Round the Corner / Being the Life and Death of Francis Christopher Folyat, Bachelor of Divinity, and Father of a Large Family

by Gilbert Cannan

First of all he came to the conclusion that he had religious doubts and consulted his vicar, who bowled him over with professional arguments. Against them he could only set his vivid sensation on that strange night and his keen recollection of the tallow candle in the bottle and the moon shining through the window; and of these he dared not speak. He agreed perfectly that he had set his hand to the noblest service in the world and had no right to look back. But looking forward availed him nothing; the present was bewildering and the past had suddenly become empty. The bung had been removed from the tight barrel of his existence and all the good liquor had leaked away.

However, he did his work neither better nor worse than he had done it before. He christened children and churched women and married couples and read solemn and beautiful words over the dead, and for the first time began to ponder the meaning of these ceremonies. The Church, he said, sanctified birth and death and what lay between them, and he tried to persuade himself that it raised them from brutality, spiritualised them, and made them holy; but then he could not help feeling that there was some discrepancy. The facts remained the same, therefore if they were sacred at all they must be sacred in themselves. All that could be done by mind and Holy Writ, the product of inspired minds, was nobly to interpret the facts, to see to it that men lived nobly—lived nobly and nobly died. He had seen several persons die, had given them the comfort of religion, and now, when he remembered, he was struck principally by the dignity with which death was accepted. It seemed to him that men had religion in themselves, that it was not, could not be grafted on them from without.

“Life,” he said to himself, “is a religious thing, or it is something less than life.”

He felt that he was moving from the circumference to the centre, and then he realised that he was reaching only the centre of his own thoughts, not the heart of the world. He had advanced in theory but in practice was just as far out of his bearings as ever. He had fed himself chiefly with the writings of ironists and he was hungry for belief—in the nobility of life and death and the unity of all things. The lives of birds he knew and the lives of beasts, but of the lives of men he knew nothing at all. Never had he been to a great city, but he conceived that there also the lives of men must be very much what they were in the somnolent little town on the Devon estuary—they were born, they suffered, and they died. That was all. Surely that was all.

He would not have that. The ironists left it at that. He became positive that the manner of it mattered—to Nature, perhaps, not at all, but to men, and to God through men, vitally. To that end the Holy Bible had been written and the Church founded, and to that end Keble and Pusey had sought to rouse the Church from its indolence and indifference. His vicar was right: he could not turn back, but he must know wherein his work as a priest consisted. If it served any purpose at all, it must be for the sanctification of life by endowing it with a noble interpretation.

Francis had no large conception of the universe. At this young period of his life his notions were still mediæval. He believed the earth to be stationary, Hell to be under his feet, and the Heavenly region to be beyond the blue vault of the sky, and that human life led infallibly to one or the other. A noble life, therefore, was that which led to Heaven, and to this idea, and to the cosmogony it implied, he shaped his ethics and his ideals, never suspecting that he was sacrificing the greater to the less.

When men sit down and think out schemes of life they nearly always make the mistake of leaving women out of them. This is easily understood in the case of young men for whom women hardly exist except as an emotion, a fire that may at any moment flame into their existence and lay it waste like the little foxes in the Bible. Our curate made that mistake. Naturally he had been in love—never out of it; but always he had worshipped from afar, and had thought the objects of his adoration as insensible to it as the stars in the sky to his wonder and delight. He was in love now, but could attach his emotion to no particular young woman. There were at least four, and he never credited them with any design when he met them out walking, or they came to him on parish business or demanded his escort or displayed their gardens to him. He enjoyed his emotions while he was ashamed of them. They were not “noble.”

When next he sat—at her suggestion—with Miss Martha Brett in the gazebo, he found himself thinking that she was very charming and pretty with her brown ringlets on either side of her face and her plump little shoulders peeping out of her gown, a modification of the style made popular by the young Queen. She was so demure, so quiet, and her manner of listening to him gave him such a sense of authority. He felt it could never leave him, that he would never again have those appalling moments in church when a gulf opened wide in front of him and he felt that any one of his listeners had more right than he to be talking and calling this black and that white.

She sat by a little table and he sat on the other side of it with a book in his hands, and she let her hand fall on the table so that it lay flat, very white and soft and pink at the finger-tips, and in her wrist was the most delicious little bone. He could see nothing else. He gazed and gazed at it, then with a wrench turned to his book, but his eyes were swimming so that the words swallowed each other up.

Roses nodded in at the window, and the smell of the salt water came up and mingled with the garden scents.