But the race is quick-witted and imaginative. The Greek cities which welcomed and spread Christianity carried within them much the same elements as are supplied by certain sections of the London working class—elements of restlessness, of sensibility, of passion. The mere intermingling of races, which a modern capital shares with those old towns of Asia Minor, predisposes the mind to a greater openness and receptiveness, whether for good or evil.
As the weeks passed on, and after the first inevitable despondency produced by strange surroundings and an unwonted isolation had begun to wear off, Robert often found himself filled with a strange flame and ardour of hope! But his first steps had nothing to do with religion. He made himself quickly felt in the night-school, and as soon as he possibly could he hired a large room at the back of their existing room, on the same floor, where, on the recreation evenings, he might begin the story-telling, which had been so great a success at Murewell. The story-telling struck the neighbourhood as a great novelty. At first only a few youths straggled in from the front room, where dominoes and draughts and the illustrated papers held seductive sway. The next night the number was increased, and by the fourth or fifth evening the room was so well filled both by boys and a large contingent of artisans, that it seemed well to appoint a special evening in the week for story-telling, or the recreation room would have been deserted.
In these performances Elsmere's aim had always been twofold—the rousing of moral sympathy and the awakening of the imaginative power pure and simple. He ranged the whole world for stories. Sometimes it would be merely some feature of London life itself—the history of a great fire, for instance, and its hairbreadth escapes; a collision in the river; a string of instances as true and homely and realistic as they could be made of the way in which the poor help one another. Sometimes it would be stories illustrating the dangers and difficulties of particular trades—a colliery explosion and the daring of the rescuers; incidents from the life of the great Northern ironworks, or from that of the Lancashire factories; or stories of English country life and its humours, given sometimes in dialect—Devonshire, or Yorkshire, or Cumberland—for which he had a special gift. Or, again, he would take the sea and its terrors—the immortal story of the Birkenhead; the deadly plunge of the Captain; the records of the lifeboats, or the fascinating story of the ships of science, exploring step by step, through miles of water, the past, the inhabitants, the hills and valleys of that underworld, that vast Atlantic bed, in which Mont Blanc might be buried without showing even his topmost snowfield above the plain of waves. Then at other times it would be the simple frolic and fancy of fiction—fairy tale and legend, Greek myth or Icelandic saga, episodes from Walter Scott, from Cooper, from Dumas; to be followed perhaps on the next evening by the terse and vigorous biography of some man of the people—of Stephenson or Cobden, of Thomas Cooper or John Bright, or even of Thomas Carlyle.
One evening, some weeks after it had begun, Hugh Flaxman, hearing from Rose of the success of the experiment, went down to hear his new acquaintance tell the story of Monte Cristo's escape from the Château d'If. He started an hour earlier than was necessary, and with an admirable impartiality he spent that hour at St. Wilfrid's hearing vespers. Flaxman had a passion for intellectual or social novelty; and this passion was beguiling him into a close observation of Elsmere. At the same time he was crossed and complicated by all sorts of fastidious conservative fibres, and when his friends talked rationalism, it often gave him a vehement pleasure to maintain that a good Catholic or Ritualist service was worth all their arguments, and would outlast them. His taste drew him to the Church, so did a love of opposition to current 'isms.' Bishops counted on him for subscriptions, and High Church divines sent him their pamphlets. He never refused the subscriptions, but it should be added that with equal regularity he dropped the pamphlets into his waste-paper basket. Altogether a not very decipherable person in religious matters—as Rose had already discovered.
The change from the dim and perfumed spaces of St. Wilfrid's to the bare warehouse room with its packed rows of listeners was striking enough. Here were no bowed figures, no recueillement. In the blaze of crude light every eager eye was fixed upon the slight elastic figure on the platform, each change in the expressive face, each gesture of the long arms and thin flexible hands, finding its response in the laughter, the attentive silence, the frowning suspense of the audience. At one point a band of young roughs at the back made a disturbance, but their neighbours had the offenders quelled and out in a twinkling, and the room cried out for a repetition of the sentences which had been lost in the noise. When Dantes, opening his knife with his teeth, managed to cut the strings of the sack, a gasp of relief ran through the crowd; when at last he reached terra firma there was a ringing cheer.
'What is he, d'ye know?' Flaxman heard a mechanic ask his neighbour, as Robert paused for a moment to get breath, the man jerking a grimy thumb in the story-teller's direction meanwhile. 'Seems like a parson somehow. But he ain't a parson.'
'Not he,' said the other laconically. 'Knows better. Most of 'em as comes down 'ere stuffs all they have to say as full of goody-goody as an egg's full of meat. If he wur that sort you wouldn't catch me here. Never heard him say anything in the "dear brethren" sort of style, and I've been 'ere most o' these evenings and to his lectures besides.'
'Perhaps he's one of your d—d sly ones,' said the first speaker dubiously. 'Means to shovel it in by and by.'
'Well, I don't know as I couldn't stand it if he did,' returned his companion. 'He'd let other fellers have their say, anyhow.'