I believe some of us half-suspected that the wine had gone to his head, though how such stuff could make any man tipsy was beyond understanding. He continued to irradiate gloom upon us from under his shaggy brows. Mulroyd, to create a diversion, held out his hands to Madeleine in mock appeal.
‘Du vin, mademoiselle! Nous sommes bien chagrinés.’
The girl’s eyes brightened again. At the merest hint of a renewal of gaiety she rose, radiantly, as if from the dead.
‘Let’s have some champagne,’ Mulroyd suggested, ‘to take the taste of death out of our mouths.’
‘Carpe diem,’ murmured Hayter. ‘Trite. But the first and last word of wisdom.’
‘You can’t escape that way,’ remarked Bellingham, sourly insistent.
But we could stand no more of Bellingham just then. Flinging courtesy to the winds we laughed and sang and shouted him down. ‘Death be damned!’ cried Mulroyd, as we clinked glasses. Never was a toast drunk with more fervour.
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.