“Yes,” he answered. “I remember. Ted was the dreamer. He dreamed of a new world. You were for the practical. You wanted improvements made in the old.”
“Yes,” she answered. “I thought it could be done.”
He shook his head.
“You were wrong,” he said. “We were the dreamers. It was Ted had all the common sense.”
“Oh, yes, I go on,” he said in answer to her look. “What else is to be done. There used to be hope in the world. Now one has to pretend to hope. I hoped model dwellings were going to do away with the slums. There are miles more slums in Millsborough today than there were ten years ago; and myself, if I had to choose now I’d prefer the slums. I’d feel less like being in prison. But we did all we could. We put them in baths. It was a new idea in Millsborough. The local Press was shocked. ‘Pampering the Proletariat,’ was one of their headlines. They could have saved their ink. Our bath was used to keep the coals in. If they didn’t do that, they emptied their slops into it. It saved them the trouble of walking to the sink. We gave them all the latest sanitary improvements, and they block the drains by turning the places into dustbins. And those that don’t, throw their muck out the window. They don’t want cleanliness and decency. They were born and bred in mud and the dirt sticks to them; and they bring up their children not to mind it. And so it will go on. Of course, there are the few. You will find a few neat homes in the filthiest of streets. But they are lost among the mass, just as they were before. It has made no permanent difference. Millsborough is blacker, fouler, viler than it was when we started in to clean it. Garden suburbs. We began one of those five years ago on the slopes above Leeford, and already it has its Alsatia where its disreputables gather together for mutual aid and comfort. What is it all, but clearing a small space and planting a garden in the middle of a jungle. Sooner or later the jungle closes in again. Every wind blows in seeds.
“This profit-sharing. I can see the end of that. They quarrel among themselves over the sharing. Who shall have the most. Who shall be forced to accept least. And the strong gather together: it is for them to dictate the division; and the weaker snarl and curse, but have to yield. And brother is against brother, and father is against son. And so the old game of greed and grab begins anew. Co-operative shops. And the staff is for ever insisting on the prices being raised to their own kith and kin, so that their wages may be increased out of the profits. And when I expostulate they talk to me about my own companies and the fine dividends we earn by charging high prices to our neighbours.” He laughed.
“You remember Sheepskin,” he went on, “the old vicar? The Reverend Horace Pendergast has got the job now. He’s a cousin of Eleanor’s—rattling good preacher. We’re hoping to make him a bishop. I went to see the old man once, when I was a youngster, to arrange about my uncle’s funeral, and he threw me in a sermon. I don’t know why—I wasn’t worrying much about religion in those days—but I can still see his round, pink, puzzled face and his little fat hands that trembled as he talked. It was near Christmas time—Christ’s birthday; and all that he could think about, he told me, were the Christmas bills and how to meet them. It wasn’t his fault. How can a respectable married man be a Christian? ‘How can I preach Christ?’—there were tears in his eyes. ‘Christ the outcast, the beggar, the servant of the poor, the bearer of the Cross.’ That’s what he had started out to preach. The people would only have laughed at him. He lives in a big house, they would have said, and keeps four servants and a gig. His sons go to college, and his wife and daughters wear rich garments. ‘Struggle enough I find it, Strong’nth’arm,’ he confessed to me. ‘But I ought not to be struggling to do it. I ought to be down among the people, preaching Christ, not only with my lips but with my life.’ It isn’t talkers for God, it is fighters for God that are wanted. Men who are not afraid of the world!”
The daylight had faded. Betty had pushed the table into a corner. They sat beside the blazing logs.
“Some years ago,” said Betty, “I travelled from San Francisco to Hong Kong in company with a Chinese gentleman. It was during the off-season, and half a dozen of us had the saloon to ourselves. There were two commercial travellers and a young missionary and his wife. By process of natural selection—at least so I like to believe—Mr. Cheng and myself chummed on. He was one of the most interesting men I have met, and I think he liked talking to me. I remember one brilliantly clear night we were alone together on the deck. I was leaning back in my chair looking up at the Southern Cross. Suddenly I heard him say that the great stumbling block in the way of man’s progress was God. Coming from anybody else the remark would have irritated me; but I knew he wasn’t trying to be clever; and as he went on to explain himself I found myself in agreement with him. Man’s idea of God is of some all-powerful Being who is going to do everything for him. Man has no need to exert himself; God, moving in mysterious ways, is labouring to make the world a paradise where man may dwell in peace and happiness. All man has to do is to trust in God and practise patience. Man if he took the task in hand for himself could turn this world into a paradise tomorrow without waiting for God. But it would mean man giving up his greeds and passions. It is easier to watch and pray. God has promised man the millenium, in the dim and distant future. Men by agreeing together could have the millenium ready in time for their own children. When man at last grasps the fact that there is no God—no God, that is, in the sense that he imagines—that whatever is going to be done for him has got to be done by himself, there will be born in man the will to accomplish his own salvation. It is this idea of man as the mere creature—the mere puppet of God—powerless to save himself, helpless to avert his own fate, that through the ages has paralysed man’s spiritual energies.
“God is within us. We are God. Man’s free will is boundless. His future is in his own hands. Man has only to control his evil instincts and heaven is here; Man can conquer himself. Of his own will, he does so every day. For the purposes of business, of pleasure, of social intercourse, he puts a curb upon his lusts and passions. It is only the savage, the criminal that lets them master him. Man is capable of putting greed and selfishness out of his life. History, a record of man’s sin and folly, is also a record of man’s power to overcome within himself the obstacles that stand in the way of his own progress.