Part 5 (1/2)

I felt I had never encountered a more detestable way of evading a licking. I shoved him against the wall and left him there, forgiving me, and went back into the house.

”You better not speak to your cousins, George,” said my aunt, ”till you're in a better state of mind.”

I became an outcast forthwith. At supper that night a gloomy silence was broken by my cousin saying,

”'E 'it me for telling you, and I turned the other cheek, muvver.”

”'E's got the evil one be'ind 'im now, a ridin' on 'is back,” said my aunt, to the grave discomfort of the eldest girl, who sat beside me.

After supper my uncle, in a few ill-chosen words, prayed me to repent before I slept.

”Suppose you was took in your sleep, George,” he said; ”where'd you be then? You jest think of that me boy.” By this time I was thoroughly miserable and frightened, and this suggestion unnerved me dreadfully but I kept up an impenitent front. ”To wake in 'ell,” said Uncle Nicodemus, in gentle tones. ”You don't want to wake in 'ell, George, burnin' and screamin' for ever, do you? You wouldn't like that?”

He tried very hard to get me to ”jest 'ave a look at the bake'ouse fire”

before I retired. ”It might move you,” he said.

I was awake longest that night. My cousins slept, the sleep of faith on either side of me. I decided I would whisper my prayers, and stopped midway because I was ashamed, and perhaps also because I had an idea one didn't square G.o.d like that.

”No,” I said, with a sudden confidence, ”d.a.m.n me if you're coward enough.... But you're not. No! You couldn't be!”

I woke my cousins up with emphatic digs, and told them as much, triumphantly, and went very peacefully to sleep with my act of faith accomplished.

I slept not only through that night, but for all my nights since then.

So far as any fear of Divine injustice goes, I sleep soundly, and shall, I know, to the end of things. That declaration was an epoch in my spiritual life.

II

But I didn't expect to have the whole meeting on Sunday turned on to me.

It was. It all comes back to me, that convergence of attention, even the faint leathery smell of its atmosphere returns, and the coa.r.s.e feel of my aunt's black dress beside me in contact with my hand. I see again the old Welsh milkman ”wrestling” with me, they all wrestled with me, by prayer or exhortation. And I was holding out stoutly, though convinced now by the contagion of their universal conviction that by doing so I was certainly and hopelessly d.a.m.ned. I felt that they were right, that G.o.d was probably like them, and that on the whole it didn't matter.

And to simplify the business thoroughly I had declared I didn't believe anything at all. They confuted me by texts from Scripture which I now perceive was an illegitimate method of reply. When I got home, still impenitent and eternally lost and secretly very lonely and miserable and alarmed, Uncle Nicodemus docked my Sunday pudding.

One person only spoke to me like a human being on that day of wrath, and that was the younger Frapp. He came up to me in the afternoon while I was confined upstairs with a Bible and my own thoughts.

”'Ello,” he said, and fretted about.

”D'you mean to say there isn't--no one,” he said, funking the word.

”No one?”

”No one watching yer--always.”

”Why should there be?” I asked.

”You can't 'elp thoughts,” said my cousin, ”anyhow. You mean--” He stopped hovering. ”I s'pose I oughtn't to be talking to you.”

He hesitated and flitted away with a guilty back glance over his shoulder....

The following week made life quite intolerable for me; these people forced me at last into an Atheism that terrified me. When I learnt that next Sunday the wrestling was to be resumed, my courage failed me altogether.