I can well imagine Stone’s sportsmanlike joy and the flash of his eyes when, as I am informed, he said, “Thank heaven I learned to use my fists at Charterhouse! and thank heaven for what rowing did for my biceps at Oxford. I think I’ve given those two scoundrels a lesson.” He shook his head reminiscently and mournfully. “I’d have given five pounds to have got my fists on that third rascal’s hide. Honestly, I’ve enjoyed pommelling those other two scoundrels more than anything that has happened since I came to Haggerston.”
Then, seeing, perhaps, a whimsical look in his companion’s eye, and perhaps already asking himself whether “taking on” three blackguards at fisticuffs, and badly punishing two out of the three in a fair fight, would by every one be considered decorous or becoming in a clergyman, he broke into infectious laughter that was directed entirely against himself.
No, apart from the question whether this story (I tell it as it was told me long ago) be true or not true, I do not claim for S. J. Stone that he was a saint. To some men the consciousness of what Stevenson called “a healthy dash of the brute” necessitates an ever watchful “on guard” lest one day the brute spring out to overpower the angel. To Stone—so wholly had he made honour, purity, and truth the very habit of his life—a lapse into anything false, impure, or dishonourable, into thinking or speaking, or even into allowing others, in his presence, to speak what was evil or slanderous, had become impossible. Had the proofs, or what seemed like the proofs, of some base act on Stone’s part been brought to the knowledge of any friend who knew him, as I knew him, that friend would not have stooped to examine them. His reply would have been, “I know this man, and though I am aware that he can be prejudiced, stubborn, overbearing, irritable, and that faults of temper, errors of judgment, and the like, may be laid to his charge, I know him well enough to be sure that of what is base he is incapable. Were all the facts before me, they would do no more than reveal him, possibly in a quixotic, but at least in a nobly chivalrous light.”
For all his quixotism, chivalry, and hot-headedness, Stone held so strongly that, as Christ’s minister, a clergyman must in certain matters be so entirely beyond even a shadow of reproach, that he was singularly wise and guarded in his dealings with the other sex. The foolish girls or women who go simpering to a clergyman, especially if a bachelor as Stone was, to ask advice on love-affairs and the like, he instantly if considerately dismissed to seek the advice of their mother or of some good woman known to him; and at all times, and upon all questions, he avoided seeing women-callers alone—not because he feared evil in them or in himself, but because he felt he owed it to his sacred office to avoid even the appearance of anything upon which evil-thinking folk might choose to put an evil construction.
He was not without experiences—what clergyman is?—of, in other respects, worthy and well-meaning women who, even in connection with Church work, contrive to set people by the ears, or otherwise to cause dissension and trouble. With these he was impatient. He did not hesitate to deal summarily with them, nor firmly, if considerately, to speak his mind; but Womanhood, I might almost say every woman, he held, if only for his own mother’s sake, if only because of a woman the Saviour of the world was born, in a reverence that no folly or sin could altogether break down. I have heard him speak to the poor harlot of the street—his “Sister” as he would not have hesitated to call her—with sorrowful courtliness, and with the pitifulness, the gentleness, and the consideration, which one uses to (as indeed not a few of such unhappy women are) an erring and ignorant child.
I remember, on another and very different occasion, a girl of the soft and silly type coming to the vicarage one day when I was with Stone—I think she came about a Confirmation Class. She had a certain innocence in her face; not the challenging, starry purity that one sees in some faces, but a negative, babyish innocence, which was pretty enough, and appealing in its way, but that meant no more, probably, than that the girl had not yet had to make choice for herself between good and evil.
“Did you notice the flower-like beauty of that child’s face?” Stone asked me, when she had gone. “In the presence of such exquisite purity and innocence,” he went on gravely, and with intense reverence in his voice, “one feels convicted of sin, as it were. One is so conscious of one’s own coarseness, grossness, and impurity as to feel unworthy to stand in such presence!”
And all the time, the white armour of purity in which he was clad, the armour and purity of his own soul’s—a strong man’s—forging, was compared with hers, as is the purity of fine gold tried in the furnace to metal mixed with base earth and newly brought all untested from a mine.
IV
His unfailing sense of humour, his boyish and buoyant love of fun, like the cork jacket by means of which a swimmer rides an incoming wave, carried Stone through difficulties which would have depressed another. Let me put one such instance on record. To brighten in any way the drab days of the poorest folks in his East End parish, he counted a privilege as well as a happiness, and he was constantly devising means for bringing some new gladness to their lives—the gift of a sorely needed bit of furniture, or a coveted ornament, a boating party with the children in Victoria Park, a magic-lantern entertainment—anything in fact which seemed to him likely to make them forget their many troubles and to call them out of themselves.