Delphi Complete Works of Jerome K. Jerome (Illustrated) (Series Four) (209 page)

They had been working long into the short June night. Landripp had drawn back the curtains and thrown open the window. There came from the east a faint pale dawn.

“There is a God I could believe in, worship and work for,” he said. “Not the builder of the heaven and of the earth, who made the stars also. Such there may be. The watch presupposes the watchmaker. I grant all that. But such is outside my conception — a force, a law, whatever it may be, existing before the beginning of Time, having its abiding place beyond Space. The thing is too unhuman ever to be understood by man. The God I could love and serve is something lesser and yet perhaps greater than such.”

He turned from the window and, leaning against the mantelpiece, continued:

“There is a story by Jean Paul Richter, I think. I read the book when I was a student in Germany. There was rather a fine idea in it; at least, so it seemed to me. The man in the story dies and beyond the grave he meets Christ. And the Christ is still sad and troubled. The man asks why, and Christ confesses to him. He has been looking for God and cannot find Him. And the man comforts Him. Together they will seek God, and will yet find Him. I think it was a dream, I am not sure. It is the dream of the world, I suppose. Personally I have given up the search, thinking it hopeless. But I am not sure. Christ’s God I could believe in, could accept. He is the God — the genius, if you prefer the word, of the human race. He is seeking — still seeking to make man in His own image. He has given man thought, consciousness, a soul. It has been slow work and He is still only at the beginning of His labours. He is the spirit of love. It is by love, working for its kind, working for its species, that man has evolved. It is only by love of his kind, of his species, that man can hope to raise himself still further. He is no God of lightnings and of thunders. The moral law within us, the voice of pity, of justice, is His only means of helping us. The Manichæans believed that Mankind was devil created. The evidence is certainly in their favour. The God that I am seeking is not the Omnipotent Master of the universe who could in the twinkling of an eye reshape man to His will. But a spirit, fighting against powerful foes, a God I can help or hinder — the spirit of love, knocking softly without ceasing at the door of a deaf world. The wonder of Christ is that He was the first man to perceive the nature of God. The gods that the world had worshipped up till then — that the world still worships — are the gods man has made in his own image: gods glorying in their strength and power, clamouring for worship, insisting on their ‘rights’; gods armed with punishments and rewards. Christ was the first man who conceived of God as the spirit of love, of service, a fellow labourer with man for the saving of the world.”

Anthony was still seated at the long table, facing the light.

“May it not be that you have found Him?” he said. “May He not be the God we are all seeking?”

Landripp gave a short laugh.

“He wouldn’t be popular,” he answered. “Not from Him would Job have obtained those fourteen thousand sheep and six thousand camels, and a thousand yoke of oxen and a thousand she asses as a reward for his patience. ‘The God from whom all blessings flow,’ that is the God man will praise and worship. The God I am seeking asks, not gives.”

The plans were finished; the builders got to work. On the very day of the laying of the foundation-stone the doctors pronounced Eleanor out of danger. Anthony forgot his talks with Landripp. God had heard his prayer and had accepted his offering. He would continue to love and serve Him, and surely goodness and mercy would follow him all the days of his life. One of the minor steel foundries happened to be on the market. He obtained control and re-established it on a new profit-sharing principle that he had carefully worked out. His system would win through by reason of its practicability; the long warfare between capital and labour end in peace. His business genius should not be only for himself. God also should be benefited. He got together a small company for the opening of co-operative shops, where the poor should be able to purchase at fair prices. There should be no end of his activities for God.

Eleanor came back to him more beautiful, it seemed to him, than she had ever been. They walked together, hand in hand, on the moor. She wanted to show him how strong she was. And coming to the old white thorn at the parting of the ways, she had raised her face to his; and he had drawn her to him and their lips had met, as if it had been for the first time.

She would be unable to bear more children, but that did not trouble them. Little Jim and Norah grew and waxed strong and healthy. Norah promised to be the living image of her mother. She had her mother’s faults and failings that Anthony so loved; her mother’s wilfulness with just that look of regal displeasure when anyone offended or opposed her. But also with suggestion of her mother’s graciousness and kindness.

Jim, likewise, took after the Coomber family. He had his uncle’s laughing eyes and all his obstinacy, so Eleanor declared. He was full of mischief, but had coaxing ways and was the idol of the servants’ hall.

John was more of the dreamer. Lady Coomber had taught him to read. She had grown strangely fond of the child. In summer time they would take their books into the garden. They had green hiding-places known only to themselves. And in winter they had their “cave” behind the great carved screen in the library.

As time went by Eleanor inclined more towards the two younger children. They were full of life and frolic, and were always wanting to do things. But Anthony’s heart yearned more towards John, his first-born.

CHAPTER XV

A GOD needing man’s help, unable without it to accomplish His purpose. A God calling to man as Christ beckoned to His disciples to follow Him, forsaking all, to suffer and to labour with Him. The thought had taken hold of him from the beginning: that summer’s night when he and Landripp had talked together, until the dawn had drawn a long thin line of light between the window curtains.

And then had come Eleanor’s sudden recovery, when he had almost given up hope, on the very day of the laying of the foundation-stone of the new model dwellings; and it had seemed to him that God had chosen this means of revealing Himself. The God he had been taught. The God of his fathers. Who answered prayers, accepted the burnt offering, rewarded the faithful and believing. What need to seek further? The world was right. Its wise men and its prophets had discovered the true God. A God who made covenants and bargains with man. Why not? Why should not God take advantage of Anthony’s love for Eleanor to make a fair businesslike contract with him?

Help me with these schemes of yours for the happiness of my people and I will give you back your wife.” But the reflection would come: Why should an omnipotent God trouble Himself to bargain with His creatures, take round-about ways for accomplishing what could be done at once by a movement of His will? A God who could have made all things perfect from the beginning, beyond the need of either growth or change. Who had chosen instead to write the history of the human race in blood and tears. Surely such a God would need man’s forgiveness, not his worship. The unknown God was yet to seek.

Landripp had been killed during the building of the model dwellings. It had been his own fault. For a stout, elderly gentleman to run up and down swaying ladders, to scramble round chimney stacks, and balance himself on bending planks a hundred feet above the ground was absurd. There were younger men who could have done all that, who warned Mr. Landripp of the risks that he was running. He had insisted on supervising everything himself. The work from its commencement had been to him a labour of love. He was fearful lest a brick should be ill-laid.

Anthony had a curious feeling of annoyance as he looked upon the bruised and broken heap of rubbish that had once been his friend. Landripp had been dead when they picked him up. They had put him on a stretcher and carried him round to his office. Anthony had heard the news almost immediately, and had reached Bruton Square as the men were coming out. The body lay on the big table in the room where he and Anthony had had their last long talk. The face had not suffered and the eyes were open. There may have been a lingering consciousness still behind them, for it seemed to Anthony that for an instant they smiled at him. And then suddenly the light went out of them.

It was tremendously vexing. He had been looking forward to renewal of their talks. There was so much he wanted to have said to him: questions he had meant to put to him; thoughts of his own that he had intended to discuss with him. Where was he? Where had he got to? It was ridiculous to argue that Landripp himself — the mind and thought of him — had been annihilated by coming into contact with a steel girder. Not even a cabbage dies. All that can happen to it is for it to be resolved into its primary elements, to be reborn again. This poor bruised body lying where the busy brain had been at work only an hour before, even that would live as long as the solar system continued. Its decay would only mean its transformation. Landripp himself — the spirit that came and went — could not even have been hurt. The machinery through which it worked was shattered. Anthony could not even feel sorry for him. He was angry with him that he had not been more careful of the machinery.

Landripp had been the first person with whom he had ever discussed religion. As a young man he had once or twice ventured the theme. But the result had only reminded him of his childish experiments in the same direction. At once most people shrivelled up as if he had suggested an indelicate topic, not to be countenanced in polite society. Especially were his inquiries discouraged by the clergy of all denominations. At the first mention of the subject they had always shown signs of distress — had always given to him the impression that they were seeking to guard a trade secret. Landripp had opened his mind to the conception of a religion he could understand and accept. God all-powerful and glorious; the great omnipotent Being who had made and ordered all things! What could man do for such? As well might the clay ask how it could show its gratitude to the potter. To praise God, to adore Him, to fall down before Him, to worship Him, what use could that be to Him? That the creatures He had made should be everlastingly grovelling before Him, proclaiming their own nothingness and His magnificence: it was to imagine God on a par with an Oriental despot. To obey Him? He had no need of our obedience. All things had been ordered. Our obedience or disobedience could make no difference to Him. It had been foreseen — foreordained from the beginning. Even forgetting this — persuading ourselves that some measure of freewill had been conferred upon us, it was only for our own benefit. Obey and be rewarded, disobey and be punished. We were but creatures of His breath, our souls the puppets of His will. What was left to man but to endure? Even his endurance bestowed upon him for that purpose. It was death, not life, that God — if such were God — had breathed into man’s nostrils.

But God the champion, the saviour of man. God the tireless lover of man, seeking to woo him into ever nobler ways. God the great dreamer, who out of death and chaos in the beginning had seen love; who beyond life’s hate and strife still saw the far-off hope, and called to men to follow Him. God the dear comrade, the everlasting friend, God the helper, the King. If one could find Him?

Landripp had left his daughter a few thousands, and she had decided to open a school again at Bruton Square, in the rooms that her father had used for his offices. Inheriting his conscientiousness, she had entered a training college to qualify herself as a teacher. Towards the end quite a friendship had existed between Mrs. Strong’nth’arm and the Landripps. With leisure and freedom from everlasting worry her native peasant wit had blossomed forth and grown; and Landripp had found her a wise talker. She had become too feeble for the long walk up to The Abbey, but was frightened of the carriage with its prancing horses. So often Eleanor would send little John down to spend the afternoon with her. Old Mrs. Newt was dead, and, save for a little maid, she was alone in the house. She made no claim with regard to the two younger children. It was only about John she was jealous.

One day she took the child to see the house in Platt’s Lane where his father had been born. Old Witlock had finished his tinkering. His halfwitted son Matthew lived there by himself. No one else ever entered it. Matthew cooked his own meals and kept the place scrupulously clean. Most of the twenty-four hours he spent in the workshop. His skill and honesty brought him more jobs than he needed, but he preferred to remain single-handed. The workshop door was never closed. All day, summer and winter, so long as Matthew was there working, it remained wide open. At night Matthew slept there in a corner sheltered from the wind, and then it would be kept halfclosed, but so that anyone who wished could enter. He would never answer questions as to this odd whim of his, and his neighbours had ceased thinking about it. They took a great fancy to one another, Matthew and the child. Old Mrs. Strong’nth’arm would sometimes leave him there, and his father would call for him on the way home. He had taken for his own the stool on which wandering Peter had many years ago carved the King of the Gnomes. And there he would sit by the hour swinging his little legs, discussing things in general with Matthew while he worked. At the child’s request Anthony had bought the house and workshop so that Matthew might never fear being turned out.

There grew up in the child a strange liking for this dismal quarter, or rather three-quarters of the town of Millsborough that lay around Platt’s Lane. Often, when his father called for him of an afternoon at Bruton Square he would plead for a walk in their direction before going home. He liked the moorland, too, with its bird life and its little creeping things in brake and cover that crouched so still while one passed by. There he would shout and scamper; and when he was tired his father would carry him on his shoulder. But in the long, sad streets he was less talkative.

One day, walking through them, Anthony told him how, long ago, before the mean streets came, there had been green fields and flowers, with a little river winding its way among the rocks and through deep woods.