WARCHESTER,
St. Andrew's Parish House,
August 12th.
Yesterday it rained. And then the telephone rang, and some incoherent person mumbled an address out in the furthest suburb. It was North Baxter Court. You never saw that—a row of yellow houses with the door-sills level to the mud and ashes of the alley, and swarms of children who stare and whisper, "Here's the 'Father.'" Number 7 1/2 was marked with a membraneous croup sign—the usual lie to avoid strict quarantine and still get anti-toxin at the free dispensary; the room was unspeakable—shut windows and a crowd of people. A woman, young, sat rocking back and forth, half smothering a baby in her arms. Nobody spoke. It took time to get the windows open and persuade the woman to lay the child on the bed in the corner. There wasn't anything else to use, so I fanned the baby with my straw hat—until, finally, it got away from North Baxter Court forever. Which was as it should be. Then tumult. Probably you are not in a position to know that few spectacles are more hideous than the unrestrained grief of the poor. The things they said and did—it was unhuman, indecent. I can't describe it. As I was leaving, after a pretty bad half hour, I met the doctor at the door—one of these half-drunken quacks who live on the ignorant. That child died of diphtheria. I knew it, and he admitted it. The funeral was this breathless morning, with details that may not be written down.
LATER.
Somebody interrupted. And now it's long past midnight. I must try to send you some answer to your letter. I have been thinking—the combination may strike you as odd—of North Baxter Court and you. Not that the happenings of yesterday were unusual. That is just it—they come almost every day, things like that. And you, with your birds and rustling trees and your lake—you keep a shiny pistol in the drawer of your dressing-table, and write me the sort of letter that came from you this morning. When all these people need you—these blind, dumb animals, stumbling through the sordid, hopeless years—need you, because, in spite of everything, you are still so much further along than they, because you are capable of seeing where their eyes are shut, because you and your kind can help them, and put the germ of life into the deadness of their days, because of all that makes you what you are, and gives you the chance to become infinitely more—you, in the face of all that, can sit down in the fragrance of a garden-scented breeze and write as you have done about God and the things that matter.
You said that it was not flippancy. Your whole point of view is wrong. Do not ask me how I "know"—some conclusions do not need to be analyzed. I wonder if you realize, for instance, what you said about faith? I haven't the charity to call it even childish. Have you ever got below the surface of anything at all? Do you want to know what it is that has brought you to the verge of suicide? It is not your horror of illness, nor your oddly concluded determination to marry a man whom you do not love. Suicide is an ugly word—I notice that you avoid it—and love is a big word; I am using them understandingly and soberly. You came to the edge of this thing for the reason that there is not an element of bigness in your life, and there never has been. You lack the balance of large ideas. This man of whom you tell me—of course you do not love him—you have not yet the capacity for understanding the meaning of the word. You like to ride and you like to dance and you are fond of the things that please, but you do not love anybody or even any thing. You are living, yes, but you are asleep. And it is because you are ignorant.
If your letter had been designedly flippant, it would merely have annoyed. It is the unconscious flippancy in it that is so discouraging. You do not know what you believe because you believe nothing. Your most coherent conception of God is likely a hazy vision of a majestic figure seated on a cloud—a long-bearded patriarch, wearing a golden crown—the composite of famous pictures that you have seen. You have been taught to believe in a personal God, and you have never taken the trouble to get beyond the notion that personality—God's or anybody's—is mainly a matter of the possession of such things as hands and feet. What can be the meaning to one like you of the truth that we are made in the image of God? The Kingdom of Heaven—that whole whirling activity of the commonwealth of God—the citizenship towards which you might be pointing Baxter Court—you have not even imagined it. I am not being sentimental. Don't misunderstand. Don't fancy, for instance, that I am exhorting you to go slumming. Deliberately or not, you took a wrong impression from my first letter. You can't mistake this. Reach after a few of the realities. Why not shut your questioning mind a while and open your soul? Live a little—begin to realize that there is a world outside yourself. Try to get beyond the view-point of a child. And, if I have not angered you beyond words, let me know how you get on.
The unconventionality of this correspondence, you see, is not all on one side. If you found English to your taste in what I wrote before, this time you have plain truths, perhaps less satisfactory. You are not in a position to decide some matters. I do not ask you to let me decide them for you. I have only tried to indicate some reasons why you must wait before you act. And I think it has made you angry. One has to risk that. Yesterday I could not have imagined sending a letter like this to anybody. But it goes—and to you. I ask you to answer it. I think you owe me that. It hasn't been exactly easy to write.
One more thing—don't trust letters to stand between you and the toy in the dressing-table drawer. Any barrier there, to be in the least effective, will have to be of your own building.
GEOFFREY McBIRNEY.
About a month after the above letter had been received, on September 10th, Geoffrey McBirney, dashing down the three flights of stairs in the Parish House from his quarters on the top floor, peered into the letter-box on the way to morning service. He peered eagerly. There had been no answer to his letter; it was a month; he was surprisingly uneasy. But there was nothing in the mail-box, so he swept along to the vestry-room, and got into his cassock and read service to the handful of people in the chapel, with a sense of sick depression which he manfully choked down at every upheaval, but which was distinctly there quite the same. Service over, there were things to be done for three hours; also there was to be a meeting in his rooms at twelve o'clock to consider the establishment of a new mission, his special interest, in the rough country at the west of the city; the rector and the bishop and two others were coming. He hurried home and up to his place, at eleven-forty-five, and gave a hasty look about to see if things were fairly proper for august people. Not that the bishop would notice. He dusted off the library table with his handkerchief, put one book discreetly on the back side of the table instead of in front, swept an untidy box of cigarettes into a drawer, and gathered up the fresh pile of wash from a chair and put it on the bed in his sleeping-room and shut the door hard. Then he gazed about with the air of a satisfied housekeeper. He lifted up a loudly ticking clock which would not go except lying on its face, and regarded it. Five minutes to twelve, and they were sure to be late. He extracted a cigarette from the drawer and lighted it; his thoughts, loosened from immediate pressure, came back slowly, surely, to the empty mailbox, his last letter, the girl whom he knew grotesquely as "August First." Why had she not written for four weeks? He had considered that question from many angles for about three weeks, and the question rose and confronted him, always new, at each leisure moment. It was disproportionate, it showed lack of balance, that it should loom so large on the horizon, with the hundred other interests, tragedies, which were there for him; but it loomed.