Ivy looked with puzzled, thoughtful eyes, which this morning, unusually, were observing people rather than their clothes, at the rest of the congregation, her own brothers and sisters first. The young Delmers were several in number; there was Betty, who had just left school, and showed no signs of "doing" anything, except her hair, the flowers, and occasionally the lamps. For the rest, she played tennis for prizes and hockey for Bucks, went out to tea, and when in doubt dyed her clothes or washed the dogs. There was Charlie, at Cambridge. Charlie was of those for whom the Great War had been allowed to take the place of the Littlego, which was fortunate in his case, as he had managed to get through the one but would probably in no circumstances have got through the other. And there was Reggie, who had got through neither, but had been killed at Cambrai in November, 1917. There were also some little ones, Jane and John, aged twelve and eleven, who, though separated by the length of a seat, still continued to hold communication by Morse, and Jelly, who was named for a once famous admiral and whose age cannot be specified. Jelly was small and stout, sat between his mother and Ivy and stared at his father in the choir-stalls, and from time to time lifted up his voice and laughed, as if he were at a Punch and Judy show.
On the whole an agreeable family, and well-intentioned (though Ivy and Betty quarrelled continuously and stole each other's things), but certainly to be numbered among the simple, who were urged to get understanding. Would they ever get it? That was the question, for them and for the whole congregation here present, from the smallest, grubbiest school-child furtively sucking bulls'-eyes and wiping its sticky hands upon its teacher's skirt, to the vicar in the pulpit, giving out his text.
"The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God"; that was the text. Ivy saw a little smile cross the clever and conceited face of Mr. Amherst as it was given out. He settled himself down to listen, expectant of entertainment. He believed that he was in luck. For Mr. Amherst, who did not say in his heart that there was no God, because even in his heart he scorned the affirmation of the obvious, was of those who are sure that all members of the Christian Church are fools (unlike Mr. Arnold Bennett, who tries and fails, he did not even try to think of them as intellectual equals), so he avoided, where he could, the study of clever Christians, and welcomed the evidences of weakness of intellect that crossed his path. He believed that this was going to be a foolish sermon, which, besides amusing them all, would help him in his article on Organised Religion.
Ivy could not help watching the End House people. Somehow she knew how the sermon was affecting them. She didn't think it funny, but she suspected that they would. Her father wasn't as clever as they were; that was why he failed to say anything that could impress them except as either dull or comic. Brains again. How much they mattered. Clergymen ought to have brains; it seemed very important. They ought to know how to appeal to rich and poor, high and low, wise and simple. This extraordinary thing called religion—(Ivy quite newly and unusually saw it as extraordinary, seeing it for a moment with the eyes of the End House, to all of whom, except Miss Ponsonby and, presumably, Cyril Grammont, it was like fairy lore, like Greek mythology, mediæval archaic nonsense)—this extraordinary lore and the more extraordinary force behind it, was in the hands, mainly (like everything else), of incompetents, clerical and lay, who did not understand it themselves and could not help others to do so. They muddled about with it, as Miss Pomfrey muddled about with office papers.... It would not be surprising if the force suddenly demolished them all, like lightning....
But such speculations were foreign to Ivy, and she forgot them in examining the hat of Mrs. Peterson, the grocer's wife, which was so noticeable in its excessive simplicity—its decoration consisted wholly of home-grown vegetables—as to convince beholders that Mr. Peterson had not, as some falsely said, made a fortune during the war by cornering margarine.
2
Mr. Delmer was talking about the worst form of unwisdom—Atheism; a terrible subject to him, and one he approached with diffidence but resolution, in the face of the unusual pew-full just below him.
"It is an extraordinary thing," he was saying, "that there are those who actually deny the existence of God. We have, surely, only to think of the immeasurable spaces of the universe—the distance He has set between one thing and another.... It is reported of the Emperor Napoleon that, looking up at the stars one night, he remarked...." Ivy, who had heard this remark of the Emperor Napoleon's before, let her attention wander again to the hats of Mrs. Peterson and others. When she listened once more, the vicar had left Napoleon, though he was still dealing with the heavenly bodies.
"If an express train, performing sixty miles an hour, were to start off from this planet—were such a thing possible to imagine, which of course it is not—towards the moon, and continue its journey without stops until it arrived, it would reach its destination, according to the calculations of scientists, in exactly 1 year, 8 months, 26 days." (Ivy, who had left school lately enough to remember the distance set by the creator between the earth and the moon, began to work this out in her head; she did not think that her father had got it quite right.) "And, in the face of this, there are those who say that God does not exist. A further thought, yet more wonderful. If the same train, travelling at the same rapid rate, were to leave this earth again, this time for the sun, the time it would take over this journey would be—I ask you, if you can, to imagine it, my friends—no less than 175 years, 1 week, and 6 days...." (Ivy gave it up; it was too difficult without pencil and paper.) "Is it possible that, knowing this, there are still those who doubt God? Yet once more. Imagine, if you can, this train again starting forth, this time bound for the planet Jupiter. Scientists tell us, and we must believe it" (All right, thought Ivy, with relief, if he'd got it out of a book), "that such a journey would take, if performed when Jupiter was at its furthest, 1097 years, 9 months, 2 weeks, 5 days, 10 hours, and a fraction. Can it really be that, confronted with the dizzy thought of these well-nigh incredibly lengthy journeys from one heavenly body to another, there are yet men and women who attribute the universe to the blind workings of what they are pleased to call the Forces of Nature? I ask you to consider earnestly, could any force but God have conceived and executed such great distances? And Jupiter, my friends, is comparatively near at hand. Take instead one of those little (but only apparently little) nameless stars twinkling in the firmament. Imagine our train starting off into space once more...."
Ivy failed to imagine this; her attention was occupied with the End House seat. The train's last journey had been too much for the tottering self-control of the Grammont family and Vernon Prideaux (nothing ever broke down Mr. Amherst's self-control, and Pansy's thoughts were elsewhere). Prideaux's head rested on his hand, as if he were lost in thought; Kitty and Anthony were shaking, unobtrusively but unmistakably, and Cyril's fine, supercilious chin, set firmly, was quivering. Cyril had, from childhood, had more self-control than the other two, and he was further sustained by his conviction that it would be unthinkably bad form for a Catholic to attend a Protestant service and laugh at it in public.