Buch lesen: «The Angel»

PREFACE

I do not think a book of this sort requires a very lengthy foreword, but one or two things I feel it necessary to say concerning it. In the first place, I have to thank Mr. Hamilton Edwards for many valuable suggestions concerning it, suggestions which, undoubtedly, helped me very much in the writing.

The story is an attempt to impress upon readers the fact that we are, without doubt, surrounded on our way through life by unseen presences, unseen intelligences, which guard or attack that real portion of us which is ourselves – the soul.

Superficially, but only superficially, this is a very material age. We are surrounded by so many material wonders that the unthinking person is inclined to believe, at any rate to state, that the material is everything. Yet there is nothing more unsatisfying than the purely material aspect of life, after all.

How can any one be surprised if the ordinary man is perplexed when he is called upon to decide questions of economy and morality, when the material point of view is all that he can see? For all questions of morality must necessarily depend – as long ago Plato pointed out – upon a belief in something which we cannot touch or see. Otherwise, morality has no significance and no meaning, except that of expediency.

If, when our body dies, our personality stops, then I can see no logical reason whatever for trying to be good. To get all this life in itself has to offer by means of any sort – provided they do not entail personal discomfort – is the logical philosophy of the materialist. Yet the materialist, at the same time, is very frequently an honest and good-living man. This is not because he is a materialist, for there is no reason for being honest, unless one is found out in one's dishonesty, but because there is implanted within that soul which he denies a spark of the Divine Fire.

Of course, amongst thinking and really educated men and women, materialism is as out-moded as the bow and arrow in modern warfare, yet the majority of people do not think very much, nor are they well educated.

This story is an endeavour to point out that people who assert nowadays that Matthew Arnold's dogma, "miracles do not happen," are hopelessly out of the run of modern thought.

Men like Sir Oliver Lodge are laboriously discovering some of the laws of the Universe which give us portents and signs. No one who knows to-day dares to sneer at parthenogenesis, or to repeat the slander of Celsus about the Mother of God. It is only men who do not know, and men who have grown rusty in reposing on their past reputations, who cannot see that Materialism as a philosophy is dead.

Day by day fresh evidence of the power of the Spirit over Matter bursts upon us. A plea for "philosophic doubt," for Professor Huxley's infallibility, is no longer necessary. The very distinction between Matter and Spirit grows more and more difficult as Science develops analytical power. The minds of men are being again prepared to receive that supreme revelation which told of the wedding of the earth and Heaven, the taking of the Manhood into God.

The processes by which the hero of this story – Joseph – became what he was have been carefully thought out, in order to provide an opportunity for those who read the story, to get near to the explanation of some of those psychical truths which need not necessarily be supernatural, but only supernormal. It seems to me the wildest of folly to say that because a thing is not capable of being explained by the laws of Nature as we know them, that it is above the laws of Nature. Every week is a witness to the fact that the laws of Nature are only imperfectly known by us, and therefore, to say that anything is outside Nature is, to put it plainly, simply nonsense.

For Nature does not exist, nor is there any possibility that it has ever existed, without a Controlling Power which created it.

At the very end of his famous and wonderful life, Lord Kelvin himself stated it as his unalterable opinion, after all the investigations he had made into the primary causes of phenomena as we know them, that the only possible explanation was that a Controlling Intelligence animated and produced them all.

I was reading a few days ago one of a series of weekly articles which an eminent modern scientist, Sir Ray Lankester, is writing in a famous newspaper. He was speaking of Darwin and "The Origin of Species," and he seemed to imagine that the great discovery of Darwin finally disposed of the truth of the first chapter of Genesis, as we have it in the pages of the Holy Bible. Surely nothing was ever more limited than such a view as this! God manifests Himself in His own way, at His own time, and in a fashion which is modified and adjusted to the intelligences and opportunities of those who live at the time of this or that Revelation in the progressive scheme of Revelation itself. To say that because modern science has proved that God did not, as a human potter or modeller of clay would do, make the whole of living things in full being, and at a definite time, that therefore the Bible is untrue, is simply the blindness of those who do not realize that Truth must often wear a robe to hide its glory from the eyes of those who are unable to appreciate its full splendour and magnificence.

If we are descended or evolved from primeval protoplasm, as I for one am quite prepared to believe, one simply goes back to the simple question – "Who made the protoplasm?"

It is no use. We cannot get away, try as we will, from the fact of God, and we cannot also get away from the fact of the Incarnation, when God revealed Himself more fully than ever before, and when God Himself became Man.

My idea in this story is to show that, by means of processes of which we have at present but little idea, a man may be drained and emptied, under special circumstances, of himself and the influences of his past life, and be made as a vessel for the special in-pouring of the Holy Spirit.

The death of Lluellyn Lys for Joseph, the mysterious interplay of a soul going, and meeting on its way, another soul about to go into the Unknown, aided by the special dispensation of God, might, I think, well produce some such supernormal being as the Joseph of this tale. Perhaps an angel, one of those mysterious beings – whom Christians believe to be the forces and the messengers of God – may have animated Joseph in his mission, without entirely destroying or obscuring his personality. Be this as it may, I offer this story as an effort to attract my readers' minds towards a consideration of the Unseen which is all around us, and which – more probably than not – is the real world, after all, and one in which we, as we are now, walk as phantoms and simulacrums of what we shall one day be in the glorious hereafter.

GUY THORNE.

CHAPTER I
AND GOD SPAKE —

Two men stood outside a bird-fancier's shop in the East End of London. The shop was not far from the docks, and had a great traffic with sailors. Tiny emerald and gamboge love-birds squawked in their cages, there was a glass box of lizards with eyes like live rubies set in the shop window, while a hideous little ape – chained to a hook – clattered in an impish frenzy.

Outside the shop door hung a cage containing a huge parrot, and it was this at which the two men were looking.

Hampson, a little wrinkled man in very shabby clothes, but of a brave and confident aspect, pointed to the parrot.

"I wonder if it talks?" he said.

Immediately upon his words the grey bird, its watchful eye gleaming with mischievous fire, began a stream of disconnected words and sentences, very voluble, very rapid, and very clear.

Hampson shuddered.

"Do you know, Joseph," he said, "I am always afraid when I hear that sound – that noise of a bird talking human words. To me, there is no more dreadful sound in the world."

Hampson's companion, a taller and much more considerable man, looked at the little fellow with surprise.

"Afraid?" he said. "Why should you be afraid? The sound is grotesque, and nothing more. Has hunger completed her work, and privation conquered at last? Are your nerves going?"

"Never better, my dear Joseph," the little man replied cheerfully. "It will take a long time to knock me out. It's you I'm afraid about. But to return to the parrot. Has it ever struck you that in all nature the voice of a bird that has been taught to speak is unique? There is no other sound even remotely resembling it. We hear a voice using human words, and, in this instance, and this alone, we hear the spoken words of a thing that has no soul!"

The other man started.

"How fantastic you are," he said impatiently. "The thing has a brain, hasn't it? You have in a larger and far more developed measure exactly what that bird has; so have I. But that is all. Soul! There is no such thing!"

The bird in the cage had caught the word, which excited its mechanical and oral memory to the repetition of one of its stock phrases.

"Soul! Soul! 'Pon my soul, that's too good. Ha, ha, ha!" said the parrot.

"Polly differs, apparently," Hampson said drily, as they moved on down the Commercial Road; "but what a hopeless materialist you are, Joseph. You go back to the dogmatism of the pre-Socratic philosophers or voice the drab materialism of the modern animal man who thinks with his skin. Yet you've read your Plato! – you observe that I carefully refrain from bringing in Christian philosophy even! You believe in nothing that you have not touched or handled. Because you can't find the soul at a post-mortem examination of the body you at once go and say there is no such thing. Scholars and men of science like you seem astonishingly blind to the value of evidence when it comes to religious matters. You, my dear Joseph, have never seen India. Yet you know a place called India exists. How do you know it? Simply through the evidence of other people who have been there. You have just as much right to tell the captain of a P. & O. steamer that what he thought was Calcutta was merely a delusion as to tell me or any other professing Christian that there is no such thing as the Kingdom of Heaven! Well, I must be off; I have a bit of work to do that may bring in a few shillings. There may be dinner to-night, Joseph!"

With a quick smile, Hampson turned down a side street and was gone. The man called Joseph continued his way, walking slowly and listlessly, his head sunk upon his breast in thought.

The teeming life of the great artery of East London went on all round him; but he saw nothing of it. A Chinaman, with a yellow, wrinkled face, jostled up against him, and he did not know it; a bloated girl, in a stained plush blouse, wine-coloured like her face, and with an immense necklace of false pearls, coughed out some witticism as he passed; a hooligan surveyed him at leisure, decided that there could be nothing worth stealing upon him, and strolled away whistling a popular tune – one and all were no more to the wanderer than a dream, some dream dim-panelled upon the painted scenes of sleep.

Shabbily dressed as he was, there was yet something about the man which attracted attention. He drew the eye. He was quite unlike any one else. One could not say of him, "Here is an Englishman," or "There is a German." He would have looked like a foreigner – something alien from the crowd – in any country to which he went.

Joseph's age was probably about thirty-three, but time and sorrow had etched and graven upon his face a record of harsh experience which made him seem much older.

The cheeks were gashed and furrowed with thought. Looking carefully at him, one would have discovered that he was a distinctly handsome man. The mouth was strong and manly in its curves, though there was something gentle and compassionate in it also. The nose was Greek, straight and clearly cut; the hair thick, and of a dark reddish-brown. But the wonder of the man's face lay in his eyes. These were large and lustrous; full of changing light in their dark and almost Eastern depth. They were those rare eyes which seem to be lit up from within as if illuminated by the lamp of the soul.

Soul! Yes, it was that of which those eyes told in an extraordinary and almost overwhelming measure.

The soul is not a sort of fixed essence, as people are apt to forget. It is a fluid thing, and expands or contracts according to the life of its owner. We do not, for example, see any soul in the eyes of a gross, over-fed, and sensual man. Yet this very man in the Commercial Road, who denied the very existence of the soul with convinced and impatient mockery, was himself, in appearance, at any rate, one of those rare beings of whom we say, "That man is all soul."

The man's full name was Joseph Bethune. To the tiny circle of his friends and acquaintances he was simply Joseph. If they had ever known his surname, they had forgotten it. He was one of those men who are always called by their Christian names because, whatever their circumstances may be, they are real, accepted, and unquestioned facts in the lives of their friends.

Joseph Bethune's history, to which he never referred, had been, up to the present, drab, monotonous, and dismal. When an event had occurred it was another failure, and he could point to no red-letter days in his career. Joseph had never known either father or mother. Both had died during his infancy, leaving him in the care of guardians.

His father had been a pastor of the Methodist sect – a man of singular holiness of life and deep spiritual fervour. Possessed of some private means, he had been able to leave a sufficient sum for his son's education upon a generous and liberal scale.

The boy's guardians were distant relatives in each case. One was a clergyman, the other a prosperous London solicitor. The strange, studious child, quiet, dreamy, and devoted to his books, found himself out of touch with both.

The clergyman was a Low Churchman, but of the worst type. There was nothing of the tolerant outlook and strong evangelical piety of a Robertson in Mr. St. John. He was as narrow as his creed, condemning all that he had not experienced, or could not understand, hating the devil more than he loved God. If he had been sent to the rack he could not have truthfully confessed to an original thought.

Joseph Bethune was sent to an English public school of good, though not of first, rank. Here he was unpopular, and made no friends. His nature was too strong, and, even as a boy, his personality too striking, for him to experience any actual physical discomfort from his unpopularity. He was never bullied, and no one interfered with him; but he remained utterly lonely.

In contradiction of the usual custom in the English public school of his day, Hamilton possessed splendid laboratories, and great attention was paid to modern science and mathematics.

Of these advantages Joseph Bethune availed himself to the full. His temper of mind was accurate and inquiring, and though his manner was dreamy and abstracted, it was the romance of science over which he pored; the cold, glacial heights of the higher mathematics among which his imagination roamed.

He gained a scholarship at Cambridge, lived a retired and monotonous life of work, shunning the natural and innocent amusements of youth while at the university, and was bracketed Third Wrangler as a result of his degree examination.

By this time his moderate patrimony was nearly exhausted, though, of course, his success in the schools had placed many lucrative posts within his reach. He had actually been offered a fellowship and a tutorial post at his own college, when he wrecked his university career by an extraordinary and quite unexpected proceeding.

At a great meeting in the Corn Exchange, convened by the Bishop of London for a discussion of certain vexed questions of the Christian faith, Joseph Bethune rose, and, in a speech of some fifteen minutes' duration, delivered an impassioned condemnation of Christianity, concluding with a fierce avowal of his disbelief in God, and in anything but the purely material.

We are tolerant enough nowadays. The red horror of the Inquisition has departed, and men are no longer "clothed in a shirt of living fire" for a chance word. A "Protestant" ruler no longer hangs the priests of the Italian Mission for saying the Mass. Any one is at liberty to believe what he pleases. But men about to occupy official positions must not bawl unadulterated atheism from the housetops.

The offence was too flagrant, the offer of the fellowship was withdrawn, and Joseph, so far as Cambridge was concerned, was ruined.

It is perfectly true that there were many people who believed exactly as he did. They sympathized with him, but in secret, and no word or hint of their sympathy ever reached him. He had done the unpardonable thing: he had dared to speak out his thoughts, and men of the world do not care to champion openly one who is publicly disgraced.

The news got about in many quarters. The man was not an "agnostic" – polite and windy word! But he was an atheist! Terrible word, recalling shuddering memories of Tom Paine and Bradlaugh even in the minds of men and women who themselves believed in nothing at all. Some men would have only been locally harmed by such an episode as this. But Bethune's case was peculiar, and it ruined him.

He had nothing to sell in any market but the academic. He was a born lecturer; demonstrator of scientific truth. But he had just overstepped the limit allowed in even these liberal times. Moreover, he was too young. Such a speech as he had made, had it been delivered at sixty, with a long and distinguished record behind the speaker, would have been regarded as a valuable and interesting contribution to modern thought. It might even have been taken as a sort of fifth Gospel – the Gospel according to St. Thomas the Doubter!

Joseph, however, was done for.

He disappeared from the university. His name was no more heard, and after the traditional nine days was utterly forgotten.

It is true that three or four men who saw further than their fellows realized that a force, a potential but very real force, had departed. Some one who, as they believed, was to have done extraordinary things was now crushed and robbed of his power. They perceived that virtue had departed from the intellectual garment that shelters the men who can!

Joseph tried, and tried in vain, to make such a living as his vast mental acquirements and achievements entitled him to. Obscure tutorships, ill-paid lecturing to coteries of cock-cure Socialists, who believed in nothing but their chances of getting a slice of the wealth of men who had worked, and not merely talked – these were his dismal and pitiful endeavours.

He came at last to the very lowest pitch of all. He, the high wrangler, the eminent young mathematician, earned a squalid and horribly precarious living by teaching elementary science to the sons of struggling East End shopkeepers who were ambitious of County Council scholarships for their progeny.

His health was impaired, but his spirit was as a reed bruised and shaken by the winds of adversity, yet not broken. He had known sorrow, was acquainted with grief.

He had plumbed the depths of poverty, and his body was a wreck. Want of food – the mean and squalid resting-places he had perforce to seek – the degradation and vileness of his surroundings, had sapped the life blood. He did not know the defiant trumpet words of a poet of our time, but had he done so, they would have well expressed his attitude —

 
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud;
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody but unbowed.
 

He turned off into a by-street, and walked on till he came to the docks. His progress was quite aimless. Once he stopped and wearily asked himself whither he was going; but the next moment he was lost in thought, and moved on again.

Once he stumbled over a steel hawser. He nearly lost his balance, and had his arm not shot out with an involuntary movement to clutch the bollard on his left, he would have fallen over the granite-bound edge of the wharf into the foul, black, slimy depths below.

Hardly giving a thought to the danger he had just escaped, he moved on and on.

Through open sheds – where freight was heaped up waiting the onslaught of stevedores and labourers – across jutting portions of cobbled space and shunting grounds, he came to a remote corner, far removed from the rattle of cranes and the shouts of the workmen.

Something drew him out of himself, and fixed his attention. It was a shadow. It caught his gaze, and his eyes became fixed on it. He knew that a shadow was only the phenomenon produced when streams of radiant energy are intercepted by an object which is unable to transmit them. His scientific training had taught him that even sound shadows may be produced, though to recognize the existence of them the ear must pass from the unshadowed to the shadowed part. Perhaps it was a symbol! He himself was in darkness and shadow. Would his ear ever catch those mysterious harmonies that come to those who suffer? – Hampson heard them…

A woman crept stealthily behind the wall, and the shadow disappeared.

The woman bore a burden; what it was he could not see. But she held it close to her breast with the tense clasp of some fierce emotion.

She had not noticed the dreamer. She stopped by some steps leading down to the waters of a small section of the dock.

Joseph sat down on a capstan and looked steadily at her.

The woman unclasped the burden she bore, drew aside a part of the covering, and kissed – a baby face. He knew at once what she was doing. She was bidding it good-bye. She was going to drown it.

"And they say that there is a God," Joseph thought. "A conscious Intelligence that directs human affairs. Even Lord Kelvin himself thought so! Yet God does nothing to save this woman from her sin – or rather crime!"

He gazed fiercely. Those eyes, through which his rebellious unconquerable soul shone out, caught the startled stare of the woman as she saw the strange man who watched her.

The man said nothing. The woman thought: "If he prevents me now, I shall – I must do it later. He can't change me. If he gives me in charge he can't prove it. I've done nothing yet."

Yet she looked again, and this time did not turn away.

A strange magnetism which seemed to run through her, projected from those eyes, was making even her finger-tips tingle as with a new sensation, and one she had never known before. Her purpose melted and dissolved in that flow of more than electric influence; it changed as fire changes a material thing. It melted like snow before the radiant energy of the sun.

Slowly she unwrapped the bundle. The paper, the cloth wrappings she threw into the black and oily water, but the child she clasped to her breast.

"My baby," she murmured, very quietly, but in tones that pierced the tense atmosphere and reached Joseph's ear. "I bore you in shame, and was about to kill you to save you from shame like mine; but I will bear my cross and love you for the sake of Jesus. Amen."

She stole away, trembling. There was a great fear and wonder at her heart, and the watcher saw no more.

Joseph smiled bitterly. His brain seemed some detached thing, a theatre upon the stage of which wild thoughts were the conflicting actors and his sub-conscious intelligence the spectator.

The simile of the shadow returned to him, and was it not all a shadow – this dark, unhappy life of his? The words "radiant energy," the words "God" "conscious force" danced before him. The whole sentient world was reeling – the blood that fed the grey matter of his brain was poor and thin – this was the reason.

Yet, was it the reason, after all? What had happened to him in the last few minutes? He felt as he had never in his whole life felt before. There was a sense of extraordinary impotence. Something had come into him; something had gone out of him.

No! – something had gone through him – that was the way to describe it to himself…

Oh for food, rich nourishing food, quiet and fresh air – then all this sickness would go…

Joseph left the docks, and was soon back in the teeming Commercial Road. He walked, lost in thought, unconscious of all his surroundings.

"Nah, then, Monkey Brand, 'oo y'r shovin'? I can see y'r gettin' a thick ear, young feller-my-lad. Owns the bloomin' pyvement – "

A string of obscene oaths and the above words brought Joseph the dreamer down to earth again – the world of the Commercial Road.

He had stumbled against a typical bullet-headed, wicked-eyed East End rough.

The man stepped close up to Joseph, lifting an impudent and dirty face, holding the right arm ready to strike the short, jabbing blow so dear to the hooligan.

Then a strange thing happened.

Joseph, roused so suddenly and rudely from his bitter reverie, became aware of what was toward. He was about to apologize to the man when his words were checked in his mouth by the fellow's filthy profanity. Joseph suddenly, instead of speaking, turned his full face to him. The great, blazing eyes, their brilliancy accentuated a hundred times by hunger and scorn, seemed to cleave their way through the thick skull of the aggressor, to pierce the muddy and besotted brain within, to strike fear into the small leathern heart.

The man lifted his arm and covered his face, just like a street child who expects a blow; and then with a curious sound, half whimper, half snarl, turned and made off in a moment.

It was an extraordinary instance of magnetic power inherent in this starving scholar who roamed the streets in a sad dream.

On his own part, Joseph's action had been quite unconscious. He had no thought of the force stored up in him as in an electric accumulator. Some experiments in animal magnetism he had certainly made, when he had taken a passing interest in the subject at Cambridge. He had cured his "gyp" of a bad attack of neuralgia once, or at least the man said he had, but that was as far as it had gone.

He turned his steps towards the stifling attic he called "home." After all, he was better there than in the streets. Besides, he was using up what little strength remained to him in this aimless wandering.

He had eaten nothing that day, but at nine in the evening he had a lesson to give. This would mean a shilling, and there were two more owing from his pupil, so that even if Hampson, who lived in the next garret, failed to get any money, both might eat ere they slept.

As he turned into the court and began to mount the stairs, Joseph thought with an involuntary sigh of "hall" at Cambridge, the groaning tables, the generous fare, the comely and gracious life of it all.

And he had thrown it all away – for what? Just for the privilege of speaking out his thoughts, thoughts which nobody particularly wanted to hear.

With a sigh of exhaustion he sat down on the miserable little bed under the rafters, and stared out of the dirty window over the roofs of Whitechapel.

Had he been right, after all? Was it worth while to do as he had done, to give up all for the truth that was in him. The old spirit of revolt awoke. Yes, he had been right a thousand times! No man must act or live a lie.

But supposing it was all true? Supposing there was a God after all. Supposing that the Christ upon whom that woman had called so glibly really was the Saviour of mankind? Then – The thought fell upon his consciousness like a blow from a whip.

He leapt to his feet in something like fear.

"It's this physical exhaustion," he said to himself aloud, trying to find an anodyne to thought in the sound of his own voice. "My brain is starved for want of blood. No one can live as I have been living and retain a sane judgment. It was because the hermits of old starved themselves in the desert that they saw visions. Yet it is odd that I, of all men, should weaken thus. I must go out into the streets again, come what may. The mind feeds upon itself and conjures up wild and foolish thoughts in a horrible little box like this."

With a heavy sigh he went slowly out of the room and down the steep stairs. Never in all his life had he felt so lost and hopeless; so alone and deserted.

Another man in his position would have called out upon God, either with mad and puny revilings in that He had forsaken him, or with a last piteous cry for help.

Joseph did not believe in God.

All his life he had lived without God. He had ignored the love of the Father and the necessity of faith in His Son Jesus Christ. The temple of his body was all empty of the Paraclete. Now he felt sure that there was no God; never had been any God; never would be any God.

He was at the darkest hour of all, and yet, with a strange nervous force, he clenched one lean hand until the shrunken muscle sprang up in coils upon the back of it, resolving that come what might he would not give in. There was no God, only a blind giant, Circumstance – well, he would fight that!

His mental attitude was a curious one, curiously illogical. Keen and well-balanced as the scientific side of him was, the man – like all those who openly profess disbelief – was unable to see what might almost be called the grim humor of his attitude.

"I do not believe in God!" the atheist cries, and then immediately afterwards shakes his fist at the Almighty and bids Him to do His worst!

Man challenging God! There is no more grotesque and terrible thing in human life than this.

But, as the world knows now, God had a special purpose in his dealings with this man.

All unconscious of what was to befall him, of his high destiny to come, Joseph walked aimlessly in Whitechapel, cursing in his heart the God in whom he did not believe, and yet who had already chosen him to be the centre and head of mighty issues… A channel as we may think now…

We may well believe that each single step that Joseph took was known and regulated by unseen hands, voices which were unheard by ear or brain, but which the unconscious and sleeping soul nevertheless obeyed.