And over all the vast of London lay the monster, filling it like the night—not in churches and chapels only—in almost all theatres, and most houses—most of all in rich houses: everywhere he had a foot, a tail, a tentacle or two—everywhere suckers that drew the life-blood from the sickening and somnolent soul.
When the deacon, a little brown man, about five-and-thirty, had ended his prayer, he read another hymn of the same sort—one of such as form the bulk of most collections, and then looked meaningly at Mr Graham, whom he had seen in the chapel on Sunday with his brother deacon, and therefore judged one of consequence, who had come to the meeting with an object, and ought to be propitiated: he had intended speaking himself. After having thus for a moment regarded him,
“Would you favour us with a word of exhortation, sir?” he said, in a stage-like whisper.
Now the monster had by this time insinuated a hair-like sucker into the heart of the schoolmaster, and was busy. But at the word, as the Red-Cross Knight when he heard Orgoglio in the wood staggered to meet him, he rose at once, and although his umbrella slipped and fell with a loud discomposing clatter, calmly approached the reading desk. To look at his outer man, this knight of the truth might have been the very high priest of the monster which, while he was sitting there, had been twisting his slimy, semi-electric, benumbing tendrils around his heart. His business was nevertheless to fight him, though to fight him in his own heart and that of other people at one and the same moment, he might well find hard work. And the loathly worm had this advantage over the knight, that it was the first time he had stood up to speak in public since his failure thirty years ago. That hour again for a moment overshadowed his spirit. It was a wavy harvest morning in a village of the north. A golden wind was blowing, and little white clouds flying aloft in the sunny blue. The church was full of well-known faces, upturned, listening, expectant, critical. The hour vanished in a slow mist of abject misery and shame. But had he not learned to rejoice over all dead hopes, and write Te Deums on their coffin-lids? And now he stood in dim light, in the vapour from damp garments, in dinginess and ugliness, with a sense of spiritual squalor and destitution in his very soul. He had tried to pray his own prayer while the deacon prayed his; but there had come to him no reviving—no message for this handful of dull souls—there were nine of them in all —and his own soul crouched hard and dull within his bosom. How to give them one deeper breath? How to make them know they were alive? Whence was his aid to come?
His aid was nearer than he knew. There were no hills to which he could lift his eyes, but help may hide in the valley as well as come down from the mountain, and he found his under the coal-scuttle bonnet of the woman that swept out and dusted the chapel. She was no interesting young widow. A life of labour and vanished children lay behind as well as before her. She was sixty years of age, seamed with the small-pox, and in every seam the dust and smoke of London had left a stain. She had a troubled eye, and a gaze that seemed to ask of the universe why it had given birth to her. But it was only her face that asked the question; her mind was too busy with the ever recurring enigma, which, answered this week, was still an enigma for the next—how she was to pay her rent—too busy to have any other question to ask. Or would she not rather have gone to sleep altogether, under the dreary fascination of the slug monster, had she not had a severe landlady, who would be paid punctually, or turn her out? Anyhow, every time and all the time she sat in the chapel, she was brooding over ways and means, calculating pence and shillings—the day’s charing she had promised her, and the chances of more—mingling faint regrets over past indulgences —the extra half-pint of beer she drank on Saturday—the bit of cheese she bought on Monday. Of this face of care, revealing a spirit which Satan had bound, the schoolmaster caught sight,— caught from its commonness, its grimness, its defeature, inspiration and uplifting, for there he beheld the oppressed, down-trodden, mire-fouled humanity which the man in whom he believed had loved because it was his father’s humanity divided into brothers, and had died straining to lift back to the bosom of that Father. Oh tale of horror and dreary monstrosity, if it be such indeed as the bulk of its priests on the one hand, and its enemies on the other represent it! Oh story of splendrous fate, of infinite resurrection and uplifting, of sun and breeze, of organ-blasts and exultation, for the heart of every man and woman, whatsoever the bitterness of its care or the weight of its care, if it be such as the Book itself has held it from age to age!
It was the mere humanity of the woman, I say, and nothing in her individuality of what is commonly called the interesting, that ministered to the breaking of the schoolmaster’s trance. “_Oh ye of little faith!_” were the first words that flew from his lips—he knew not whether uttered concerning himself or the charwoman the more; and at once he fell to speaking of him who said the words, and of the people that came to him and heard him gladly;—how this one, whom he described, must have felt, Oh, if that be true! how that one, whom also he described, must have said, Now he means me! and so laid bare the secrets of many hearts, until he had concluded all in the misery of being without a helper in the world, a prey to fear and selfishness and dismay. Then he told them how the Lord pledged himself for all their needs—meat and drink and clothes for the body, and God and love and truth for the soul, if only they would put them in the right order and seek the best first.
Next he spoke a parable to them—of a house and a father and his children. The children would not do what their father told them, and therefore began to keep out of his sight. After a while they began to say to each other that he must have gone out, it was so long since they had seen him—only they never went to look. And again after a time some of them began to say to each other that they did not believe they had ever had any father. But there were some who dared not say that—who thought they had a father somewhere in the house, and yet crept about in misery, sometimes hungry and often cold, fancying he was not friendly to them, when all the time it was they who were not friendly to him, and said to themselves he would not give them anything. They never went to knock at his door, or call to know if he were inside and would speak to them. And all the time there he was sitting sorrowful, listening and listening for some little hand to come knocking, and some little voice to come gently calling through the key-hole; for sorely did he long to take them to his bosom and give them everything. Only if he did that without their coming to him, they would not care for his love or him, would only care for the things he gave them, and soon would come to hate their brothers and sisters, and turn their own souls into hells, and the earth into a charnel of murder.
Ere he ended he was pleading with the charwoman to seek her father in his own room, tell him her troubles, do what he told her, and fear nothing. And while he spoke, lo! the dragon-slug had vanished; the ugly chapel was no longer the den of the hideous monster; it was but the dusky bottom of a glory shaft, adown which gazed the stars of the coming resurrection.
“The whole trouble is that we won’t let God help us,” said the preacher, and sat down.
A prayer from the greengrocer followed, in which he did seem to be feeling after God a little; and then the ironmonger pronounced the benediction, and all went—among the rest, Frederick Marshal, who had followed the schoolmaster, and now walked back with him to his father’s, where he was to spend one night more.