The Four Roads

by Sheila Kaye-Smith

Mr. Sumption could never pass the forge, and the glow and roar of sparks from its chimney would call him over many a field, from Galleybird or Harebeating, or even from the doors of sick people—if they were not very sick. He was a blacksmith’s son.

His father had worked the smithy at the cross-roads by Bethersden in Kent, and Ezra Sumption had grown up in the smell of hoof-parings and the ring of smitten iron. His sketchy education finished, he had taken his place beside his father at the anvil—he had held the meek tasselled hoofs of the farm-horses, he had worked the great bellows that sent the flames roaring up the chimney like Judgment Day, he had swung the heavy smith’s hammer with an arm that in a few years grew lustier than his dad’s, and in time had come to cast as good iron and clap it on as surely as any smith in Kent.

But during his adolescence strange things had grown with his bulk and girth. Lonely and Bible-bred, he came to work strange dreams into the roaring furnace and clanging iron. In those sheeting, belching flames he came to see the presage of that day which should burn like an oven, the burning fiery furnace of Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego, through which only those could walk unsinged who had with them the Son of God. When he swung the hammer above his head he swung God’s judgment down on the molten iron, shaping out of its fiery torment a form of use. When the horse clumped out of the smithy with the new iron on his hoofs, he felt that there went a soul saved, a child of God passed through fire into service.

He became “queer.” He spoke his thoughts, and in time preached them to the men who brought their horses to be shod. His father jeered at him, his mother was afraid, but the minister of a neighbouring chapel took him up. He thought he had found a rustic saint. He invited young Sumption to his house, taught him, and encouraged him to enter the ministry. The parents were flattered by the pastor’s notice, and he found little difficulty in persuading them to let their boy leave the forge and train as a minister of the Particular Baptists.

Rather bewildered and scared at the new life before him, young Ezra Sumption, comely, burly, shock-headed, brown-skinned as a mushroom in a wet field, passed into a training college of the sect, and emerged a full-blown pastor, with black clothes on his unwieldy limbs and a tongue for ever struggling with the niceties of English speech. He was a great disappointment to his benefactor, for the smith in him had triumphantly survived all genteel training and theological examinations; he was to all intents the same boy who had heard voices in the fire and had preached to the carters. His manners and conversation had slightly improved, and his imaginings had been given a dose of dogma, but his rough uncouthness, his “queerness” remained as before. He was an utter failure as assistant pastor in a chapel at Dover—the congregation was shocked by the violence and vulgarity of his forge-born similes, his Judgment Day appeals, all the spate and fume of the old Doomsday doctrines which were fast dying out of Nonconformity. He pined for the country, and seemed unable to conform to town habits. On his holidays he went back to the forge and helped his father with the shoeing as if he had never worn a black coat. It was on one of these holidays that he finally damned himself.

In a cottage at Ihornden where he had gone to visit a sick woman he met a gipsy girl of the Rossarmescroes or Hearns. Her people had given up their wandering life, and settled down in the neighbourhood, where they owned several cottages. Nevertheless, to marry her, as Sumption did soon after their third meeting, was his pastoral suicide. He took her with him to Dover, where they were both miserable for a few months. Then he had to give up his post. They returned to the forge at Bethersden, where Sumption would have liked to become a blacksmith again, if it had not been for the continual restless yearning of the Word within him, that drop of the divine which had somehow mixed with his clay, and made him drunken.

At the close of the year Meridian Sumption died at the birth of her child. They had been ideally happy in their short married life, in spite of the cage-bars of circumstances and the drivings of the Word which divided them as in the beginning it had divided the waters from the earth. After her death he became “queerer” than ever. He roamed from village to village, preaching to farmers, gipsies, labourers, tinkers, all who would hear him and some who would not—leaving his child in his mother’s care.

Six years later the death of his father and mother made it necessary that he should take the boy—named grotesquely Jeremiah Meridian, as if to show his double origin in religion and vagabondage. At the same time his first patron, the minister of Bethersden, offered to recommend him for the pastorate of the Particular Baptist Chapel at Sunday Street near Dallington. His conscience had long grieved over the vagaries of his blacksmith saint, and in this empty pastorate he saw a way of settling both. Sumption had acquired a certain fame as a preacher among the ’dens of Kent, candidates for the Particular Ministry were not so many as they used to be, and the pastorate of Sunday Street, with its dwindling, bumpkin congregation, country loneliness, and small revenues, was hard to fill. After various difficulties, the new minister arrived with his black-eyed, swarthy child. He had grown tired of his wanderings, and had conceived an erratic, arbitrary affection for this pledge of gipsy love. He looked forward to a settled country life and to preaching the Word in his own Bethel.

The villagers, for the most part, liked him. His manners offended them, and as they were mostly Church-people they seldom came to his chapel except on wet Sundays, when it meant too much dirt and trouble to go to hear old Mr. Foxe at Dallington or young Mr. Poullett-Smith at Brownbread Street. But from the first he was as one of themselves, treated with no respect and much kindness. He was seldom invited to sick-beds or to officiate at funerals or marriages, but he never lacked an invitation to a Harvest Supper or Farmers’ Club Dinner. For his sake the neighbourhood tolerated the villainies of his Jerry, a throw-back to the poaching, roving, thieving Rossarmescroes. None the less, they were glad when at the outbreak of war he went to work in a munition factory, first in London, then, through a series of not very creditable wanderings, to Erith. Only the minister grieved, for he loved Jerry as he had loved no human thing since his mother died in the little apple-smelling room above the smithy. He was not always kind to the boy, and the arm which had wielded the hammer so lustily had on one or two shocking occasions nearly broken the bones he loved. But he had for his son a half-spiritual, half-animal affection, and the villagers pitied him when the boy went, though they were glad to see him go.