2
You’ll be surprised when I say that after this incident I got to know Bellingham better and to like him more. Strange as it may seem, he was not entirely without humour; and I fancied that he was the least bit ashamed of his outburst. The next day he went about like a dog in disgrace, feeling perhaps that every one disliked him. Back he went into that shell of silence from which he had only once, and with such dramatic effect, emerged. He would never, I know, have gone back on the substance of his discourse; but, as he admitted to me afterwards, he very quickly began to doubt the wisdom of his method. Fellow-undergraduates were not to be frightened into conversion by the kind of revivalist rant he had treated us to. He began to feel woefully out of place in our company. Mulroyd, good fellow though he was, could not bring himself to make any warm overtures to one whom he now regarded as a religious maniac; on the surface he was breezy and friendly enough, but in his heart he knew that Bellingham must be reckoned among his failures, one who had failed to justify his ardent faith in the latent social value of every man. The others ignored him, though not pointedly, much as they had always done. My own attitude was different. I have, as you know, an insatiable curiosity about human nature—especially freaks of human nature, I’m afraid—and Bellingham had piqued that curiosity. I had repudiated his particular version of God as being nothing but an almighty Peeping Tom, and yet a weakness for peeping is my own besetting sin. All my life I have been a kind of amateur detective of the human soul. Moreover—though I don’t stress this—I had more than a sneaking sympathy for the man. After all we had something in common, something that none of the others of our party shared with us. We were both hoping to be ordained. In spite of myself I had to admire the colossal courage of his intervention in that argument, even while I disparaged its tone. In fine, for this reason and for that, I made rather a point of cultivating Bellingham’s acquaintance from that day forth. And I had my reward. I really believe that to me he revealed a more human side of himself than anybody else ever caught sight of. Next term, back at college, he made a habit of strolling into my rooms at five minutes to ten, and very often we talked till the early hours of the morning about this and that. Sometimes he became reminiscent about his childhood. His earliest memories were of a grey suburban villa, with a black square patch in front and a black oblong patch behind, both called gardens. The square one was marked off from the road by hideous iron railings and an iron gate. Bellingham assured me that the pattern of those railings was branded on his retina; and in an unwonted lapse from literalism he declared that it was a pattern designed in hell and executed in Bedlam. ‘Wherever I see it,’ he said passionately, under the influence of nothing more potent than black coffee, ‘wherever I see it—and it is all over southeast London—I recognize the mark of the beast, the signature of an incorrigible stupidity. The very smell of those railings is noisome.’ He was like that: ever ready to see material things as symbols of the unseen, and very prone—like many religionists—to confuse the symbol with the thing symbolized. In the sheer exuberance of his passion, whether of joy or disgust, he would make some wild exaggerated statement that no one was expected to take literally; and the next moment he himself would be taking it literally. If, for example, I had suggested to him that to talk of the smell of railings was a trifle fanciful, he would have been genuinely astonished. Whenever he loved or hated, rationality went to the winds. And he seems to have hated the home of his childhood pretty completely. The back garden, where he spent a good deal of his time, figured in his talk as if it were a plague spot, an evil blot upon the earth. If one is to believe his tale, this garden was always, in season and out, full of wet flapping underclothes hanging on a line. They used to lie in wait for him, he said, and smack him in the face: it was like being embraced by a slimy fish. He was glad, however, of the clothes-line posts; he used to climb them and swing from the cross-bars, and once or twice he pulled one of these posts out of its wooden socket in the ground and stared down at the minute wriggling monsters that scuttled about in that little twilit world. Another thing that gave him pleasure was the sight of a neighbouring church, aspiring towards the sky, the throne of God. These memories may well have derived much of their colour from imagination, for both his parents died before he was ten, and he then left the suburban villa to become the ward of his uncle Joseph. Joseph Bellingham appears to have been conspicuously unfitted for the delicate task of bringing up a sensitive, solitary, and already morbid child, although not a word against him would his nephew have admitted. Justly or unjustly I was disposed to believe that this Uncle Joseph had completed the dark work begun in Bellingham by his childish solitude and loveless home. For his parents, I should have told you, were lifeless, disillusioned people. I suspect they had never been happy or passionate lovers, and that they regarded their son’s birth as one more penalty rather than as the desired fruit of their marriage. In some preposterous way (naturally Bellingham was reticent here) the man had sacrificed himself in marrying his wife—some fetish of ‘honour’ perhaps—and of course he spent the rest of his life hating her for it. This may or may not account for the fact that when I first got to know Bellingham he seemed extraordinarily insensitive, for a man of his temperament, to beauty. Not totally deficient—because even his hatred of a certain kind of iron railings implies some standard, however subconscious—but what sense of beauty he possessed had never been wakened: it manifested itself only in a series of dislikes. He had quite a devilish flair for seeing the most repulsive aspect of things. This was all in tune with his miserable theology. To the spiritual loveliness that radiates from the central figure of the New Testament—to that beacon he was as blind as he was deaf to the many golden promises of the religion of Christ. I do not mean that he swerved by a hair’s breadth from orthodoxy; I mean that there was some subtle twist in his temperament that made him accept ‘the love of God’ as a euphemism and ‘the wrath of God’ as a terrible reality. He thought more about hell than about heaven, because he had only seen beauty whereas he had felt ugliness. The one was an intellectual apprehension: the other was a perpetual experience. It was evident to me, from what he did not say, that he had never known love, and I wondered what was in store for him.
But though with me he became more and more unreserved, from all other fellows of his class and education he drew farther away. There was a spiritual uncouthness in him which prevented his taking kindly to the harmless social artificialities of academic life. As I told him—and he admitted it good-humouredly—he would have been more at home as chief medicine-man to a tribe of barbarians. In some remote and savage bush his niche awaited him. Even the traditions of politeness he grew to despise. I shocked him by admitting that I myself had more than once got out of accepting an invitation to breakfast or to coffee by feigning to be engaged elsewhere. Bellingham would have said bluntly, ‘No, thanks,’ and have left it at that. Courageous, no doubt, but it did not make for easy social relations. He became more and more dissatisfied, too, with the mild fashionable Anglicanism of our dean. Of his own religion sensationalism was the life-breath; and the worship of good form, the religion of all undergraduates, was in his eyes the most dangerous idolatry. No one was surprised when, having taken his degree with the rest of us, he abruptly left the University. Instead of being ordained he became just what I had chaffingly suggested, a medicine-man to a tribe of barbarians. To be more exact, he set up as a lay-missioner near the Euston Road. He had a meagre but sufficient private income which permitted him to go his own solitary gait. And there he busied himself wrestling with the Devil for the souls of all the miscellaneous street-scum he could lay hands on. God forgive me if I have ever in my heart derided Bellingham! He had the heroism as well as the mania of a one-idea’d man. I find it hard to suppose that his converts were any the happier for having been injected with his particular virus of fear; but, as Bellingham would say, where happiness cannot be reconciled to salvation happiness must go. Go it did, I have no doubt. Fear of the policeman was displaced by a scarcely less ignoble fear of God, conceived to be another policeman on a much larger scale. If I speak bitterly, it is not in spite of my religion but because of it. Before I have finished the story you will understand that I have cause for bitterness.
We exchanged a few letters, he and I; but it was not until eighteen months later that, at his own invitation, I went to see him. ‘Saunders, I need your help,’ he said in his letter, and added something about my being his only real friend and so on. He had dismal little lodgings in a dismal little side-street the name of which I have forgotten. Bellingham himself opened the door to me. I had told him when to expect me and he must have been waiting at the window. He greeted me in a shamefaced eager fashion that touched my heart. I was astonished at the change in him: the more astonished because it was at once subtle and impossible to miss. There was a gentleness in his eyes that I had never seen there before. He was more human. He led me to his own rooms—they were at the top of a four-storied house, and looked out on a prospect of smoking chimneys—and forced me into the only comfortable chair he possessed.
I began smoking, but he denied himself that nerve-soothing indulgence. His eyes, alight with an unwonted shyness that was only half shame, avoided meeting mine. We fenced for a while, talking over our Jesus days; and all the while my mind, involuntarily, was seeking a name for something in that room that I had not expected to find. Presently Bellingham rose from his chair. It was an abrupt and surprising movement. ‘Like to see the rest of my quarters?’ he said, in a tone desperately casual. I followed him into the next room, and there, in one glance, the mystery was made clear. The bedroom was the answer to the problem of the sitting-room. What I had detected while we sat talking was domesticity, a subtle but decided fragrance of home: a certain precision in the arrangement of books and furniture. In the bedroom, with its two spotlessly white-sheeted beds and its vase of flowers standing in the centre of a miniature dressing-table, the same story was told more eloquently; there was, accentuated, aggressive, the same neatness and daintiness of effect which a contented woman instinctively imposes on her surroundings. No bachelor, however fastidious, could have achieved it. ‘Quite a jolly little place,’ I remarked, to hide my own surprise and his embarrassment. ‘Very,’ said Bellingham, and we went back to our seats by the fire.
Bellingham tried to take up the thread of our conversation where we had dropped it five minutes before. But for his own sake I cut off that line of retreat.
‘Look here, my dear fellow! You didn’t ask me over here in order to discuss our esteemed Dr. Morgan. Tell me all about it.’
Bellingham faced me squarely at last. ‘You mean my marriage?’ I nodded. ‘Well, to start with, I’m not married.’
I think he expected me to flinch at that; and perhaps my failure to do so disconcerted as well as encouraged him. I said nothing. I felt that I could do more good by listening than by talking.
‘She has been in these rooms for two months,’ said Bellingham. ‘And what you saw in there—that has existed for ten days, just ten days.’ I divined that this was his way of indicating to me the duration of his married life. ‘You see I didn’t fall at once, or easily. The Devil is always insidious, isn’t he? Saunders, that girl is a magician. Joan, her name is. She transformed this place. It’s not bad now, is it? You should have seen it before she came. And me, too—you should have seen me before she came. It’s a new life to me. I’m translated. And yet....’
‘How and where did you meet her?’
‘In the street, at the beginning of November. Her husband kicked her out. A swine he is; thank God I’ve never set eyes on him. Told her to go and sell herself, and come back with her earnings.’
There was a pause. ‘And she?’ I asked.
‘She was on the streets for five days. Yes, a prostitute for five days.’ I saw Bellingham’s face contract with pain, and I knew that something deeper than pity had been stirred in him. And so the recital went on. Bit by bit I got his story and pieced it together. He did not spare himself; but even his passion for repentance, his ingrained conviction of sin, could not persuade me that he had been guilty of a very heinous crime. He had rescued the girl, at first in sheer compassion, and cherished her as he would have cherished any other fragment of human salvage. And her presence, her pathetic prettiness and her childish need of affection, had been too much for him. In a passion of gratitude, I surmise, she had offered him, with a full heart, what she had so reluctantly sold to casual men during her five days purgatory. The appeal to his manhood was too sudden, too overwhelming, to be resisted. Beauty, seen for the first time in dazzling glory, had invaded his heart and beaten down his defences. For the first time in my experience of him there was inconsistency in Bellingham. He spoke, one minute, of his ‘fall,’ like any sour moralist; and in his very next sentence he would become almost lyrical about this ‘new life,’ this shattering apocalypse of beauty. It was as if the man had been cloven in twain and spoke with two voices. And that, I believe, is the real key to the baffling terror that was to follow.
Later in the afternoon, in time to prepare tea for us, came Joan herself, a big-eyed child in her early ’twenties, with very fair hair, like a little lost angel with a Cockney accent. The sudden fear that leaped into her eyes as she timidly greeted me would have stabbed any man’s heart. She was absurdly fragile, and I saw at once that those five evil days had been no more than a gruesome physical accident which had left her courage shaken but her innocence unimpaired. She guessed, no doubt, that we had been discussing her; and both Bellingham and I felt caddish, I dare say, when we remembered having done so. But I succeeded in winning her confidence by displaying a keen interest in her market-basket, which she carried on her arm, and in a very few moments she became garrulous about her shopping experiences, displaying a pretty pride in her purchases. They included, I remember, three dried herrings and a pound of pig’s-fry. The herrings we had for our tea, and I have never enjoyed a meal more.
In the evening, during a long walk through mean streets, Bellingham came to the point. He had said, you will remember, that he needed my help. What he wanted was no less than that I should play the part of conscience to him. I was to be instated, apparently, as his spiritual pastor. For the sake of that poor child happily darning his socks at home, I could not refuse the embarrassing honour thrust upon me. And when I learned that repentance was actually beginning to gain the upper hand of him I was glad indeed to exert any influence I possessed on the side of humanity. He had had a vile dream, he told me, and it was evident that he regarded it as a warning sent by that vigilant deity of his. In the dream his landlady, who believed him to be a legally married man, came and smiled at him over the bedrail, and wagged her head till it detached itself from the body and multiplied. The air was full of these grinning heads, poised like dragonflies, all their evil eyes on Bellingham. Terror, he told me, took concrete form inside his own head: he could hear it simmering, sizzling, gurgling, boiling, splitting; it drove him out of bed, away from Joan, and across the arid plains of hell under a sky monotonously grey except where the sun, a bloody red, like a huge socket from which the eye had been torn, stared sightlessly at him. Even as he gazed at it it filled and became menacing with the eye of God.
‘It was a vision of hell,’ Bellingham said, wiping the moisture from his brow. ‘And the eye of God was even there. O Lord, how can I escape from Thy presence!’
It did not seem to me a moment propitious for argument, so I held my peace. He talked on about his doubts and his difficulties, his sin and his repentance; and at last I gathered that I was being invited to tell him whether he should stay with Joan or leave her.
‘Oh, fling her into the streets,’ I advised him, with furious irony, ‘as her husband did.’
‘Yes,’ he said, mildly enough. ‘You’re right. Against all my religious convictions I feel you to be right. I have made her my wife, and I must be faithful to my choice, right or wrong.’
‘It’s as plain as day,’ I assured him. ‘Love and duty are pointing in the same direction for once. Why should you doubt it?’
‘You see, Saunders,’ said Bellingham, with sudden fire, ‘it’s all or nothing. She must remain my wife, or we must separate. There’s no third way. I can’t spend the rest of my life in the waters of Tantalus. I’m only a man, God help me!’
For a while we left it at that.