“Zachariah, I heard Mr. Bradshaw as well as yourself; I am a member of the church just as much as you are, and I don’t think it becoming of you to preach to me as if you were a minister.” Her voice rose and became shriller as she went on. “I will not stand it. Who are you that you should talk to me so?—bad enough to bring me down here to die, without treating me as if I were an unconverted character. Oh! if I had but a home to go to!” and she covered her face with her apron and became hysterical.
What a revelation! By this time he had looked often into the soul of the woman whom he had chosen—the woman with whom he was to be for ever in this world—and had discovered that there was nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing which answered anything in himself with a smile of recognition; but he now looked again, and found something worse than emptiness. He found lurking in the obscure darkness a reptile with cruel fangs which at any moment might turn upon him when he was at his weakest and least able to defend himself. He had that in him by nature which would have prompted him to desperate deeds. He could have flung himself from her with a curse, or even have killed himself in order to escape from his difficulty. But whatever there was in him originally had been changed. Upon the wild stem had been grafted a nobler slip, which drew all its sap from the old root, but had civilised and sweetened its acrid juices. He leaned over his wife, caressed her, gave her water, and restored her.
“God knows,” he said, “I did not mean to preach to you. God in heaven knows I need that somebody should preach to me.” He knelt down before her as she remained leaning back in the chair, and he repeated the Lord’s Prayer: “Give us this day our daily bread. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us.” But will it be believed that as he rose from his knees, before he had actually straightened his limbs, two lines from the “Corsair” flashed into his mind, not particularly apposite, but there they were:
“She rose—she sprung—she clung to his embrace
Till his heart heaved beneath her hidden face?”
Whence had they descended? He was troubled at their sudden intrusion, and he went silently to the window, moodily gazing into the street. His wife, left to herself, recovered, and prepared supper. There was no reconciliation, at least on her side. She was not capable of reconciliation. Her temper exhausted itself gradually. With her the storm never broke up nobly and with magnificent forgetfulness into clear spaces of azure, with the singing of birds and with hot sunshine turning into diamonds every remaining drop of the deluge which had threatened ruin; the change was always rather to a uniformly obscured sky and a cold drizzle which lasted all day.
The next morning he renewed his quest. He was away all day long, but he had no success. He was now getting very anxious. He was expecting his furniture, which he had directed to be sent to the inn where they had first stayed, and he would have to pay for the carriage. His landlord had insisted on a week’s rent beforehand, so that, putting aside the sum for the carrier, he had now two pounds left. He thought of appealing to his friends; but he had a great horror of asking for charity, and could not bring himself to do it.
The third, fourth, and fifth day passed, with no result. On the seventh day he found that his goods had come; but he decided not to move, as it meant expense. He took away a chest of clothes, and remained where he was. By way of recoil from the older doctrine that suffering does men good, it has been said that it does no good. Both statements are true, and both untrue. Many it merely brutalises. Half the crime of the world is caused by suffering, and half its virtues are due to happiness. Nevertheless suffering, actual personal suffering, is the mother of innumerable beneficial experiences, and unless we are so weak that we yield and break, it extracts from us genuine answers to many questions which, without it, we either do not put to ourselves, or, if they are asked, are turned aside with traditional replies. A man who is strong and survives can hardly pace the pavements of a city for days searching for employment, his pocket every day becoming lighter, without feeling in after life that he is richer by something which all the universities in the world could not have given him. The most dramatic of poets cannot imagine, even afar off, what such a man feels and thinks, especially if his temperament be nervous and foreboding. How foreign, hard, repellent, are the streets in which he is a stranger, alone amidst a crowd of people all intent upon their own occupation, whilst he has none! At noon, when business is at its height, he, with nothing to do, sits down on a seat in an open place, or, may be, on the doorstep of an empty house, unties the little parcel he has brought with him, and eats his dry bread. He casts up in his mind the shops he has visited; he reflects that he has taken all the more promising first, and that not more than two or three are left. He thinks of the vast waste of the city all round him; its miles of houses; and he has a more vivid sense of abandonment than if he were on a plank in the middle of the Atlantic. Towards the end of the afternoon the pressure in the offices and banks increases; the clerks hurry hither and thither; he has no share whatever in the excitement; he is an intrusion. He lingers about aimlessly, and presently the great tide turns outwards and flows towards the suburbs. Every vehicle which passes him is crowded with happy folk who have earned their living and are going home. He has earned nothing. Let anybody who wants to test the strength of the stalk of carle hemp in him try it by the wringing strain of a day thus spent! How humiliating are the repulses he encounters! Most employers to whom a request is made for something to do prefer to treat it as a petition for aims, and answer accordingly. They understand what is wanted before a word is spoken, and bawl out “No! Shut the door after you.” One man to whom Zachariah applied was opening his letters. For a moment he did not pay the slightest attention, but as Zachariah continued waiting, he shouted with an oath, “What do you stand staring there for? Be off!” There was once a time when Zachariah would have stood up against the wretch; but he could not do it now, and he retreated in silence. Nevertheless, when he got out into the Street he felt as if he could have rushed back and gripped the brute’s throat till he had squeezed the soul out of his carcass. Those of us who have craved unsuccessfully for permission to do what the Maker of us all has fitted us to do alone understand how revolutions are generated. Talk about the atrocities of the Revolution! All the atrocities of the democracy heaped together ever since the world began would not equal, if we had any gauge by which to measure them, the atrocities perpetrated in a week upon the poor, simply because they are poor; and the marvel rather is, not that there is every now and then a September massacre at which all the world shrieks, but that such horrors are so infrequent. Again, I say, let no man judge communist or anarchist till he has asked for leave to work, and a “Damn your eyes!” has rung in his ears.
Zachariah had some self-respect; he was cared for by God, and in God’s Book was a registered decree concerning him. These men treated him as if he were not a person, an individual soul, but as an atom of a mass to be swept out anywhere, into the gutter—into the river. He was staggered for a time. Hundreds and thousands of human beings swarmed past him, and he could not help saying to himself as he looked up to the grey sky, “Is it true, then? Does God really know anything about me? Are we not born by the million every week, like spawn, and crushed out of existence like spawn? Is not humanity the commonest and cheapest thing in the world?” But as yet his faith was unshaken, and he repelled the doubt as a temptation of Satan. Blessed is the man who can assign promptly everything which is not in harmony with himself to a devil, and so get rid of it. The pitiful case is that of the distracted mortal who knows not what is the degree of authority which his thoughts and impulses possess; who is constantly bewildered by contrary messages, and has no evidence as to their authenticity. Zachariah had his rule still; the suggestion in the street was tried by it; found to be false; was labelled accordingly, and he was relieved.
The dread of the real, obvious danger was not so horrible as a vague, shapeless fear which haunted him. It was a coward enemy, for it seized him when he was most tired and most depressed. What is that nameless terror? Is it a momentary revelation of the infinite abyss which surrounds us; from the sight of which we are mercifully protected by a painted vapour, by an illusion that unspeakable darkness which we all of us know to exist, but which we hypocritically deny, and determine never to confess to one another? Here again, however, Zachariah had his advantage over others. He had his precedent. He remembered that quagmire in the immortal Progress into which, if even a good man falls, he can find no bottom; he remembered that gloom so profound “that ofttimes, when he lifted up his foot to set forward, he knew not where or upon what he should set it next;” he remembered the flame and smoke, the sparks and hideous noises, the things that cared not for Christian’s sword, so that he was forced to betake himself to another weapon called All-prayer; he remembered how that Christian “was so confounded that he did not know his own voice;” he remembered the voice of a man as going before, saying, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear none ill, for Thou art with me.” Lastly, he remembered that by-and-by the day broke, and Christian cried, “He hath turned the shadow of death into the morning.” He remembered all this; he could connect his trouble with the trouble of others; he could give it a place in the dispensation of things, and could therefore lift himself above it.
He had now been in Manchester a fortnight, and his little store had dwindled down to five shillings. It was Saturday night. On the Sunday, as his last chance, he meant to write to Mr. Bradshaw. He went out on the Sunday morning, and had persuaded his wife to accompany him. They entered the first place of worship they saw. It was a Methodist chapel, and the preacher was Arminian in the extreme. It was the first time Zachariah had ever been present at a Methodist service. The congregation sang with much fervour, and during the prayer, which was very long, they broke in upon it with ejaculations of their own, such as “Hear him, O Lord!”—“Lord have mercy on us!”