The Elderbrook Brothers (21 page)

‘Do you think we could make a better job of it, you or I?'

‘We could hardly make a worse, in some ways. I'm not criticizing the “wonders of creation”. We hear enough about them. But when it comes to other things than mechanical marvels, and flowers and all the rest of it … when it comes to things like … well, justice … I don't mean exactly justice. Wisdom if you like. And ordinary common sense.'

Blandly, but with an air of alert interest, Dan said: ‘You find God lacking in these qualities, eh?'

‘Oh, I suppose I'm talking rot,' said Felix. What he really supposed, however, was that Dan was laughing at him. ‘And you, as a clerk in holy orders, can't be expected to approve of such blasphemy. All the same …'

Dan waved his apologies aside. ‘Most interesting! Delightful! You're not saying quite what you mean: it's not justice, it's goodness and lovingkindness that you feel to be missing. But the beautiful thing is, you're next door to a
Marcionite, my dear boy. Fascinating!' He was rosy with delight, seeing his beautiful hobby-horse come prancing out of its stable. ‘Marcion, you will remember, was a thoroughgoing dualist. He——'

‘I've never even heard of him,' Felix said, with a grin.

‘He found it,' said Dan, ignoring the disclaimer, ‘impossible to accommodate the facts of pain and evil with the Christian doctrine of an all-wise, all-powerful, creative Love, He posited in effect, two Gods, one standing for power and what Marcion called “justice” and the other for what he called “goodness”. A false dichotomy, you may say; but never mind that for the moment. The Just God, or Demiurge, was the creator and controller of the universe, and the Good God was the source of our human values. It was a severely ascetic system, regarding the body and all its passions as essentially evil. Dualism in its most uncompromising form. But later it was modified beyond recognition by Apelles, Marcion's most celebrated follower. Apelles reduced the Demiurge to the status of an apostate angel, like Satan in
Paradise Lost
. And there we were, back where we started.'

He beamed triumphantly upon this happy conclusion.

‘And with the problem still unsolved,' said Felix. He realized that Dan was interested less in the problem, however, than in its history. ‘How's the book getting on?'

‘The book? My book? My dear Felix, you must know as well as I do by now that my precious book, though it goes on and on, will never be finished. It's buried under a mountain of notes. Faith calls it my knitting,' he said, with a pleased smile, ‘but it's more like Penelope's weaving.'

‘And you don't mind?'

‘Not in the least.'

Felix only half envied him his contentment. Wretched though he was, he would not have accepted that placid, blinkered easygoing life of small satisfactions in exchange for his own unappeasable wants and unanswerable questions.

WITH Stephen Hemner it was a very different story. Dan Williams, for all his benevolence, could be of no real help to a young man suddenly confronted with the ultimate mystery and passionately wanting to make up his mind about it. Dan was no seeker, except of other men's findings. He was ardent enough in pursuit of theories, but he was not, as Hemner was, a self-dedicated spirit living in the centre of a radiant certainty.

Among people of his own sort Father Hemner, as they called him, was tolerably well known in his day. But he did nothing to attract public notice: he did not even take pains to avoid it. The popular press, then as now, would have enjoyed braying forth, under exclamatory headlines, the story of how this Anglican priest, being born to riches, had come into possession of a half-ruined Priory at Minsterbourne and restored it, body and soul, to a semblance of its ancient uses; but so far he had been spared that attention. The local gossips mostly ignored him: which was easy to do, for he seldom appeared in the world, and your only chance of seeing or hearing him was to attend matins or evensong at the Priory itself, and risk being the sole visitor in a congregation of brown-habited brethren. He was a tall lean man, grey-haired at thirty-five, with the face of an austere angel. Felix, so soon as he set eyes on this man, was conscious of a premonition. He watched him not uncritically. He was ready enough to find fault. The merest hint of histrionics would have been enough to put him off. But behind all this precautionary suspicion was a need and a longing, a need to escape from this merely personal life, which carried him every minute nearer the dark void, and an unconscious longing that his heart's treasure, rejected of woman, should be accepted and used for a larger purpose. Hemner had scarcely begun speaking before Felix knew, or thought he knew, that here was a man who had adventured into the high places of the spirit and could perhaps speak of them. His manner of preaching was quiet and unemphatic; it missed, by a hair's breadth, being
flat and pedestrian; it was almost toneless, like the wind among trees, and tasteless, like water from a mountain spring. Its intellectual content, had Felix been able to analyse it on a printed page, would have seemed little if at all different from what he had heard a hundred times: the only novelty was the absence equally of weary unction and of sentimental appeal, and the presence of something luminous and quickening which made it impossible to doubt that the things Hemner touched on were for him as real and solid as his daily bread, that they were, indeed, the daily bread of his spirit.

‘Let us dwell for a moment on the mystery of God and the manner of his revealing. It is written that no man hath seen God at any time. Yet Our Lord said: He that hath seen me hath seen the Father. How shall we resolve the contradiction? There are many, even among the faithful, to whom the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity is a cause of stumbling; yet here, in a figure, as it were a figure drawn on a child's slate, we may catch a glimpse of a truth which in its fullness must always be, as God himself is, beyond the compass of our understanding. God being spirit, without body, parts, or passions, we cannot see him; God being a name for the Eternal and the Infinite, our minds, being of time, cannot contain the knowledge of him. We know in part and we prophesy in part, but then shall we know even as also we are known. That
then
, my brothers, points not to a moment in future time: it points to eternity. Nothing short of eternity shall suffice for that knowing. But how until then, you ask, how until then are we to support the affliction of our not seeing and our not knowing? And how may we come to that knowledge in the last day? I am to tell you again, as so often before, for it is the whole gospel, that Our Lord is the answer. As a poet is revealed in his poem, so that while knowing nothing perhaps of his person or his history we are in touch with the quality of his mind, so in Christ Jesus the Father is revealed. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And God for our salvation uttered the Word which was himself. He became
flesh and dwelt among us. Let us be very clear about this. We have no language in which to tell ourselves the whole truth of the divine incarnation. Because we are children we must needs speak in figures and metaphors. But let us not, by pleading metaphor, seek to escape the fact, the cardinal fact of our faith and of human history, that at a particular point in time and space, in a particular human person, God became flesh.'

The voice went on, quiet and persuasive. It was the old story, and one hardly needed to listen to it, yet listen one did, because, coming from this illumined spirit, it had the effect of a light shining in darkness. The familiar Christian mythos seemed suddenly new and strange and true: not true merely in the sense of being accepted, as Felix had always accepted it, but challengingly ‘real', with the reality of a vivid dream. For the first time Felix became aware of the sheer arbitrariness of the story; and in the same moment he realized that though he had never denied he had equally never believed it as he believed ordinary inescapable things. Today its very difficulty was an additional attraction. Nothing probable could convince him, nothing easy content him, nothing short of the preposterous seduce him from despair. In Judaea and not elsewhere, at a certain time and at no other time, and in the person of Jesus of Nazareth and in no one else, an absentee Creator had made a belated debut into human history. Looked at soberly, it seemed an audacious formula, impossible of belief. But Felix was in a mood to embrace the impossible, and something deeper than mood drove him, after much self-doubt and hesitation, to seek an interview with Father Hemner.

THE offices of Elderbrook & Talavera, general brokers, were situated in a small court or alley on the north side of Ludgate Hill, a few hundred yards east of the Circus and an almost equal distance west of St Paul's. It was in many respects an attractive situation, and one that gave great satisfaction to our Mr Elderbrook. Perhaps he was deceived in supposing his reasons for the choice to be purely business ones; but such reasons there were, especially for a firm so unorthodox, so little trammelled by tradition, and with its fingers in so many and diverse pies, as Elderbrook & Talavera. For beyond Ludgate Circus lay Fleet Street and the Strand, with London's river flowing south of them, and Piccadilly and Mayfair, region of rank and fashion, beckoning from the west. Beyond St Paul's was the City, hub of the commercial universe. Trumpet Court, approached through Trumpet Alley, stood therefore in an enchanted no man's land between two demi-paradises. Silk-hatted congregations of men did business in the one; morning coats and gardenias and gold-headed canes contributed to the glamour of the other; and the taximeter cabs, still comparatively new to London streets, would take you in a very few minutes to either place. These proximities pleased and stimulated Guy. They gave him a feeling of power and satisfied his craving to be in the middle of things. He was little concerned with London's long history, but the life of the streets stirred him, almost as though it were an extension of himself.

Trumpet Court belied its name. Within a stone's throw of one of the busiest thoroughfares in London, it yet had its own quietness. The roar of the street was here subdued; and an ancient plane tree growing in the middle of the paved court seemed not out of place, or only just enough out of place to give strangers a small shock of pleasure. Situated at this nerve-centre
like a spider in its web, Guy felt both more and less himself than he did in his dingy lodgings. He was here more that public person, that busy man of affairs, which he was engaged in building up, and less the raw, eager, more ingenuous self that belonged to the past. Which was the ‘real' Guy is a question that can hardly arise: it certainly did not arise in his own mind. If it were to arise the answer would perhaps be that he was neither; for what are the selves we appear in but the passing fancies, the temporal masks, of one behind the scenes? His interior life was not without its moments of unthinking relaxation, when ambition lay quiet in its bed. He liked his comfort, and if he allowed himself a comparatively small measure of it, that was in pursuit of his master-plan, not from a natural asceticism. He liked lying in bed in the morning, and was tempted, like other men, to lie too long; he relished his eggs and bacon and rejoiced in the good strong coffee Mrs Macfarlane his landlady made for him. True, he had carefully abstained from acquiring a taste for wine and spirits, and steered clear of those still more intoxicating delights to which a normal young man is predisposed by nature; but these things, too, figured in his map of the future, ready for when he should have time for them. Meanwhile they must not be allowed to deflect him from his primary purpose, which was, in a word, to spend little money and make much. The firm had already, in the few years of its existence, served that purpose astonishingly well. The partnership had suited Guy down to the ground so far; for Jimmie Talavera was clever enough to have good ideas, and weak enough, when it came to a tussle, to be overruled and perhaps ultimately set aside. His weakness just lately, it is true, had been taking an inconvenient form; but the days of his usefulness to Guy were not yet ended. Guy had learnt much from Jimmie, much more than Jimmie knew; but he had learnt still more from other men, business associates and rivals, and from the very air he breathed, here in London. He had a quick eye and a retentive memory for the salient facts, the significant detail. The noise and bustle of busy men trying to get the
better of each other, the conferring, the telephoning, the contrived casual encounters, the pursed lips, the nod and the wink, the inside information, the bluff and counter-bluff: he revelled in it, it was music and solace to him, it was heart's nourishment.

‘Miss Morgan!'

‘Yes, Mr Elderbrook.'

He dictated three letters in quick succession. Routine matters, of quite minor importance. Miss Morgan sat meekly, notebook in lap. Just sixteen, fresh from her shorthand and typewriting classes, she adored Mr Elderbrook, she adored being in business, she adored buying herself lunch every day (glass of milk with a dash, and two pieces of cake) in a crowded teashop, and going home in the train at nights. With her small round face and snub nose and quiet manner she was like a small purring cat. She made herself exceedingly useful, to both partners (they shared her, thus keeping down the overheads), and at home allowed it to be inferred that she was the repository of momentous business secrets. In fact she had but the dimmest idea of the manifold operations by which Elderbrook & Talavera waxed prosperous; nor perhaps would she have learnt much more from the occasional letters which were typed on Guy's own typewriter by Guy's own hand (it was her sole grievance), their carbon copies being kept in his private file under lock and key. But why lavish fifteen shillings a week on Miss Morgan when there was Nora Talavera at hand? Because, Guy had firmly explained in effect, you need Nora at home to keep house for you; because Nora doesn't know shorthand; because it's a bad scheme to make business a family affair. And because … It was for these other, unspoken, imponderable reasons that he had rejected the idea of making his home with the Talaveras, as they had suggested. Nora who had once been an attractive young girl was now a more than attractive young woman; moreover he was fond of her; and the arrangement proposed could have had, he suspected, only one end. It was an end he by no means excluded from the range of desirable possibility; but plenty of time for that, and meanwhile there
were more important things to be seen to. It was no part of his idea of himself that he should figure as the industrious apprentice who marries his master's daughter: more fun, by half, to take her to the theatre now and again, to treat her with brotherly—or a little more than brotherly—affection, and in due time, when his own magnificence should be established beyond question, to bestow himself upon her with princely generosity, if then it seemed good in his sight so to do. And if not, not.