Part 4 (2/2)
For Tonkin had told her of a noted revivalist who was coming through West Penwith, and already she felt the first delicious tremblings of that orgy of fear which should be hers.
Hers and another's, for she was set on the redemption of her beloved first-born, her beautiful Archelaus. Him she would lead to the heavenly courts and win forgiveness for the sin of his creation; he, the brand she had lit, should by her be plucked from the burning. Crossing over to her window, she had leaned her hot brow against the pane, closing her eyes in an ecstasy of prayer. It was very dim still in the house, but without the first faint pallor of the dawn was growing, and against it every solid object showed distinct and black. And, opening her eyes, Annie saw, silhouetted darkly with the precision of sculpture against the paling sky, the figures of Archelaus and a girl. He was half-lifting her over the stile whose stone steps crested the edge of the hill, and for a second the two figures stayed poised on the topmost step. The girl seemed protesting, even struggling, though with slaps that were more horseplay than earnest, and the next moment the boy's big arms had caught her and dragged her out of sight down on the far side of the stile.
The whole quick vignette was over in a flash, but Annie fell back from the window with all the egoism in her dulled nature torn awake. A more normal mother, of a more refined type, might have thought what she had seen meant nothing but a rude flirtation; Annie's blood told her differently. If she had merely heard of the matter her lack of visualising power would have saved her from sensation; it was the sight of those two striving figures which had made her feel. She moaned that her baby son had grown up and away from her, and she agonised over his soul, which she had planned to wrest for the Lord during the coming revival--small heed would she get Archelaus to pay to his soul now this new thing was opening before him. Her mind was conscious of a great emptiness where her scheme for the salvation of Archelaus had been waxing.
Annie had about as much true moral sense as a cat. Her quarrel with Archelaus was not that, in a wayside copse, with some girl, Jennifer or another, he was learning as fact what he had long known in theory; the chast.i.ty of a man, even of her beloved son, meant very little to her.
Terrible things, far worse than the casual mating of a man and a maid, happen in the country, and it needed something keenly sharpened to make Annie's dulled sensitiveness feel a shock. She raged that her son was taken from her, but she would have felt indignant anger if the girl had denied her lovely boy. And behind her sense of loss in Archelaus, behind her terror that he was being led in the way of destruction, there lurked, unknown to her, another anger, an anger against life. Some last remnant of femininity cried out because for her it was all over--gone the shudderings and the fierce delights.... Suddenly she felt intensely old, and she collapsed from her kneeling att.i.tude on to her heels and sat there slackly. Youth is so confident that it can never grow old, and then one day unthinking middle age awakens and finds that it has become so.
Then stirred in Annie the outraged feeling of a parent, which says that it seems somehow wrong, almost indecent, for offspring to feel pa.s.sion.
It had been all right for her and her generation, but incomprehensible in her own parents, and now it was equally so when she saw it beginning to work out in her children. She supposed vaguely, confronted by the fact that the race went on multiplying, that everyone might feel like that about other people, but differently about themselves.
Broad daylight had seen Archelaus return, but by then Annie had fallen into a heavy sleep and did not hear his entry, though there was nothing furtive about it; rather was it the unashamed clatter of the master. She awoke to deadness of all feeling except the thought of the revival that was to sweep like a flail over the land, and in her tired but avid mind that winnowing began to a.s.sume the proportions of the chief thing for which to live. She saw herself in it, and with her, by a flash of inspiration, not the fair eldest-born who had failed her, but the youngest--he whom she could flaunt in the face of G.o.d and men. Some receptacle for pa.s.sion Annie had to have, and being an uneducated woman, it had to be a personal one. Archelaus had gone beyond her clutch, Tom she knew would evade her, John-James she, like Ishmael, found unresponsive. As for girls, she placed them below any male creature. She loved Va.s.sie far more than she did Ishmael, if she could be said to love him at all, but nevertheless he was a son. Her punishment for sin might be that those other more dearly loved ones were not to be among the saved, but this child she could shake in the face of the Almighty....
It was by this new pa.s.sion that Ishmael, with his foolish little plans of a new importance, found himself caught up and held relentlessly.
CHAPTER VII
THE CHAPEL
The revivalist preacher had come, and was indeed sweeping the land like a flail. Everyone was caught up in that thres.h.i.+ng, and staid old church-goers of years rushed into the chapels and added their groans and outcries to the rest. Parson Boase stood aside, powerless while the excitement lasted. Those were days when Methodism was at its most harsh; the pure, if fierce, white flame of Whitefield and Thomson and Wesley had become obscured by the redder glare and smoke of that place whose existence seemed the chief part of these latter-day Methodists' creed.
h.e.l.l was the theme of sermon and hymn--a h.e.l.l of concrete terrors enough to scare children in their beds at night. Thanks to the Parson, Ishmael had hitherto been kept out of this maelstrom of gloomy fears, but now that Annie, with the vicarious piety of so many women, had set her mind on his ”conversion,” he too was to run the gamut of religious emotion, in which it has been said there are contained all the others.
Ishmael, in so far as at that age he could be said to wish to attend any place of prayer at all, was quite pleased to be going to chapel, partly because he had never been allowed to, and partly because the singing, from without, always sounded so much noisier and more frequent than church music. Annie impressed on him that he was to say nothing to the Parson about her intentions, and, though it made Ishmael uncomfortable and even miserable to think of deceiving his friend, he was too afraid of his mother to go against her, especially since this new sustained violence was upon her.
It was a weekday evening when the preacher came to the gaunt little chapel which affronted the skies at the highest curve of the moorland road. Annie had put on her Sunday clothes, though she had ripped the feather out of her bonnet as a concession to the spirit of repentance, and she dressed Ishmael with care in the fine little nankeen suit with braided tunic that the Parson's housekeeper had made for him. She oiled his unruly black hair till it looked as though painted on to his bullet head, except for the obstinate forelock that would fall over his eyes; then she took him firmly by the hand and they set out together. Va.s.sie, to whom any gathering was better than none, was already gone with a girl friend; John-James, who was the Martha of the family, had too much to attend to at the farm; while Archelaus was frankly a scoffer, though an uneasy one. Neither was Annie anxious for the presence of her other children at chapel. The belief that as a judgment on her these dearly-loved ones were not to be among the saved had been growing; it was to be Ishmael whom the Lord demanded of her; it was by the tail of his little tunic that she, clinging, should also be swept into the region of the secure. Archelaus had failed her; that must be meant to show that it was not the children of her heart who were chosen by the Almighty. It was with a set mind and look that she urged Ishmael along the rough track that curved inland over the moor, its rain-filled ruts s.h.i.+ning in the glamorous evening light.
They were not the only people on that errand; the pale road was scattered with moving specks of blackness--solitary old men and women that stumbled on faster than they had done for years in their anxiety lest no place should be left for them; family groups already discussing all they had heard of the preacher; knots of youths, half-ribald and half-curious, encouraging each other as over their reluctant spirits there blew the first breath of that dread which was to send them, shaking, to the penitents' bench. Little children, sagging sideways from the hand of a grown-up relation, dragged their feet along that road, taken to the means of salvation w.i.l.l.y-nilly.
Ishmael's heart began to stir within him; the sight of so many people all intent on the same way affected him curiously with a tingling of excitement. But at the first glimpse of the hideous chapel--one of those buildings found throughout the Duchy which rebuke G.o.d for ever having created beauty--seemed to Ishmael like some awful monster sucking in its prey. The chapel had one chimney c.o.c.ked like an ear, and two large front windows that were the surprised eyes in a face where the door made a mouth, into which the black stream of people was pouring. If he had ever heard of Moloch he would have been struck by the resemblance, and unfairly so, for when revivals were not in the air that ugly little chapel was served very faithfully by a spiritually-minded minister, who hurled himself all the year round against the obduracy of the people.
Ishmael had a quick movement of withdrawal as his mother led him in through the prosaic yellow-grained doors, but it availed him nothing.
Another moment and he was being propelled into a pew.
They were in good time, and Ishmael stared about him curiously. The place was very bare and ugly--the walls washed a cold pale green, the pews painted a dull chocolate that had flaked off in patches, the pulpit a great threatening erection that stood up in the midst of the pews and dominated them, like a bullying master confronting a pack of little boys.
The chapel was lit by lamps hung in iron brackets, and, the oil used being extracted from pilchards, a strong fishy odour pervaded the air.
The pews soon filled to overflowing; people even sat up the steps of the pulpit and stood against the walls; every place was taken save in the front pew that was being kept for penitents. Annie had told Ishmael of its import, and he stared at it in morbid fascination.
There was a stir and a sound throughout the chapel when the preacher made his appearance. Quite an ordinary-looking man, thought Ishmael with a sense of flatness, unable to note the height of the brow and its narrowness at the temples, the nervous twitching of the lids over the protuberant eyeb.a.l.l.s and the abrupt outward bulge of the head above the collar at the back. Abimelech Johns was a tin-miner who had spent his days in profane swearing and coursing after hares with greyhounds until the Lord had thrown him into a trance like that which overtook Saul of Tarsus, and not unlike an epileptic fit Abimelech himself had had in childhood. Since the trance he was a changed man; his pa.s.sion for souls was now as great as his pa.s.sion for pleasure had been before, and he had a name for working himself and his congregations up to a higher pitch than any one who had been on that circuit for years past. It was known to be a terrible thing to see Abimelech wrestling with the Lord.
The meeting began quietly enough with a long extemporary prayer from the preacher that was more a confident b.u.t.ton-holing of the Almighty, and Ishmael began to feel bored and at the same time relieved. Then the first thrill of instinctive protest ran through him as the voices of old and young arose in a hymn:
”There is a dreadful h.e.l.l And everlasting pains, Where sinners do with devils dwell, In darkness, fire and chains.”
<script>