For many people, it must be confessed, he is a slightly ludicrous figure. He presents the spectacle of a sparrow stretching its wings and opening its beak to imitate the eagle of catholic lecterns. And he has a singularly nettling manner with some people which must add, I should think, to this unpopularity. He seems sweepingly satisfied with himself and his opinions, which are mostly of a challenging nature. He does not discuss but attempts to browbeat. His voice is an argument, and the expression on his face and the fire in his eyes suggest the street corner. He would have greatly distressed a man like Matthew Arnold, for the only method against such didactics is to send for the boxing gloves.
All the same he is a man of no little force, perhaps a scattered and dispersed force, as I am inclined to think; and he is a fighter whose blows, if not a teacher whose opinions, are more worthy of attention than his sacerdotal pretensions might lead one to suppose.
In appearance he may be compared with Dr. Clifford, but Dr. Clifford reduced to youthfulness and multiplied by an infinite cocksureness; a small, eager, sandy-haired, clean-shaven, boyish-looking man, with light-coloured eyes behind shining spectacles, the head craning forward, the body elastic and restless with inexhaustible energy, the whole of him—body, mind, and spirit—tremulous with a jerkiness of being which seems to have no effect whatever on his powers of endurance.
One misses in him all feeling, all tone, of mellowness. His mind, at present, shows no lightest, trace of the hallowing marks of time; it suggests rather the very architecture he takes so savage a pleasure in denouncing—a kind of mock Gothic mind, an Early Doulton personality. He has a thin voice, rather husky, and a recent accent.
In his most vigorous moments, when he is bubbling over with epigrams and paradoxes, ridiculing the dull people who do not agree with him, and laughing to scorn those who think they can maintain the Christian spirit outside the mysterious traditions of the Catholic Church, or when he is describing a recent church as a Blancmange Cathedral, and paraphrasing an account, given I think by Mr. James Douglas, of the building of a certain tabernacle in London—first it started out to be a Jam Factory, then a happy idea occurred to the builder that he should turn it into a Waterworks, then the foreman suggested that it would make an ideal swimming-bath, but finally the architect came on the scene and said, "Here, half a minute; there's an alteration wanted here; we're going to make it into a church"—at such moments, Dr. Orchard might be likened to a duo-decimo Chesterton—but a Chesterton of nonconformity. For he is a little crude, a little recent; a mind without mellowness, a spirit without beauty, a soul which feeds upon aggression.
He makes an amusing figure with a black cloak wrapped round his little body in Byronic folds, and a soft hat of black plush on his head, a Vesta Tilley quickness informing both his movements and his speech, as he nips forward in conversation with a friend, the arms, invisible beneath their cloak, pressed down in front of him, his body leaning forward, his peering eyes dancing behind their spectacles.
Nevertheless, those who most find him only amusing or worse still thoroughly dislikeable, who are antipathetic to the whole man, and who thus cannot come at the secret of his influence, must confess that there is nothing about him either of the smooth and oily or of the adroit and compromising. He is the last man on earth to be called an opportunist. This is in his favour. His aggressiveness must put all but the toughest against him. He is tremendously in earnest. It would be difficult I think to exceed his sincerity.
But not to mind whose toes one may tread on is hardly in the style of St. Francis; and, after all, it is possible to be tremendously earnest about wrong things, and consumingly sincere in matters which are not perhaps definitely certain to advance the higher life of the human race. Humility is always safest; indeed, it is essential to all earnestness and sincerity, if those energies are not to repel as many as they attract.
Dr. Orchard's manner, which can be extraordinarily nettling in conversation, as I have suggested, is evidently of a very soothing character in the confessional—if that is the proper term. He has a remarkable following among women, and it is said that "if he put a brass plate on his door and charged five guineas a time" he might be one of the richest mind-doctors in London. He himself declares that his real work is almost entirely personal. I have heard him speak with some contempt of preaching, quoting the witticism of a friend that "Anglican preaching is much worse than it really need be," or words to that effect. He likes ceremonial and private confidence. He has the instincts of a priest.
His patients appear to be the wreckage of psychoanalysis. It is said that "half the neurotics of London" consult him about their souls. I have no idea of the manner in which he treats these unhappy people, but I am perfectly sure that he gives them counsel of a healthy nature. There is nothing about him which suggests unwholesomeness, and much that suggests sound strength and clean good sense. Also among his penitents are numerous shopgirls who have lost in the commercial struggle whatever piety they possessed in childhood and in their craving for excitement have gone astray from the path of safe simplicity—gambling on horse races and often getting into serious trouble by their losses. Dr. Orchard may be trusted to give these weak, rather than erring daughters of London, advice which would commend itself to the Free Church Council, for with all his sacerdotal aberrations the basis of his moral life is rooted in Puritanism.