Anthony John/Chapter 15
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—fore-ordained 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 half-witted son Matthew lived there by himself. No one else ever entered it. Matthew cooked his own meals and kept it 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 half-closed but so that any one 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.
"What made the streets come?" the child asked.
Riches had been discovered under the earth, so Anthony explained to him. Before this great discovery the people of the valley had lived in little cottages—just peasants, tilling their small farms, tending their flocks. A few hundred pounds would have bought them all up. Now it was calculated that the winding Wyndbeck flowed through the richest valley in all England.
"What are riches?" asked the child. "What do they do?"
Riches, his father explained to him, were what made people well off and happy.
"I see," said John. But he evidently did not, as his next question proved conclusively.
"Then are all the people happy who live here now?" he asked. They had passed about a score of them during the short time they had walked in silence. "Why don't they look it?"
It had to be further explained to John that the riches of the valley did not belong to the people who lived and died in the valley, who dug the coal and iron or otherwise handled it. To be quite frank, these sad-eyed men and women who now dwelt beside the foul black Wyndbeck were perhaps worse off than their forbears who had dwelt here when the Wyndbeck flowed through sunlit fields and shady woods, undreaming of the hidden wealth that lay beneath their careless feet. But to a few who lived in fine houses, more or less far away, in distant cities, in pleasant country places. It was these few who had been made well off and happy by the riches of the valley. The workers of the valley did not even know the names of these scattered masters of theirs.
He had not meant to put it this way. But little John had continually chipped in with those direct questions that a child will persist in asking. And, after all, it was the truth.
Besides, as he went on to explain still further to little John, they were not all unhappy, these dirty, grimy, dull-eyed men and women in their ugly clothes living in ugly houses in long ugly streets under a sky that rained soot. Some of them earned high wages—had, considering their needs, money to burn, as the saying was.
"I see," said John again. It was an irritating habit of his, to preface awkward questions with, I see. "Then does having money make everybody happy?"
It was on the tip of Anthony's tongue. He was just about to snap it out. Little John mustn't worry his little head about things little Jacks can't be expected to understand. Little boys must wait till they are grown-up, when the answer to all these seemingly difficult questions will be plain to them. But as he opened his lips to speak there sprang from the muddy pavement in front of him a little impish lad dressed in an old pair of his father's trousers, cut down to fit him, so that the baggy part instead of being about the knee was round his ankles—a little puzzled lad who in his day had likewise plagued poor grown-up folk with questions it might have been the better for them had they tried to answer.
"No, John," he answered. "It doesn't make them happy. I wonder myself sometimes what's the good of it. How can they be happy even if they do earn big money, a few of them. The hideousness, the vileness that is all around them. What else can it breed but a sordid joyless race. They spend their money on things stupid and gross. What else can you expect of them. You bring a child up in the gutter and he learns to play with mud, and likes it."
They were walking where the streets crept up the hillside. Over a waste space where dust and ashes lay they could see far east and west. The man halted and flung out his arms.
"The Valley of the Wyndbeck. So they call it on the map. It ought to be the gutter of the Wyndbeck. One long, foul, reeking gutter where men and women walk in darkness and the children play with dirt."
He had forgotten John. The child slipped a hand into his.
"Won't the fields ever come back?" he asked.
Anthony shook his head. "They'll never come back," he said. "Nothing to do for it, John, but to make the best of things as they are. It will always be a gutter with mud underneath and smoke overhead, and poison in its air. We must make it as comfortable a gutter as the laws of supply and demand will permit. At least we can give them rainproof roofs and sound floors and scientific drainage, and baths where they can wash the everlasting dirt out of their pores before it becomes a part of their skin."
From where they were they could see the new model dwellings towering high above the maze of roofs around them.
"We'll build them a theatre, John. They shall have poetry and music. We'll plan them recreation grounds where the children can run and play. We'll have a picture gallery and a big bright hall where they can dance."
He broke off suddenly. "Oh, Lord, as if it hadn't all been tried," he groaned. "Two thousand years ago, they thought it might save Rome. Bread and circuses, that is not going to save the world."
They had reached, by chance, Platt's Lane. The door of the workshop stood open as ever. They could hear the sound of Matthew's hammer and see the red glow of the furnace fire. John slipped away from his father's side, and going to the open door called to Matthew.
Matthew turned. There was a strange look in his eyes. The child laughed, and Matthew coming nearer saw who it was.
It was late, so after exchanging just a greeting with Matthew they walked on. Suddenly John caught his father by the sleeve.
"Do you think he is still alive," he said, "Christ Jesus?"
Anthony was in a hurry. He had ordered the carriage to wait for them in Bruton Square.
"What makes you ask?" he said.
"Matthew thinks he is," explained the child, "and that He still goes about. That is why he always leaves the door open, so that if Christ passes by He may see him and call to him."
Anthony was still worried about the time. He had to see a man on business before going home. He promised little John they would discuss the question some other time. But, as it happened, the opportunity never came.