my voice. Three little spots of color came
into the cheeks and nose of Mr. Gabbitas, but his voice showed
nothing of his ruffled temper.

"You see," I said, "I'm a socialist. I don't think this world was
made for a small minority to dance on the faces of every one else."

"My dear fellow," said the Rev. Gabbitas, "I'M a socialist too.
Who isn't. But that doesn't lead me to class hatred."

"You haven't felt the heel of this confounded system. I have."

"Ah!" said he; and catching him on that note came a rap at the front
door, and, as he hung suspended, the sound of my mother letting
some one in and a timid rap.

"NOW," thought I, and stood up, resolutely, but he would not let
me. "No, no, no!" said he. "It's only for the Dorcas money."

He put his hand against my chest with an effect of physical
compulsion, and cried, "Come in!"

"Our talk's just getting interesting," he protested; and there
entered Miss Ramell, an elderly little young lady who was mighty
in Church help in Clayton.

He greeted her—she took no notice of me—and went to his bureau,
and I remained standing by my chair but unable to get out of the
room. "I'm not interrupting?" asked Miss Ramell.

"Not in the least," he said; drew out the carriers and opened his
desk. I could not help seeing what he did.

I was so fretted by my impotence to leave him that at the moment
it did not connect at all with the research of the morning that
he was taking out money. I listened sullenly to his talk with Miss
Ramell, and saw only, as they say in Wales, with the front of my
eyes, the small flat drawer that had, it seemed, quite a number
of sovereigns scattered over its floor. "They're so unreasonable,"
complained Miss Ramell. Who could be otherwise in a social
organization that bordered on insanity?

I turned away from them, put my foot on the fender, stuck my elbow
on the plush-fringed mantelboard, and studied the photographs,
pipes, and ash-trays that adorned it. What was it I had to think
out before I went to the station?

Of course! My mind made a queer little reluctant leap—it felt like
being forced to leap over a bottomless chasm—and alighted upon the
sovereigns that were just disappearing again as Mr. Gabbitas shut
his drawer.

"I won't interrupt your talk further," said Miss Ramell, receding
doorward.

Mr. Gabbitas played round her politely, and opened the door for her
and conducted her into the passage, and for a moment or so I had
the fullest sense of proximity to those—it seemed to me
there must be ten or twelve—sovereigns. . . .

The front door closed and he returned. My chance of escape had
gone.

"I MUST be going," I said, with a curiously reinforced desire to
get away out of that room.

"My dear chap!" he insisted, "I can't think of it. Surely—there's
nothing to call you away." Then with an evident desire to shift the
venue of our talk, he asked, "You never told me what you thought
of Burble's little book."

I was now, beneath my dull display of submission, furiously angry
with him. It occurred to me to ask myself why I should defer
and qualify my opinions to him. Why should I pretend a feeling
of intellectual and social inferiority toward him. He asked what
I thought of Burble. I resolved to tell him—if necessary with
arrogance. Then perhaps he would release me. I did not sit down
again, but stood by the corner of the fireplace.

"That was the little book you lent me last summer?" I said.

"He reasons closely, eh?" he said, and indicated the armchair with
a flat hand, and beamed persuasively.

I remained standing. "I didn't think much of his reasoning powers,"
I said.

"He was one of the cleverest bishops London ever had."

"That may be. But he was dodging about in a jolly feeble case,"
said I.

"You mean?"

"That he's wrong. I don't think he proves his case. I don't think
Christianity is true. He knows himself for the pretender he is.
His reasoning's—Rot."

Mr. Gabbitas went, I think, a shade paler than his wont, and propitiation
vanished from his manner. His eyes and mouth were round, his face
seemed to get round, his eyebrows curved at my remarks.

"I'm sorry you think that," he said at last, with a catch in his
breath.

He did not repeat his suggestion that I should sit. He made a step
or two toward the window and turned. "I suppose you will admit—" he
began, with a faintly irritating note of intellectual condescension.
. . . .

I will not tell you of his arguments or mine. You will find if
you care to look for them, in out-of-the-way corners of our book
museums, the shriveled cheap publications—the publications of the
Rationalist Press Association, for example—on which my arguments
were based. Lying in that curious limbo with them, mixed up with
them and indistinguishable, are the endless "Replies" of orthodoxy,
like the mixed dead in some hard-fought trench. All those disputes
of our fathers, and they were sometimes furious disputes, have
gone now beyond the range of comprehension. You younger people, I
know, read them with impatient perplexity. You cannot understand
how sane creatures could imagine they had joined issue at all
in most of these controversies. All the old methods of systematic
thinking, the queer absurdities of the Aristotelian logic, have
followed magic numbers and mystical numbers, and the Rumpelstiltskin
magic of names now into the blackness of the unthinkable. You can
no more understand our theological passions than you can understand
the fancies that made all ancient peoples speak of their gods only
by circumlocutions, that made savages pine away and die because
they had been photographed, or an Elizabethan farmer turn back from
a day's expedition because he had met three crows. Even I, who have
been through it all, recall our controversies now with something
near incredulity.

Faith we can understand to-day, all men live by faith, but in the
old time every one confused quite hopelessly Faith and a forced,
incredible Belief in certain pseudo-concrete statements. I am
inclined to say that neither believers nor unbelievers had faith as
we understand it—they had insufficient intellectual power. They
could not trust unless they had something to see and touch and
say, like their barbarous ancestors who could not make a bargain
without exchange of tokens. If they no longer worshipped stocks and
stones, or eked out their needs with pilgrimages and images, they
still held fiercely to audible images, to printed words and formulae.

But why revive the echoes of the ancient logomachies?

Suffice it that we lost our tempers very readily in pursuit of
God and Truth, and said exquisitely foolish things on either side.
And on the whole—from the impartial perspective of my three and
seventy years—I adjudicate that if my dialectic was bad, that of
the Rev. Gabbitas was altogether worse.

Little pink spots came into his cheeks, a squealing note into his
voice. We interrupted each other more and more rudely. We invented
facts and appealed to authorities whose names I mispronounced;
and, finding Gabbitas shy of the higher criticism and the Germans,
I used the names of Karl Marx and Engels as Bible exegetes with no
little effect. A silly wrangle! a preposterous wrangle!—you must
imagine our talk becoming louder, with a developing quarrelsome
note—my mother no doubt hovering on the staircase and listening
in alarm as who should say, "My dear, don't offend it! Oh, don't
offend it! Mr. Gabbitas enjoys its friendship. Try to think whatever
Mr. Gabbitas says"—though we still kept in touch with a pretence
of mutual deference. The ethical superiority of Christianity to
all other religions came to the fore—I know not how. We dealt with
the matter in bold, imaginative generalizations, because of the
insufficiency of our historical knowledge. I was moved to denounce
Christianity as the ethic of slaves, and declare myself a disciple
of a German writer of no little vogue in those days, named Nietzsche.

For a disciple I must confess I was particularly ill acquainted
with the works of the master. Indeed, all I knew of him had come
to me through a two-column article in The Clarion for the previous
week. . . . But the Rev. Gabbitas did not read The Clarion.

I am, I know, putting a strain upon your credulity when I tell you
that I now have little doubt that the Rev. Gabbitas was absolutely
ignorant even of the name of Nietzsche, although that writer presented
a separate and distinct attitude of attack upon the faith that was
in the reverend gentleman's keeping.

"I'm a disciple of Nietzsche," said I, with an air of extensive
explanation.

He shied away so awkwardly at the name that I repeated it at once.

"But do you know what Nietzsche says?" I pressed him viciously.

"He has certainly been adequately answered," said he, still trying
to carry it off.

"Who by?" I rapped out hotly. "Tell me that!" and became mercilessly
expectant.

A happy accident relieved Mr. Gabbitas from the embarrassment
of that challenge, and carried me another step along my course of
personal disaster.

It came on the heels of my question in the form of a clatter of
horses without, and the gride and cessation of wheels. I glimpsed
a straw-hatted coachman and a pair of grays. It seemed an incredibly
magnificent carriage for Clayton.

"Eh!" said the Rev. Gabbitas, going to the window. "Why, it's old
Mrs. Verrall! It's old Mrs. Verrall. Really! What CAN she want with
me?"

He turned to me, and the flush of controversy had passed and his
face shone like the sun. It was not every day, I perceived, that
Mrs. Verrall came to see him.

"I get so many interruptions," he said, almost grinning. "You must
excuse me a minute! Then—then I'll tell you about that fellow.
But don't go. I pray you don't go. I can assure you. . . . MOST
interesting."

He went out of the room waving vague prohibitory gestures.

"I MUST go," I cried after him.

"No, no, no!" in the passage. "I've got your answer," I think it
was he added, and "quite mistaken;" and I saw him running down the
steps to talk to the old lady.

I swore. I made three steps to the window, and this brought me
within a yard of that accursed drawer.

I glanced at it, and then at that old woman who was so absolutely
powerful, and instantly her son and Nettie's face were flaming in
my brain. The Stuarts had, no doubt, already accepted accomplished
facts. And I too—

What was I doing here?

What was I doing here while judgment escaped me?

I woke up. I was injected with energy. I took one reassuring look
at the curate's obsequious back, at the old lady's projected nose
and quivering hand, and then with swift, clean movements I had the
little drawer open, four sovereigns in my pocket, and the drawer
shut again. Then again at the window—they were still talking.

That was all right. He might not look in that drawer for hours. I
glanced at his clock. Twenty minutes still before the Birmingham
train. Time to buy a pair of boots and get away. But how I was to
get to the station?

I went out boldly into the passage, and took my hat and stick. . . .
Walk past him?

Yes. That was all right! He could not argue with me while so
important a person engaged him. . . . I came boldly down the steps.

"I want a list made, Mr. Gabbitas, of all the really DESERVING
cases," old Mrs. Verrall was saying.

It is curious, but it did not occur to me that here was a mother
whose son I was going to kill. I did not see her in that aspect
at all. Instead, I was possessed by a realization of the blazing
imbecility of a social system that gave this palsied old woman
the power to give or withhold the urgent necessities of life from
hundreds of her fellow-creatures just according to her poor, foolish
old fancies of desert.

"We could make a PROVISIONAL list of that sort," he was saying,
and glanced round with a preoccupied expression at me.

"I MUST go," I said at his flash of inquiry, and added, "I'll be
back in twenty minutes," and went on my way. He turned again to
his patroness as though he forgot me on the instant. Perhaps after
all he was not sorry.