By the Same Author: 
 
 Novels: 
 PASSION 
 DEMOCRACY 
 
 Plays: 
 MY COUNTRY 
 
 Books of Travel, etc.: 
 THE SOUL OF DENMARK 
 LABOUR: THE GIANT WITH THE 
 FEET OF CLAY 
 
GODS 
 
GODS 
 
 BY 
 
 SHAW DESMOND 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 1921 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 Printed by 
 
 J. J. Little & Ives Company 
 New York, U. S. A. 
 
To the Unknown God 
 
 463416 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PART I 
 LONDON 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I READING AND PRAYER 3 
 
 II BITTER-BLACK 6 
 
 III A DAY IN THE LIFE or JEMMY FONTAINE .... 15 
 
 IV BLOOD AND FIRE 23 
 
 V A DAY IN THE LIFE OF PARIS ASTHAR 37 
 
 VI THE POWERS OF DARKNESS 45 
 
 VII FINN WRESTLES WITH THE DEVIL ' oo 
 
 VIII "BRANDS FROM THE BURNING" 73 
 
 IX THE FIGHT FOR POWER 84 
 
 PART II 
 IRELAND 
 
 X IRELAND 99 
 
 XI THE LAND OF SHADOWS in 
 
 XII IMPERIAL DOGMA 122 
 
 XIII EAST AND WEST 133 
 
 XIV THE HUNGER-LINE 140 
 
 XV THE HOUSE OF DREAMS 156 
 
 XVI "AND THE GATES OF HELL ..." 167 
 
 XVII GHOST-HUNTING 178 
 
 XVIII PAUDEEN 19 
 
 ix 
 
x CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 XIX HYSSOP AND VINEGAR 197 
 
 XX ELLEN MASTERS ,207 
 
 XXI FAITH AND FINANCE 219 
 
 XXII SOULS RECALCITRANT 226 
 
 XXIII THE SOUL or A NATION 231 
 
 XXIV "THIRTY PIECES OF SILVER" 235 
 
 XXV IN THE MELTING POT 243 
 
 XXVI "Goo or BATTLES" 252 
 
 PART III 
 LOVE AND DEATH 
 
 XXVII OUT OF THE GREEN WATERS 269 
 
 XXVIII THE WAKE 280 
 
 XXIX IN THE SHADOW OF THE OLD CHAPEL 285 
 
 XXX "!N SICKNESS AND HEALTH" 289 
 
 XXXI JEMMY FONTAINE DIES IN HARNESS 294 
 
 XXXII MELLERAY 299 
 
 XXXIII THE FIGHT TO LIVE 307 
 
 XXXIV THE CLEANSING OF TREVOR TITTERLING '312 
 
 XXXV THE BIRTH OF FINN 3^7 
 
 XXXVI THE STORY OF FINN 322 
 
 XXXVII THE STORY OF FINN (CONTINUED) 326 
 
 XXXVIII THE PASSING OF FINN 331 
 
 XXXIX THE UNKNOWN GOAL 334 
 
PART I 
 LONDON 
 
GODS 
 
 READING AND PRAYER 
 
 THE drone of his father's voice came to him where he knelt, 
 losing itself in the zooming of the bee, a great velvety-backed 
 fellow that clambered through the Marechal Niel outside in the 
 scented air of a London June, lulling him to sleep and to 
 dreams. 
 
 "Oh God! have mercy upon us poor miserable sinners . . . 
 have mercy . . . mercy. . . . Send down thy lightnings upon 
 the stiff-necked and wicked. ..." 
 
 The boy found himself checked into a consciousness through 
 which began to steal, irrelevantly, questions the questions he 
 was beginning to ask "God." Who was God? 
 
 Was He? 
 
 The interrogation hooked itself incredibly into the entity 
 that was Finn Fontaine, dragging him into full consciousness. 
 
 "... save us from the worm that dieth not and the fire 
 that is not quenched. ..." 
 
 He could see his father's trousers, of nondescript seediness, 
 where he crouched small and shrunken before the Lord. Be- 
 yond, his mother, unyielding, held herself stiffly on the thin 
 carpet. It was as though he had seen them for the first time. 
 They were strangers hostile. 
 
 But God? 
 
 There was the hairy sackclothed giant which had material- 
 ised in the twilight of babyhood, holding Itself aloof and men- 
 acing. That had never been his, though it had held itself, 
 remote, bogeyish, through his seventeen years of life. . . , 
 
 But God? 
 
- 4 GODS 
 
 There had been those others, those dark playmates of his 
 dreams, sleeping and waking, friendly devils, great and tiny, 
 who had flitted with him through the golden shadow of Ad- 
 ventureland. With them he had travelled the world around, 
 scaling mountains, leaping precipices, hosting in enchanted 
 castles. Or sometimes, lifting with them over its fleeting edge, 
 he had seen it unroll beneath him where the lakes shone like 
 mercury in the forests of night as he chased towards the sun 
 of red copper that flaunted its first rays upwards over the rim 
 of the darkened earth. Them he loved. . . . 
 
 But God? 
 
 There was the little Methodist chapel down the road with 
 an Indweller, fiery, local, implacable, under whom his father 
 cowered in those dismayed intervals when, to the disgust of his 
 wife and the glory of God, he broke out from the great dead 
 Church of the Established, which held itself in aristocratic 
 segregation a little along the main road of the London suburb 
 on the right hand side as you pass the painted sign of the 
 "White Hart." 
 
 But God? 
 
 His eye, roving, caught the tiny heap of saintliness and frayed 
 silk which was his grandmother and which bunched itself on 
 its knees of eighty winters between its son and grandson in 
 sweet humility. From where he knelt, his eye, peering through 
 the loophole of thumb and forefinger, searched the network of 
 indigo that veined itself over the diminutive gnarled hands 
 where they pressed themselves against the eyes of china-blue, 
 filmed by the tears of pity and age. Yes, perhaps there was 
 God the God of forgiveness and love the God of childlike 
 hymns and praiseful psalms quavered in gentle Irish trebles 
 by a fragile figure which smiled to him in the mornings, minute 
 on the high white altar of the bed, from the edge of which 
 fell the three steps of ascent and descent. 
 
 But he was not the God of Father Lestrange, the slender 
 dark Jesuit of the rolling red-lit eye, who, mistaking him for 
 a good Catholic, had visited him when he lay sick of the 
 chicken-pox. That was another kind of God, a God of strange 
 harshnesses and of as strange indulgences, a God for whom 
 good and evil were the same. 
 
 Nor was he that gloomy exclusive devil of Mrs. Titterling, 
 who concerned himself, alone of the sons of men, with the 
 
READING AND PRAYER 5 
 
 Spirit's Elect the God of a dreadful simplicity who, without 
 blench, unrevengeful, damned the race to torture eternal, 
 plucking from their midst the preordained of the Elect brands 
 from the burning. 
 
 "Brands from the burning." How often had he not been 
 plucked from the burning by the God of his savings by grace 
 the taskmaster who alternately cajoled and terrorised his 
 submission by burning fire and pearly gate. But God? 
 
 From the first floor came the tap-tap of the lodger's mallet. 
 Strom, the Swedish sculptor, who worshipped a God so in- 
 effably remote that He could not even be named. A nameless 
 God. 
 
 But God? 
 
 Where was He? Who was He? Why was He? 
 
 Was He at all?^ 
 
 That was the interrogative to which he always came back. 
 
 "... and make us happy ever after for Christ's sake. 
 Amen." 
 
 His thoughts were broken by the pushing back of his father's 
 chair as he rose from his knees after communion with infinity. 
 He looked down at the little, shrunken head with its fringe 
 of scanty beard and whisker out of which the eyes of liquid 
 grey glanced at him puzzled, fleetingly, as though they were 
 ashamed, in the way that they had; caught the stiff made 
 tie of black silk through the straggling hair, the frock coat 
 of Sunday's shabby gentility, the bagging of the foreshortened 
 trousers which lifted themselves indecently over the buniony 
 boots. He looked at his mother, the predominating partner 
 by a head, in her Sabbath rigidity of watered silk, with the 
 eyes of hard brown that gazed in truculent virtue out over his 
 grandmother. 
 
II 
 
 BITTER-BLACK 
 
 JAMES FONTAINE, or "Jemmy," as he was known to his 
 mother and wife and to nobody else in the world, for he had 
 few friends and no intimates, was a common soldier in that 
 grey army of conformity the London middle-middle class, the 
 class of the little huckstering commission man, the clerk, and 
 the counter-jumper the army of the Unskilled. 
 
 Jemmy had learnt little about life and less from it. They 
 had taught him in the schools of the nation to read a little, 
 to write a little, to cipher a little his duty towards his God, 
 whom he knew intimately, and towards his neighbour, whom 
 he did not know at all, and turned out the finished article at 
 the age of fourteen or so to be a credit to itself and to its 
 country in a world of Free Competition and Pure Religion. 
 There were also educational frills in respect of one's duty to 
 one's betters. 
 
 The Finished Article did its best. That is to say, it was 
 flung neck and crop into the tin tacks and 'orneriness of a 
 hardware house in the Borough, whence it emerged, slightly dis- 
 hevelled as to moral and pocket, some three years afterwards, 
 to be precipitated through a series of experiences of a uniform- 
 ity calculated to destroy any belief in human nature it might 
 originally have possessed, and Jemmy Fontaine was a man of 
 incredible belief and of as incredible suspicion. It was not that 
 Jemmy was unsteady the whole bent of his nature and up- 
 bringing was "the safe job," but he had an Irishwoman for a 
 mother, and when a man has an Irishwoman for a mother he 
 is apt to develop a jumpiness that defies even the calculation 
 of a London Cockney father. Finally, he had brought up in 
 "commissions." 
 
 Finn, who to his father was as astonishing as though he 
 had generated an archangel and who kept him in a state that 
 
 6 
 
BITTER-BLACK 7 
 
 alternated between shock and stupefaction, knew nothing of the 
 above indeed he knew nothing at all about his father except 
 that his name had been Fountain, and that his mother, who in 
 these things was sphinx-like, had issued a sort of ukase under 
 which, accompanied by the superfluity of Letters Patent, it 
 had been changed to Fontaine. "Fontainebleau, near Paris, 
 you know," she would say in polite deprecation. 
 
 It seemed that his uncle Jasper, a red hot democrat from 
 New York, feeling the need of blood for the dilution of a 
 fortune acquired under Tammany, had made a search through 
 the College of Heralds, who, for a consideration, provided him 
 with a remotely unimpeachable Huguenot ancestry. His 
 mother had even considered the possibilities of la Fontaine, but 
 Jemmy, for the first and only time in his married life, had 
 kicked at the "la." He said it was "a bit too thick," he 
 could not swallow it. 
 
 Finn had not only had to swallow the Fontaine, but "Finn 
 Nathaniel Cuthey" on the top of it. His mother had been a 
 Miss Cuthey, the daughter of an apothecary in a Nottingham- 
 shire village, with tendencies to self-annihilation which had 
 matured whilst Fanny Cuthey was still in short frocks. 
 
 "Never forget you are a Cuthey," she would say to Finn, 
 who had no difficulty in the matter as he had been daily re- 
 minded of it over a period of years by his schoolmates who 
 addressed him as "Cuthey" and as nothing else. The "Na- 
 thaniel" had been the solitary green twig of his mother's im- 
 agination, but the "Finn" was the contribution of his grand- 
 mother, who, Irish to her last hair, had, from the day he was 
 born, told Finn the story and the stories of Ireland, not for- 
 getting his immortal namesake. "We had Finns in the family," 
 said she, "when Noah was a boy and wasn't the great Finn 
 MacCoul himself wan o' thim. What more d'ye want?" The 
 argument was of course unanswerable. 
 
 The boy watched his father this Saturday afternoon "doing" 
 his coal accounts in the little back room which was half office, 
 half eating room the front room being sacred to "visits" and 
 Sunday. Despite the sun outside, the place was not so dark as 
 a coal cellar and nearly as cool. The little figure in its office 
 coat of black alpaca was buried in a mass of yellow circulars 
 which fluttered autumnally to the carpet when it moved its 
 elbows. He could almost read the bold, lying print which 
 
8 GODS 
 
 announced to a world indifferent under the July suns, that 
 "Martyr and MacGlusky's coals kept the Empire warm." He 
 could see the nice distinction which separated the definiteness 
 of Extra-Special from "Specials," a plural of non-committal, 
 and Super-Cookers from Ordinary Nuts. He knew them by 
 heart and so, although too far away to read the hateful 
 characters, he followed the thin line down to the exhaustion 
 of "Good Black House." 
 
 His mother crocheted inflexibly under the little French 
 folding doors which gave access to the skimpy garden and 
 the only light to the room, placing at intervals a hard brown 
 eye upon her husband's bald patch. 
 
 "Goodness gracious! who can it be now?" 
 
 The bell-pull always made Mrs. Fontaine jerky. Finn, who 
 acted as maid on these occasions, glimpsed with foreboding 
 the shadow that showed itself through the muslin remnant 
 which screened the semi-detachment of Ash Villa from a 
 curious suburbdom. High and thin and forbidding it hooked 
 itself into the corner of the door opening. "I'm coming in 
 it's no good, you can't keep me out!" it seemed to say. 
 
 And come in it did, with the scarecrow hat pierced by the 
 Choctaw feathers a little askew on the iron-grey tresses under 
 which the eyes stood black, arresting, its high pinched should- 
 ers cribbed by the black silk elbow cape, its hands and 
 lower arms gauntleted in black kid. Its right hand gripped 
 an umbrella which had for its handle an idol-like figure of a 
 sneering ferocity. 
 
 It was only after Aunt Bella had passed him in the narrow 
 hall that Finn discovered, crouching under her lee, his aunt 
 Maria, whose flabbiness under the concrete of her sister 
 took a consistency which left her as nearly invisible as no 
 matter. Aunt Maria had one good eye and one doubtful, 
 over the latter of which an eyelid would drop without warning, 
 leaving the semi-eclipsed orb to roll whitely and despairing, 
 and giving her a rather blackguardly expression that belied 
 her real nature, for Aunt Maria was a simple soul. 
 
 "It's the day after to-morrow and the General himself will 
 be in command, with Mr. Pickles, the American Revivalist. 
 Pickles says he's going to give them h " . . . she paused for 
 a moment in her impetuous passage through the little room into 
 which she had talked her way, circled a trifle, and then, as 
 
BITTER-BLACK 9 
 
 though overmastered by something driving at her from the 
 inside, finished the word she had begun. . . . "hell!" she said 
 as though she had exploded in the lower deeps. The white 
 jagged scar which ran from eye corner to mouth corner 
 twitched. 
 
 Aunt Maria's eye rolled piously and doubtfully at Finn. 
 
 "R-r-really, Bella!" said Mrs. Fontaine coldly expostulating. 
 Her husband's frightened face showed itself over his elbow 
 for a moment. 
 
 "I tell you what it is, Fanny what you and your Estab- 
 lished lot need is plain speech . . . and so does your canting 
 congregation. ..." She turned for a moment fiercely upon 
 her fat sister, who wilted slightly. 
 
 "Do you know 'The Bells of the Monastery,' Finn?" Aunt 
 Maria asked suddenly. 
 
 "Don't try to be diplomatic, Maria," said Bella. . . . 
 "Plain speech," she went on. "Was it not Isaiah who said: 
 'I have come to curse, not to bless to damn, not to save?' " 
 for she had a tendency in her more exalted moments to become 
 slightly blasphemic and to misquote scripture to her own ends 
 and the glory of God. "And the General is a second Isaiah," 
 she continued. "He is an instrument an instrument a 
 mouthpiece." 
 
 Mrs. Fontaine looked contemptuously at her sister. "How 
 old-fashioned you are, Bella! People don't speak about ..." 
 she hesitated a trifle "... hell in these days . . . and such 
 places. The Bishop never does." 
 
 "The Bishop!" erupted her sister. "The Bishop!" A man 
 of wrath. An apostate. A brand for the burning. His lord- 
 ship of Whitechapel." She laughed. 
 
 The laugh jarred Finn even though the Bishop of White- 
 chapel had been one of his disappointments. Dr. Goodheart 
 had not only confirmed him but had helped to prepare him 
 for the ceremony in the Forestford church. He could see now 
 the bewildered good-natured face in its halo of whisker, and 
 the bewilderment which had taken a deeper shade as Finn had 
 gradually transformed from the questioned into the questioner, 
 his lordship, too ingenuous to be ingenious, tying himself into 
 a series of theological knots which left him helpless in the 
 slightly ridiculous way that had made Finn feel mean. 
 "But one dare not question those things," he had said, and 
 
io GODS 
 
 then, more weakly. . . . "they never used to be questioned." 
 Then he had looked at the long shearing nose, the green rather 
 angry eyes, and the small pugnacious ears with the queer 
 upper-lobe depressions of the boy before him, and had been 
 silent. 
 
 But his mother with the acquisitiveness which made her 
 determined to get anything that might be going, either in 
 this world or the next, had spurred the 1 5-year doubter to 
 the altar, where he found himself in a tight pair of new brown 
 boots and a bristle of hair that refused to be soothed by 
 olive oil. Both the bishop and his mother had assured him of 
 the solemn investiture of the ceremony, the latter hinting, in 
 response to the demand for theological concreteness, at what 
 she called "possession," and so he had waited, hoping against 
 hope. He had felt the gentle hands upon his head, had held 
 his breath. . . . and then had relapsed into the torture of 
 the boots and a deeper scepticism. 
 
 And now he sat looking at the woman who had laughed. He 
 knew her history. A spoiled beauty who had thrown her 
 suitors away like used dish-clouts an ugly accident and then 
 obliteration. The acid of years the dangerous age of Indian 
 summer in which a High-church parson had unwittingly helped 
 her to find a heart and with it a passion of religion in the 
 Establishment love's labour lost hate and then the plunge 
 into Methodism and hell-fire. 
 
 That unreasoning irritation with his family gathered within 
 him like a poisonous secretion. He could see the God of 
 Aunt Bella, a sort of anthropomorphic god of leather mouth 
 and brazen lung who prayed, praised, and damned and there 
 was his father's, a variation of Aunt Bella's, but a snob and 
 his mother's, who was all snob. The God of his Aunt Maria, 
 as that of his grandmother, he could not see, though the God of 
 Father Lestrange was definite a fierce dark man of tanned 
 face and haunting smile which came and went under the flick- 
 ering fires of the open pit before him, whilst above a galaxy of 
 saints and angels set golden in the tenuous blue of the starry 
 firmament. He could never separate the Jesuit from his God 
 in a sense they were one and the same thing. 
 
 He was pulled up by a knock at the street door, which 
 Aunt Maria, who seemed to want to get out of the room, went 
 to open. There fell a sudden silence as the dark full tones 
 
BITTER-BLACK n 
 
 came from the passage, the closing of the door into the little 
 drawing-room, and then Aunt Maria, breathless, to tell them 
 that Father Lestrange was in the next room. 
 
 "The Scarlet Woman," said Aunt Bella. 
 
 Then the exodus his mother at the head, with Aunt Bella 
 on her heels, his father struggling into his second best jacket 
 as he went out with Aunt Maria panting behind, and then the 
 little grandmother bobbing serenely along. It was as though 
 something were drawing them irresistibly. 
 
 The tall man with the dark hair rolling over the high fore- 
 head which showed white against the tan of his face, stood 
 gravely to receive them, bowing ceremoniously to Mrs. Fon- 
 taine, taking in her sister Bella with the corner of an eye not 
 altogether unfriendly and Jemmy with a warm handshake, 
 which he extended to Finn with his left as to an old comrade. 
 Then, with an encouraging nod to Aunt Maria who was trying, 
 and vainly, to obliterate herself behind her sister, he went over 
 to the little silvery grandmother, smiling beautifully to her as 
 he hid the old lady's tiny hands in his big brown ones, passed 
 one of them through his arm, and led her in state to the arm- 
 chair in the corner, the little woman smiling up at him, con- 
 fiding, like a child, as he did so. 
 
 "Ah, Father," said she, "but you have the beautiful way wid 
 ye. 'Tis you that are too good to a poor old heretic like 
 meself." 
 
 "There are heretics and heretics and Catholics and Catho- 
 lics, my dear madam, and I think that some day you will find 
 prepared for you a place not far from the Lady whom we 
 Catholics love and honour above all others." There came that 
 all-understanding smile to the high dark face and the red 
 lights to the eyes, like little tongues of flame, which then 
 extinguished. 
 
 "Compromise!" ejaculated Aunt Bella triumphantly. She 
 had been moving uneasily from one foot to another like a 
 boxer waiting a chance to dart in. "And you call yourself a 
 good Catholic, Father Lestrange. I thought your Church never 
 compromised." 
 
 "Upon the unessentials, my dear madam, the unessentials. 
 . . . There is so much that is unessential," he continued 
 absently. "Compromise is the essential of all religion as of all 
 deviltry. We must compromise." 
 
12 GODS 
 
 "But not with the devil." 
 
 "It is especially with Sathanas that the Church has to com- 
 promise. If the Church didn't compromise it would never win 
 souls. Even the devil must have his due, Miss Cuthey. Poor 
 devil!" 
 
 The glittering eyes were fixed upon the priest's as those 
 of a bird on a snake's. Like so many others, Aunt Bella could 
 never make up her mind whether to hate or love the Jesuit. 
 
 "I believe you are the devil's advocate," she snapped at 
 last. 
 
 "You pay me too great honour, madam, when you make me 
 Advocatus Diaboli. His Majesty has at his command kings 
 and princes, prime ministers and bishops, and brains like that 
 of Mr. Paris Asthar. No, I do not deserve the honour." He 
 bowed in tender irony as he rolled the "r's" softly. 
 
 Jemmy Fontaine looked from one to the other, frightened 
 at all this diabolical conversation, his wife with an under- 
 ground smile at her sister's claw-clipping. 
 
 "We are all going on Monday to the Tabernacle on Kings- 
 way Waste to hear General Bliss and Billy Pickles, the Ameri- 
 can evangelist, Father Lestrange. Won't you join us?" She 
 looked at him poisonously. 
 
 "Speak for yourself, Bella," said Mrs. Fontaine with dignity 
 and slightly glancing at the priest. "I never promised any- 
 thing of the kind. Jemmy and I are Church." 
 
 "No, he's not," said Bella, "he's chapel at heart." 
 
 Jemmy Fontaine smiled nervously. 
 
 "Jemmy's Church of England," said his wife, decisively. 
 Her husband's lips quivered in mute protest. There were 
 heroic moments in Jemmy's life. 
 
 The Jesuit looked at the little man with that beautiful, sad 
 smile that brought to Finn, sitting behind, a picture of the 
 Jesus he had seen in a visit of solitary adventure to the Na- 
 tional Gallery. It was called "The Man of Compassion." He 
 felt a sympathy with his father, unexpected. 
 
 "And as I suppose Finn is also Church of England, he 
 won't be able to come either." There was something deliberate 
 in Father Lestrange's voice as he looked at Finn. The boy 
 felt something rise within him as he caught the priest's eye. 
 
 "Yes," said his mother complacently, "Finn is a good 
 Churchman. Aren't you Finn?" 
 
BITTER-BLACK 13 
 
 The priest still looked at the boy, who sat there, sullen, the 
 long strong nose challenging; the ears setting themselves a 
 trifle too closely to the large, well-balanced head. 
 
 "You're not afraid to answer, Finn, are you?" The priest 
 said it easily enough, but there was something mocking, chal- 
 lenging, in the eyes that stared at the boy. 
 
 The green eyes kindled. It was as though the look had 
 brought him to ignition. 
 
 "No!" said the boy, and shut his jaws like a trap. 
 
 "What do you mean Finn!" His mother stared at him, in- 
 credulous. "You know you believe in the Church. . . ." 
 
 "And Christianity," said the Father, still with that smile. 
 
 "I don't know what I believe!" 
 
 "Finn!" 
 
 "The boy is mad!" 
 
 "Atheist!" 
 
 "Monster! " This last from Aunt Bella. 
 
 They gazed at him as though they saw him already within 
 the mouth of the pit, his father with slackened jaw, from which 
 trickled a thin, bewildered stream all except Father Le- 
 strange. 
 
 There came a chuckle from the door, around the edge of 
 which a great nose showed itself, trembling. 
 
 Aunt Judy had, as was her custom, stolen in the back way 
 without knocking and had been listening. Aunt Judy had 
 been and still was the ugly duckling of the Cutheys, the de- 
 spised of all and the hated of Bella the beauty who took 
 her ugliness as a sort of physical affront. Aunt Judy had been 
 born with a brain in which some turn of filament had ban- 
 ished from her mind the power to believe, and given, in its 
 stead, the desire, a desire which had grown in strength and 
 hopelessness with years. She had passed from congregation to 
 congregation in her quest, and at present was in the throes of 
 the Spirit's Elect. 
 
 She came into the room, her head covered by a high round 
 hat which set itself over her nose, trembling as though it were 
 hung on wires, the all-mended clothes of her poverty hang- 
 ing from the angles of her frame, the yellow goat-like eyes 
 looking from face to face as though seeking something. 
 
 As her eyes met those of the priest, they smiled, and it was 
 strange how one forgot the grotesqueness in the smile. He took 
 
14 GODS 
 
 her warmly by the hand and led her to a corner where she 
 sat, sideways, her great nose resting against the wall paper, to 
 laugh there heartbrokenly from time to time and to draw upon 
 herself the contemptuous sniff of her sister Bella, who had al- 
 ways hated her ugliness from the days when they had been 
 children together. 
 
 "He doesn't believe," said Mrs. Fontaine as though there 
 had been no interruption. "He doesn't believe!" She pointed 
 vacantly at Finn who now sat, silent, after his outburst. 
 
 "The Zeitgeist" said the priest, smiling. "The spirit of the 
 time. The spirit of flux." There was a subtle triumph in 
 the voice. 
 
 "The bad Irish in him," said Finn's mother, vaguely. 
 
 The priest smiled beautifully. "I am an Irishman my- 
 self," he said. 
 
 "His speech bewrayeth him," murmured Aunt Maria, who 
 had a natural aversion to Irishmen, arising partly from a con- 
 fused notion as to their Church's association with the Scarlet 
 Woman. The doubtful eye, flickering, uncertain, looked at 
 him as though he were the devil as she pressed herself be- 
 hind her sister Bella, some pounds, however, exuding on either 
 side. 
 
 "But I will come with you all on Friday night," said Father 
 Lestrange, "and meet the General and Mr. Pickles, who I be- 
 lieve is generally known as Hell Fire Billy. Bliss and Pickles 
 sound like an excellent mixture." 
 
 He paused a moment, stared at the boy, and said: "Finn, 
 I am ashamed of you!" 
 
 They all seemed to breathe more freely when he had gone. 
 
Ill 
 
 I 
 A DAY IN THE LIFE OF JEMMY FONTAINE 
 
 JEMMY FONTAINE stood in the hall of Ash Villa, suffering 
 the ministrations of his wife, who was preening him for the 
 day's adventure. 
 
 And it was an adventure a very desperate breaking away 
 from the beaten paths beloved of Jemmy and his kind. 
 
 "For coals were, in the words of the unredeemable Mao 
 Glusky, a Scotsman who blended his theology with his whisky 
 to the disadvantage of the former, "going to hell," where, as 
 he remarked, "nobody wanted them." 
 
 Jemmy had been warned that the London suburb of Forest- 
 ford was a part of that Empire which was warmed by Martyr 
 and MacGlusky, and when he had inserted humbly something 
 about a combination of "slack" and "hot weather," and a 
 fainter "short weight," the MacGlusky had replied through his 
 whiskers: "We ken a' aboot that story ye can tell that to 
 the Auld Lichts." The terrible Mac, himself recusant from 
 the sect of the Auld Lichts, now hated them with a devastat- 
 ing hate and quoted them on all occasions to ignorant Sas- 
 senachs who believed him really to be referring to a South Sea 
 tribe or something of that kind. 
 
 So Jemmy was about to try soap "Beauty Soap," as the 
 angelic figures of a transparent sexlessness which lost itself in 
 the rosy dawns of the pictures which filled his bag, advertised 
 to a sceptical and unwashed world. "You buy 10 Ibs. of 
 Beauty and you get your photograph enlarged." There on 
 the rickety hall chair reclined the pattern enlarged lady her* 
 self, with features of a regularity incredible and a downcast 
 eye, who seemed to feel her position acutely. It was the lady 
 to whom, in the days that followed, when she had been hung 
 on the walls of Ash Villa, Mrs. Fontaine referred distinctly to 
 visitors as "a distant relation." 
 
 Mrs. Fontaine moved around him uneasily, dabbing with 
 
 15 
 
1 6 GODS 
 
 the clothes brush at the lapels of his frock coat, greened under 
 the suns of many summers. The trousers she left alone 
 they were past brushing, but to the top hat which under the 
 vain imagining of Mr. Fontaine "impressed the customers," she 
 devoted a torn silk handkerchief with which she repeatedly 
 caressed its fuzzy rebellion. Like her husband, Mrs. Fontaine 
 was a hopeless optimist. 
 
 But it was the boots that were Jemmy's eternal problem, 
 a problem to which during his quarter of a century's pilgrim- 
 ages on commission he had given something like the same at- 
 tention that had enabled Napoleon to carry through one of 
 his victorious campaigns. It was that other soldier of fortune 
 who said that an army marches on its belly, but Jemmy knew 
 better he knew that it marched on its boots. A fickle nature 
 had bestowed on Jemmy a pair of odd sizes in feet, which as 
 the years progressed had, under the influence of cheap boots 
 and bunions, developed a tendency to become out-sizes. So 
 it was that Jemmy had been compelled to slash his infrequent 
 boots with surgical accuracy surprising, in order to "ease" the 
 bunions which erupted through the interstices, and as Jemmy's 
 mother had always made him wear white woollen socks, the 
 result was striking. 
 
 Sometimes a pen and ink camouflaged the more flagrant 
 eruptions, but this did not help much. The situation was 
 further complicated by a perfect Vesuvius on the little toe 
 which could not be eased because it was below water level, 
 and by Mr. Blakey, who placed his boot protectors on the soles 
 of Jemmy Fontaine's aching feet, bringing up those soft corns 
 upon which he wasted, as his wife said, enough new beefsteak 
 soaked in vinegar to keep a family. 
 
 The feet of Jemmy Fontaine were in fact a problem to the 
 insolubility of which each of the four seasons made its con- 
 tribution of heat or moisture. 
 
 You see him as his wife gives him the final touches, trim- 
 ming a corner of his cuff here, running the back of her 
 thumb nail along his collar there (Jemmy had a weakness for 
 high collars which ate into the softer parts of his neck), and 
 pushing into his left hand breast pocket the original of the 
 enlarged lady, who still gazed obstinately downwards as she 
 retired into her brown paper envelope and was tucked away 
 under Jemmy's right arm. 
 
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF JEMMY FONTAINE 17 
 
 You see him with the glazed bag a trifle down by the 
 stern with Beauty and a bit of dinner, as, having been pecked 
 perfunctorily by the partner of his fortunes, he sets out down 
 the dusty road under the premonitory sting of the June sun, 
 still echoing his wife's parting admonition: "Whatever you do, 
 don't part your coat at the back when you sit down because 
 of that patch!" and, fainter, the verse he had read out that 
 morning at reading and prayer: "Not one sparrow shall fall 
 to the ground . . . not one . . . . " 
 
 This day there was an unusual palpitation in his hands, his 
 feet, and even his throat, the tremblement that always came to 
 Jemmy Fontaine when breaking new ground. It was the 
 tremblement of the gambler. Somewhere out there in the grey 
 immensity about him, veiled in the morning haze, Fortune 
 waited for him to touch, unknowing, the hem of her garment. 
 The grey eyes searched wistfully from the top of the tram 
 towards the smudge of houses that reached out from the welter 
 behind him to gather him in. Trot trot trot. Ting a 
 ling a ling. The toy tram, brave in its green and gold, 
 drawn by the horses which had not turned into the twentieth 
 century soon to dawn, became a triumphal car, its tinkling 
 bells the bells of fairyland. In his agitation, Jemmy forgot 
 his wife's injunction and parted his coat tails shamelessly. 
 
 That this neighbourhood was a regular Tom Tiddler's Ground 
 he had been told by an optimistic liar in oleographs whose 
 broken nose and baggy trousers he had met in one of his coal 
 sallies. The nose very much on one side, the eyes just clearing 
 the brim of the bowler, had said: " You Ve only got to pick it 
 up, guv'nor they fair cast it at you. I did thirty-two 'Heart's 
 Dilemmas' and fourteen 'Appy Mounting 'Omes' the fust day 
 and just look at me after a week." He had then, in his own 
 words, "touched" Jemmy for a shilling on the strength of the 
 tip and had sent him on his way suspicious but believing. 
 
 The haze had been eaten up by the sun as the green and 
 gold, its glories dimming under the Sahara thrown up by the 
 horses, trotted its way into the first of the long gullets of 
 brick and mortar lying whitey-grey in the dust of the London 
 June day. Jemmy felt his way carefully down the winding 
 stair as the tram pulled up at "The Old Girl at Home," the 
 brasses and gilding of whom stared the sun itself out of coun- 
 tenance like the brazen hussy she was. Somewhere a piano 
 
1 8 GODS 
 
 organ was playing that popular refrain "The Man that Broke 
 the Bank at Monte Carlo," trailing off the melody in runs of 
 brassy virtuosity. 
 
 Mr. Fontaine faced around the corner into the first of the 
 Kitchener and Wolseley and Victoria streets. The new 
 suburb was both loyal and martial. That it needed soap was 
 obvious. 
 
 It was with a compression of the heart-strings that Jemmy 
 knocked at his first door, after loosing the catch of the glazed 
 bag to stand it, invitingly ajar, on the doorstep and half 
 drawing the enlarged lady from her brown paper with the 
 diminutive original clasped in the left hand to prison the eye 
 that opened. 
 
 But no eye appeared. The little twenty-pound a-year was 
 as fast bolted, banned, and barred as any castle of them all. 
 
 That "Englishman's home is his castle," of which Jemmy 
 despite his Irish blood had boasted in moments of imperial 
 pridefulness after reading it each morning in "The Earth," the 
 authoritative halfpenny, which occupied a place a little lower 
 than the angels of the Bible that was his only other mental 
 nutriment took a new significance, especially after, the sun 
 getting up and the morning drawing on, he found other Eng- 
 lishmen's homes in the bricks and mortar that seemed to wrap 
 itself, labyrinthine, about him. 
 
 Gaining courage with the despair which was beginning to 
 haunt the pit of his stomach like a seasickness, Jemmy would 
 knock again and yet again at these fastnesses, even going the 
 length of peering from the twelve by four front garden into 
 the Holy of Holies screened by the same starched curtains, 
 before which the Lower Middle Class had erected its altar 
 the waxen apple; the stuffed bird; the plaster statue; all 
 chastely encased in glass and standing upon the altar cloth of 
 the antimacassar. And behind, dimly, its fantasy run riot in 
 the chairs of red velvet, the bric-a-brac of the mantelshelf, and 
 the "Heart's Dilemmas" and "Happy Mountain Homes" of 
 the man with the broken nose. 
 
 Not that all the doors were adamantine. 
 
 Sometimes a small child would appear, upon whose dirty 
 head Jemmy would expend his blandishments, partly for busi- 
 ness purposes (he had come to be a perfect Machiavelli, had 
 Jemmy) but partly from nature. Once, after a prolonged salvo 
 
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF JEMMY FONTAINE 19 
 
 on the knocker, treading on the heels of several shorter ones, 
 the door had opened without warning, disclosing to the dis- 
 mayed Jemmy the enraged and hairy-breasted owner in open 
 shirt, trousers, and bare feet, and, without parley, had as 
 suddenly shut with a report like a gun. Some let themselves 
 ajar and as silently closed some gaped at him: "Now then, 
 wot is it this time!" Some were kind, but had no money; 
 others may have had the money but certainly were unkind. 
 And one the one that had made him flush with shame had 
 offered him a cup of tea. The refusal that met the offer had a 
 dignity of its own which impressed the giver to say, apolo- 
 getic, that she had only done it "for Christ's sake," which 
 but added insult to injury for Jemmy was, in his own way, 
 as proud as Lucifer. 
 
 But there was the meeting in the Tabernacle that evening 
 which somehow kept him going. It was an escape though he 
 did not know it. Jemmy Fontaine never did know anything. 
 
 If anybody had told Jemmy Fontaine he was a hero, he 
 would have been much surprised. But nobody did so. There 
 were so many other Jemmies, only separated from him by a 
 line of houses, tramping the labyrinth about him, caught like 
 him in something not to be understood and therefore not to 
 be thought about. 
 
 The piano organ which had been tracking him during the 
 morning and the strains of which, fleeting, had come to him 
 over the intervening roofs, now met him festively as he turned 
 into the Gladys Road. The organist, an ingratiating mous- 
 tached alien, turning his handle to the children who garlanded 
 him, was grinding out "The Man Who Broke the Bank" to the 
 shrill of their voices: 
 
 "As I walked along the Continong with a hindependent air, 
 You can 'ear the girls declare 
 'E must be a millionaire. 
 And then they sigh and wish to die, 
 
 And then they wink the other eye. . . . 
 
 and then the triumphant 
 
 "For I'm the Man that Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo!" 
 
 There was a light and shine with the dancing singing children 
 
 under the sun beat, which, with the words, seemed to mock 
 
 him as he faltered there with his bag and picture. His legs 
 
20 GODS 
 
 trembled under him and the place seemed to turn round. He 
 could do no more. 
 
 Jemmy Fontaine swallowed his pride and sat down on the 
 nearest doorstep, watching the children as they danced, and 
 whilst they danced, the organ man and the pease pudding 
 house behind him and the street seemed to dance too. 
 
 It came to Jemmy that it must be want of food. He opened 
 the black bag and felt for the packet of boiled beef sandwiches 
 now disintegrating. He inserted the first and second fingers of 
 his right hand into the paper packet without taking it from the 
 bag in a vain attempt to secure edible morsels without being 
 observed by the passers by, but with indifferent success, as the 
 bread broke in his hand, whilst the beef held. Tearing the 
 wrapping in his desperation, he did manage to secure a triple 
 alliance of meat, bread, and paper, which he passed furtively 
 to his mouth, for Jemmy had the instinct which the middle- 
 class shares with the Indian and the dog, that there is some- 
 thing of disgrace in the act of eating. The dessication of the 
 crumbs choked him, nor could any moistening of his parched 
 lips and throat bring the needful lubrication. After a time he 
 gave it up, the last unswallowed morsel resting pensively in his 
 mouth, the eye, wandering, catching the words above the win- 
 dow of the Pudding Shop: 
 
 "A Good Pull-up for Carmen," 
 
 hovered a moment and then fell fatefully to the sprawl of letter 
 across the window beneath: 
 
 "Pudding Spotted 2d., Plain id." 
 
 The eye lighted. Jemmy liked pudding. 
 
 He knew it was quite indefensible to Fanny, who had packed 
 the beef sandwiches as prophylactic against exactly such temp- 
 tation, just as she had placed six pennies in his pocket against 
 remoter contingency. He knew that the conscience which was 
 the terror of his life would prod him later in his tenderer spots. 
 He knew he shouldn't. But he did. 
 
 The gentleman behind the bar was consideration itself. The 
 quiff of plastered hair, the dark humoursome eyes, and the 
 white apron with the yellow blotches, came forward over the 
 high counter to greet the unusual apparition of a customer in 
 a high hat. Behind, the Pudding steamed yeastily. There 
 
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF JEMMY FONTAINE 21 
 
 were two piles, one with plums and one without, or, as the 
 window truly said, one spotted and one plain. 
 
 Two smaller piles stood at the side. They did not steam, 
 They were cold and clammy with something of the day before 
 about them. 
 
 "Good arternoon, guv'nor, an' wot may I 'ave the pleasure 
 of doing for you?" 
 
 Jemmy, fascinated, looked through him at the pudding be- 
 hind. But he did not forget the condescension of the middle- 
 class to pudding. 
 
 "Thought I'd try twopennorth for fun. Haven't eaten it 
 since I was a boy." He smiled weakly. 
 
 The gentleman with the quiff understood. He was a man of 
 lightning comprehensions born of emergency extraordinary. 
 
 "Quite understand, guv'nor. Old times' sake as you might 
 sye. 'Ere," expansively, as he turned to the smoking piles be- 
 hind, "we 'ave two kinds spotted and plain. Penny plain- 
 tuppence spotted and worth the money. W'ch shall it be 
 guv'nor? Sye the word." 
 
 Jemmy looked at the sickliness of the penny pile, did a light- 
 ning calculation in which "twice i are 2" and "i from 6 leaves 
 nearly 6" figured, passed to the spots that mellowed the other 
 pile, and fell. 
 
 "Spotted," he said, almost inaudible. 
 
 "Cold or 'ot?" went on the barman, now warming to his 
 work. 
 
 "Hot," said Jemmy, moving uneasily from one foot to an- 
 other on the high stool upon which he crouched monkey-like 
 under the counter. 
 
 "With cruet or without?" continued the affable gentleman 
 behind the counter, now really enthusiastic, his arms akimbo. 
 
 Jemmy made a final effort at gentlemanly control just as the 
 scent of the hot pudding caught his nostrils, forgot himself, 
 and broke down desperately: 
 
 "Oh gi'me the pudding. I don't care how it is. I'm hun- 
 gry." 
 
 The man of quick decisions saw it was no case for parley, 
 drove his spoon into the heart of the smoking heap, slapped it 
 on a plate and the plate before the customer. Jemmy, perched 
 on the high stool, his coat tails shamelessly exposing the loz- 
 enge patch, ate. The hat gradually worked itself off the fore- 
 
22 GODS 
 
 head that looked as though it had been beaten, the head shrink- 
 ing into one great maw down which the pudding was pushed. 
 The lady, half out of her envelope, lay indifferently under the 
 counter in virtuous abandonment, the bag gaped unheeding. 
 James Fontaine was only a mouth and a stomach. 
 
 Out again into that terrible sun but now with hope and 
 waistcoat distended. Still the sun beat fiercely, mercilessly, 
 on his rusty hat, parching his throat, sapping his strength, and 
 making him, at the length of the street, falter again. The 
 pavements were his tormentors and he thought vaguely about 
 hell. 
 
 As he tramped up one street and down the next, the hat 
 lolled itself over one ear, the glazed bag sagging at a derelict 
 angle, and the enlarged lady going down by the head. But 
 still he set his face towards the Unknown Goal, the eyes dim 
 but unfaltering, upheld by that dogged, invincible, little-huck- 
 ster's faith in something he knew not what. As he plodded on 
 the feet through which the pavements stabbed like glowing 
 coals, there came to him, as was the way, the texts he had 
 learned from his pushing, religious, Cockney father . . . "put- 
 ting your hand to the plough," and "enduring to the end," but 
 through it all there recurred, irrelevant, the verse of the morn- 
 ing: "Not one sparrow shall fall to the ground. . . ." "Not 
 one sparrow . . . not one. . . " It repeated itself mechani- 
 cally But it was all so confused. Even Fortune seemed very 
 far away. Heaven and hell were the only definitenesses. 
 
 The feet dragged away down the length of the streets that 
 stretched themselves into the far away, the rusty hat setting 
 itself towards the westering sun now flooding them with golden 
 dust. But still the feet, the picture, and the bag went on as 
 the shadows began to steal out down the length of the streets 
 to be lost in the forgetfulness of the evening. 
 
 Not one sparrow . . . not one sparrow . . . not one. . . . 
 
IV 
 
 BLOOD AND FIRE 
 
 THERE was a nudity about the erection that was shocking. 
 It stood there, galvanised, utilitarian, stark. About the lofty 
 barnlike doors which gaped for the masses that streamed 
 within, there was something as uncompromising as Moloch. 
 Ominous under the setting sun, it loomed gigantic from the 
 waste of rubble about it, the high fagades of the houses that 
 framed it casting their shadows to its base and over its roof. 
 The two gas-flares that hung above wasted themselves palely 
 against the ruddy sky. 
 
 The vulgar called it the Tin Tabernacle. 
 
 Finn was sucked with the rest into the maw of the place, 
 which, under the infrequent electric pears, each hanging nak- 
 edly on its filament, spread vastly into the side aisles, whilst 
 in the distance, where a solitary light glimmered, could be 
 sensed a hollow of seats that yawned to the roof before them 
 a square roped stage with something hanging darkly over it. 
 
 From where they sat in the middle front, Finn looked back 
 over the seats to the red sky that poured through the doors in 
 a bloody mist, turning the lines of red-clothed seats into slaugh- 
 ter benches. Father Lestrange had also turned, the red light 
 playing, as Finn always saw it play in his dreams, on the dark 
 face which gazed out over the people through the doors. His 
 father and aunts were crouched over the leaflets with which 
 the benches were strewn. His mother looked superior. As he 
 glanced at her, that prickly heat of unreasoning irritation over- 
 whelmed him. It made him ashamed of himself. 
 
 The cavern of a place echoed to the low thunder of the boots 
 upon the boarded floor, as though they had been the hoofs of 
 driven cattle. Shadows were moving up there on the semi- 
 circle of seats. As the place filled and the light died from the 
 sky, the thunder had fallen into the tapping of the last arrivals, 
 
 23 
 
24 GODS 
 
 until even this had ceased. The great doors clanged. The iron 
 maw was full. 
 
 Out of the opacity about them there came a whispering like 
 the rustling of leaves, the faces showing pallid under the half 
 lights. Something moved on the square of the high staging. 
 The whispering had died away. There was a silence scarcely 
 to be endured. 
 
 A trumpet note rang out. The faces strained upwards as 
 though it had been the blast of Gabriel. They might have been 
 rising from their graves. 
 
 A flash of light struck blinding upon the high sacrificial 
 stage with its scarlet pillars and white ropes. A thin high- 
 shouldered, uniformed figure stood there alone. 
 
 There was something bird-like in the close-set eyes, in the 
 nose that hooked itself from between them, in the grip of the 
 hands that clawed the ropes. But there was something pro- 
 phetic too in the sweep of the long white beard and the hair 
 that tumbled itself back in snowy masses over the skull ridge 
 and behind the long flat ears. 
 
 The figure stood unmoved under the broad band of white 
 linen that stretched from wall to wall, on it in letters of scarlet: 
 "BLOOD AND FIRE." 
 
 It stood unmoved as the growl of drum from the massed 
 bands under its feet rose steadily into a thund'rous crescendo 
 that swung from iron wall to iron wall as though giants were 
 playing at bowls up there on the roof, punctuated by the thin 
 artillery of tambourine from the background of poke bonnets 
 that filled the concave behind. The long thin hand had lifted, 
 pointing to the inscription above, until the last reverberation 
 had died away under the iron roof. 
 
 "To the glory of God! Blood and Fire!" 
 
 The voice, in it something thin and high-shouldered, pierced 
 the silence. 
 
 And once more. . . . 
 
 "To the glory of God!" 
 
 The hand had fallen, and with it the darkness. A single 
 beam of light had slanted across the heads of the multitude 
 against the white screen with the black lettering: 
 
 THE GLORY SONG. 
 
 From the darkness behind, a soprano stole its way, sweetly, 
 
BLOOD AND FIRE 25 
 
 assuredly, into the farthest corners of the building. There was 
 a moment of silence, and now the invisible singer was singing 
 the refrain that echoed in straining sweetness: 
 
 Oh that will be, 
 
 Glory for me. 
 Oh that will be, 
 
 Glory for me. 
 
 When by His grace, I shall look on His face, 
 That will be glory, be glory for me! 
 
 There came a trembling in the air, that trembling which 
 Finn had once felt at the Elevation of the Host in the Catholic 
 chapel into which he had one day ventured at Westminster. 
 The Tabernacle had thrilled as though some living Presence 
 were passing. A moment, and the low thunder of ten thousand 
 throats followed, rising higher, ever higher, until they drowned 
 the clang of brass and roll of drum which had now joined in. 
 
 There was a terror about this massed singing that sent the 
 music stealing through his veins like liquid fire. Then he dis- 
 covered that he too was singing: 
 
 Oh that will be, 
 
 Glory for me. 
 Oh that will be, 
 
 Glory for me. 
 
 That will be glory, be glory for me! 
 
 He was borne upwards and outwards upon the gigantic 
 egotism of the song into something that had in it nothing of 
 self. To him, as perhaps to those others about him, there came 
 the desire to save the world that desire which sometimes came 
 to him as an expansion of spirit, a turning outwards of self to 
 envelop the world an insensate desire to love all people and 
 all things, even evil itself. It shone in the liquid-grey of his 
 father's eyes, which, as the lights once more flared out, stared 
 awed at the figure inside the ropes; in the blackness of the 
 eyes of his Aunt Bella who, if she could not save the world, 
 would destroy it by that blood and fire of which they had been 
 singing. It shone in the eyes of those about him a dim reach- 
 ing out to an unknown goal as unconscious as instinct, but as 
 deep. 
 
 Perhaps the world was divided into the people with the desire 
 that was the "Propagandists" and the "Indifferents." It 
 
26 GODS 
 
 was the thing that united Father Lestrange, Mrs. Titterling, 
 Aunt Bella, and the General. Even his mother, because of 
 that desire, seemed to take a lesser rigidity. 
 
 . Only the Jesuit sat unmoved, the lofty forehead holding 
 itself remote from everything there. There were moments in 
 which Finn almost hated the priest. This was one of them. 
 
 The boy's eye, searching the spaces about him, stopped as 
 he listened to the General, who was now reading out a list of 
 subscriptions from a paper which he held : 
 
 "Samuel B. Hodge, Esquire 500. 
 
 "The Right Honourable Lord Kilmainham 250." 
 
 ("God be praised!" in a deep bass from one of the side 
 aisles.) 
 
 Finn, looking for the voice, found instead a face known to 
 half the world in general and himself in particular, where its 
 owner sat just inside the whited circle of the arc-lights, behind 
 it, the hall in deep shadow. The skull sloping thinly to the 
 nape of the neck, showed anatomised under its yellow hair- 
 less pelt as though it were the skull of a mummy, the ears 
 pitting themselves deep, the forehead high and swelling. The 
 rat-trap jaw under that dome showed small but set to ear 
 and neck as though it were metalled and fitted by a surgeon, 
 matching the big acquisitive mouth filled with artificial teeth. 
 The nose, deep-based, ran short and sheer down the face and 
 broke off cancerously above the long bulbous upper lip like the 
 nose of the statue of a Roman boxer Finn had seen at the 
 British Museum. The eyes of stone were those of the statue. 
 
 "John L. Crux 5,000." 
 
 The poke bonnets had sprung into life the concavity had 
 become a frenzy of white handkerchief, and then the tambour- 
 ines had sent out spray on spray of sound like the breaking of 
 glass, above the undertow of the big drum, through which cut 
 the shrill of female voices: 
 
 "Hallelujah!" 
 
 "Glory, glory!" 
 
 And then the bass: 
 
 "Glory to God! John L. Crux, Unlimited!" 
 
 It was the popular title of the great money machine in 
 which Finn was an unconsidered cog. The machine man him- 
 
BLOOD AND FIRE 27 
 
 self sat there before him without the flicker of an eyelid by 
 his side, the lank spade jaw of his son Parker, smooth-faced 
 and groomed to the last hair. But Parker's eye flickered with 
 satisfaction. "John L. Crux, Unlimited 5,000." A thin 
 tongue moistened furtively the thinner lips. 
 
 Finn knew that the Tabernacle's revival meetings were fre- 
 quented by statesmen and bishops, artists and men of the 
 world, someone even had said, by royalty the General at any 
 rate had once been invited to the Palace and had rewarded his 
 host by praying for him but he had not expected to see the 
 man of millions. Yet he knew that John L. Crux in his own 
 way was fanatic, with perhaps a heaven as narrow and a hell 
 as capacious as those of General Bliss. But the American 
 never showed himself to the public, to whom he was more a 
 name than a person. "John L. Crux, Unlimited," as he and 
 his business were known to the world. 
 
 By now the General, like the enthusiasm, had come down to 
 the half guineas. He stopped. 
 
 This man knew the use of the silence. Every eye slewed 
 once more to the roped platform. 
 
 "We are going to have a round with the Devil to-night, com- 
 rades. The Cross is our symbol. A symbol of power. And 
 in that sign shall we triumph." 
 
 This anyhow was the veriest blatancy the claptrap of fan- 
 aticism. Many there, like Finn himself, breathed the freer for 
 it, shaking themselves from the miasma rising about them. 
 This, at any rate, ought to be resultless. 
 
 But it wasn't. They might call it nonsense. But it did not 
 feel like nonsense. There was something behind that made 
 them uneasy weighted it. 
 
 "Our champion is here the man who has fought for the 
 devil in many a roped square is going to knock him out to- 
 night. A fight to a finish." 
 
 "To-night is challenge night. You know the terms of the 
 challenge they are printed on your leaflets they stood in 
 the advertisement columns of the press to-day. Anyone can 
 accept the challenge prince or pauper bishop or atheist 
 five minutes and five minutes' reply. Or, as Billy Pickles 
 would say five minute rounds. Or, if you like, blow for 
 blow question and answer. The Lord is on our side!" The 
 eyes twinkled a moment, then set. 
 
28 GODS 
 
 "Hell Fire Billy!" 
 
 The lights beat on the white ropes as a high sinewy man, 
 of immense shoulder-spread, in a loose-fitting suit of tweed 
 which could not conceal the ripple of muscle underneath, ran 
 along the floor to the steps leading upwards, and sprang loosely 
 into the square. 
 
 "Time!" 
 
 The kit-bag mouth had opened, its owner, now alone on the 
 white canvassed staging, falling into the attitude that seemed 
 as natural to him as breathing, the right arm resting loosely 
 across the arch of the ribs, the left sparring easily at its au- 
 dience and ready for anything. The ex-heavyweight champion 
 of the world had no head or face worth talking about, but one 
 did not think of that when one looked at the lines of the 
 figure a living pedestal for the mouth above. Finn could 
 only see that mouth. It engulfed all else. 
 
 And now the figure stood motionless against the ropes, the 
 mouth had opened four square and had begun to speak, quick, 
 low. The words rattled out as though the mouth had been a 
 dice-box, tumbling over one another but with a syllabic clarity 
 surprising. As volume and tempo grew, there was a metallic 
 clang in them as if they had been weighted, the head began 
 to move pivot-like upon the shoulder base as though it were 
 working like a nodding Chinese mandarin in porcelain, the 
 apish arms began to jerk themselves independently of the 
 trunk, and as the sentences came hurtling through the mega- 
 phone of the throat, the legs began to move from the hips like 
 those of a Jumping Jack as though the man were galvanised. 
 The thin black line of reporters at their trestle table at the 
 side hunched themselves to their task, but vainly. Still the 
 terrible stream poured out through the square of the lips as 
 though they came from a hose, and still the penmen staggered 
 after, whilst the people listened as though their immortal souls 
 were in the balance. 
 
 And now the higb figure was lurching around the stage, the 
 left foot forward, the right obediently trailing after, the piston 
 arms shooting forward at his Invisible Antagonist, ever and 
 anon the body setting itself for that one-time dreaded left hook 
 which had so often, in Billy's own words, "brought the bacon 
 home," and with it artists and poets, statesmen and muscular 
 
BLOOD AND FIRE 29 
 
 Christianity to see him deliver it upon an adversary of flesh 
 and blood. 
 
 The big man lurched from side to side as though possessed 
 of the very devil he was supposed to be fighting, all the time 
 a stream of words, torrential, which might have been blessings 
 or blasphemies or both, pouring from his lips, whilst the poke 
 bonnets behind and the blue and red uniform caps in front 
 shrieked and hallelujahed in the retchings of the spirit. The 
 voice megaphoned itself higher and higher checked and then 
 the mouth had dived through the r6pes, a hairy claw had 
 reached downwards to the floor and had picked up a chair as 
 though it had been a stick, brought it upwards, splintered it 
 on the white canvas, lurched for another, and now the speaker, 
 standing on both, the hands on either side of the great mouth, 
 as though he would span the universal dome of the heaven 
 above, was trumpeting his peroration of Goddom and Devildom 
 in a voice rasping and changed as though the spirit inside were 
 speaking through his throat. "Blood and Fire!" he screamed. 
 "Who's for Heaven? Blood and Fire! and God damn the 
 Devil! Blood and Fire!" 
 
 The figure had collapsed on to one of the chairs as though 
 in a fit, the eyes that had almost vanished, now staring; the 
 limbs relaxed; the mouth loose, slavering. 
 
 A moment's silence, and then the thunder of drum and tinkle 
 of tambourine mingled with the shouts of the faithful and the 
 groans of the unfaithful. 
 
 "Who's for heaven? Blood and Fire!" 
 
 It was the high thin voice of the General once more domi- 
 nating from the platform and compelling silence. 
 
 "Who's for heaven?" 
 
 The place was very still. Even the groaning had ceased. 
 
 "Who's for heaven?" 
 
 There fell again that trembling in the air. 
 
 A figure broke itself frailly from one of the side-aisles. It 
 swayed brokenly in the silence as it made its way towards the 
 long bare form that ran from wall to wall. As it came into the 
 lighted circle, Finn saw the lights beat on the face of a young 
 girl, in it something of wonderment, of revelation. No flower 
 of sin this, but a girl of the middle-classes, sheltered and re- 
 fined, the grey eyes slightly opening under the white sailor 
 hat that slanted a little backwards on the finely compact head. 
 
30 GODS 
 
 As she sank by the form, it was as though something had 
 passed through the surcharged atmosphere, discharging its elec- 
 tricity. And now from every side the people like drunken men 
 lurched up the aisles to cast themselves upon the hard boards, 
 sinking their heads between their hands, their shoulders mov- 
 ing convulsively, as though they too were possessed. The great 
 building was emotional with the waves that billowed through 
 it wave on wave submerging opposition. Finn felt desire 
 uncontrollable, despite his unbelief, to fling himself down there 
 with the rest, throwing himself upon the lethal bosom of faith, 
 to be carried on the roll of drum and the shouting of the multi- 
 tude into something, he knew not what. 
 
 "Mr. Pickles!" 
 
 A voice like a silver trumpet found its way through the 
 frenzy of the place, which hushed itself into silent listening. 
 
 "Mr. Pickles!" 
 
 And now Finn could see the very tall young man, inclined 
 to corpulency, where he bulked a little to the right and in 
 front of him, standing under the arc-glare addressing the man 
 with the mouth, who had come to himself and was once more 
 alone on the platform. There was something exceeding court- 
 eous about this tall young man in the tight-fitting frock-coat 
 with the velvet collar, a corner of laced cambric showing from 
 the pocket. As he moved his head a trifle away, Finn caught 
 the sheer fine-formed nose, with something pinched and thor- 
 oughbred about the nostrils, the dark eye, prominent, voluptu- 
 ous, with heavy drooping eyelid, set squarely in the head, the 
 high smooth forehead with the curling brown-black hair that, 
 as he moved, took a tone of red. The mouth was small, al- 
 most tiny, the Cupid's bow of the lips thick and red. Despite 
 the olive smoothness of his face, there was something about this 
 man that might have been Assyrian. 
 
 "Mr. Pickles!" 
 
 The tone was curiously considerate, but the face of the man 
 in the ropes showed hostile as it searched for the voice. Al- 
 ready there was a wavering at the penitent form, and one or 
 two figures slunk shamefacedly back across the lighted circle. 
 The tremblement had passed. 
 
 And now Pickles had found him. 
 
 "Name!" the big mouth megaphoned. It was a trick which 
 in one form or another had never failed a man who in the ring 
 
BLOOD AND FIRE 31 
 
 had been a master of intimidation and who now used it for the 
 salvation of souls. 
 
 "I should say Lucifer, Son of the Morning, were it not 
 blasphemous," replied the tall man quietly. "But I am only 
 his servant. My father called me Paris Asthar," he continued. 
 
 Every eye was staring, avid, at the young aristocrat who 
 was the sensation of the daily paper, the scandal of London, 
 and the darling of its gods. Paris Asthar, son of old Asthar, 
 eccentric and Irishman. That was something worth looking 
 at anyhow. The penitent form was forgotten. 
 
 "Well?" The mouth was uncompromising. 
 
 "Quite, thank you." Somebody giggled. But the face of 
 the man with the orchid was immovable. 
 
 "I mean wot-cher-want?" came nasally. 
 
 "Oh, I beg your pardon. I must have misunderstood you." 
 
 "And I say wot-cher-want?" and then, after a moment, the 
 big mouth opening, sardonic. . . . "Lucifer." 
 
 Paris Asthar bowed. "You do me too much honour," he 
 said. 
 
 Something stirred a chord of memory in the listening boy. 
 Then he remembered. Father Lestrange had said the same to 
 his Aunt Bella. But this man was not Father Lestrange. Yet 
 there was something. . . . 
 
 But the man with the orchid was speaking. 
 
 "It is because you so obviously misunderstand the nature 
 and mission of the poor Devil that I venture to put in a word 
 for him to-night. In the first place, you speak of his Majesty, 
 Mr. Pickles, as though he were the only devil in the world 
 but this world, like other worlds, is full of devils, some of them 
 devilishly improper and impossible, who play the very deuce 
 with your existence as with mine, but some of them perfectly 
 proper and very possible. ..." 
 
 Finn noticed that the penitent form was emptying, some of 
 those still at the form twisting half round to listen to the man 
 who was speaking. As his eye ran along the crimson of the 
 seats, he caught sight of a man who, sitting a few places on 
 the other side of his father, with his curiously bright grey eye 
 and a beard in which the fine snow had sifted itself through 
 the hairs, might have been his father's elder brother, but a 
 brother of a superior sort. He was rapidly making shorthand 
 notes in a lined book bound with leather and had been doing 
 
32 GODS 
 
 so all the evening. Every now and then he would look up at 
 the platform with that expanding of the eye which had first 
 caught Finn's attention. 
 
 There was something about the man, something friendly and 
 natural, that made the boy's heart go out to him in the un- 
 reasoning way that it had. For a moment he wished that 
 that had been his father . . . and then his conscience smote 
 him. He loved his father in a pitying sort of way. 
 
 "That," said Father Lestrange, replying to the boy's ques- 
 tion, "that is Lanthorn, editor of the review that bears his 
 name. He is a seer of visions and a dreamer of dreams. He 
 is known as the prince of journalists, although Paris Asthar 
 who christens everybody has christened him the Prince of 
 Darkness because of his spiritualistic experiments. 
 
 So that was Lanthorn, the spiritualist, the man who had in- 
 terviewed the uninterviewable, including the Russian Czar, 
 whom he was said to have converted. And there was some- 
 thing else about him Finn blushed in the way that he had as 
 there came to him the misty memory of a dreadful case in 
 which Lanthorn, "seeking copy" his enemies said, had pro- 
 cured evidence of the traffic in children and had served six 
 months for a technical assault upon Mrs. Grundy, editing "The 
 Lanthorn" from his cell. 
 
 ". . . in fact I have no doubt, Mr. Pickles, if you will per- 
 mit me to say so without offence, that I am a better Christian 
 than you, showing as I do that charity which is the very 
 foundation of Christianity even to the Master of Evil himself. 
 Advocatus Diaboli Advocatus Dei. It is so easy to be charit- 
 able to the really good. . . ." 
 
 It was the voice of Paris Asthar coming through the diminu- 
 tive mouth as through a tiny silver trumpet. The big man in- 
 side the ropes, now gripping them in his big sinewy hands, 
 had a look as though he were behind bars. 
 
 "Another little misapprehension, which indeed is shared by 
 the members of the seventy-three sects which compose that 
 branch of the Church to which you belong. ..." 
 
 "I belong to the Church of Christ to the universal church 
 of Christ throughout the world. I am a member of all Chris- 
 tian churches!" The voice came strident from the high plat- 
 form, angry, seeking assurance. 
 
 "Including the Church of Rome?" inserted Asthar with that 
 
BLOOD AND FIRE 33 
 
 suavity of manner which seemed to irritate the big man into 
 rawness. 
 
 "That is the Scarlet Woman," replied Pickles. 
 
 "Then you are not a member of all the Christian churches,'* 
 went on Asthar, unmoved. "But as I was saying before this 
 little digression, another of your misapprehensions is that 
 Lucifer uses evil because he likes it from er what shall we 
 say? sheer devilry." 
 
 "He is the Father of Evil!" said the big man, dogmatic. 
 
 "Then who is the Father of good?" 
 
 "God!" said the big man with angry solemnity. 
 
 "And the Father of all things living and dead?" 
 
 "God!" 
 
 "Then God is the father of your Devil." 
 
 "Blasphemy!" said the big man in a voice like Caiaphas. 
 
 "Not blasphemy, but logic, and all logic is blasphemic be- 
 cause it annihilates all distinction. There is no good or evil. 
 These are only terms." A man back in the audience laughed, 
 and checked himself. 
 
 Finn could see the sweat beads standing on the big man's 
 forehead like frosted dew where he moved his face under the 
 arcs. He was very pale and he drew his breath like a man who 
 had been running. Finn felt quite sorry for him, but forgot his 
 sorrow in his admiration for that breadth of shoulder. 
 
 "To return to our misapprehensions. Lucifer was once 
 angel your bible tells you that as I think it tells you every- 
 thing in the world worth knowing ... if you only know how 
 to read it," he added after a moment . . . "but the God he 
 served was a God of power your bible tells you that also 
 and Lucifer lusted, as he had the right to lust, for the only 
 thing in the universe worth having for Power. But power, like 
 all other things, can only be purchased at a price perhaps 
 God himself paid his price in the eternities to Another before 
 him and the price was the sacrifice of good that is, of god- 
 ship." 
 
 "Blasphemy! blasphemy!" came the thin voice of the Gen- 
 eral like that of an angry old woman from under the platform 
 at the side, where he seemed to be holding a watching brief on 
 behalf of the Almighty. It sounded ridiculous in the stillness 
 of the place. 
 
 "And when he fell, flung by a greater power than his own, 
 
34 GODS 
 
 fell to earth, he found the god of this world yes, for this 
 world has its own gods and devils using the weapon of his 
 master the God of the universe good." So far the speaker 
 had been speaking with a sort of light earnestness of his own; 
 now, his face broke into the smile that had seduced London 
 "... and so there was only evil left for the poor devil. When 
 the day comes that he has conquered good with evil, he will 
 become good." He was serious again. 
 
 "The battle between good and evil is not eternal even you 
 presuppose its ceasing at Doomsday the battle is not for 
 principle but for power. It is the unceasing battle of the eter- 
 nity of our little world as it is the battle of the Universe itself, 
 with the gods of good and evil fighting on either side fighting 
 inside on the hearthstone of each heart as on those other outer 
 battlefields of gun and armour. Even now, here, the fight is 
 going on just as outside in the shadows darkening over 
 Europe, out of which comes the glitter of weapon and the 
 tamp of the anvil of war, preparation is being made for that 
 Armageddon of our time which will come before two decades 
 have passed. King and statesman bishop and scientist work- 
 man and little bourgeois they are all protagonists for the 
 gods standing behind, and when the armies of the world will 
 have gripped in the physical deathlock of the war to come^ 
 above them, the angels of light and darkness, of what we call 
 good and evil, will be battling with the weapons of the spirit." 
 
 "Time up!" said the big man, looking on his antagonist in 
 pale malignity. "Sit down!" 
 
 The man to whom he spoke sat down with an inclination of 
 the fine head only now the face was smiling steadfastly at 
 the man within the ropes, whose face to Finn seemed contracted 
 as though he were in pain. The big mouth opened once or 
 twice spasmodically and then it had broken into the first line 
 of the Glory Song: "Oh that will be, Glory for me. . . ." 
 
 A woman at the back joined in piercingly and then stopped, 
 appalled at her own voice in the unbroken silence . . . and 
 still the man with the orchid stared upwards, smiling. 
 
 "All together!" said the big man, his voice straining. 
 
 Here and there a voice broke in, and stopped. There was 
 something of strangulation in the atmosphere. And still the 
 man in the frock-coat smiled. 
 
 The man up there on the platform and the man down there 
 
BLOOD AND FIRE 35 
 
 in the hall seemed to be grappling, although the man on the 
 platform did not look at the other. His eyes searched the 
 building, as though seeking help. His mouth opened as though 
 he were trying to speak. 
 
 But the spirit of chaos seemed to have entered the place. 
 
 "Shut up Pickles!" came from a man a few paces from 
 Finn. 
 
 "Fairplay for the gent!" from an unshaven Eastender of 
 protruding jowl who sat in front nursing a cold pipe in the 
 hollow of his right fist as he crossed one knee more comfort- 
 ably over the other to listen. 
 
 "Will you let me speak. ..." It seemed that the man on 
 the platform had been trying to make himself heard for some 
 time, although nobody had noticed him in the tumult which 
 had been rising again. 
 
 "I will speak," said Pickles, to whom a meeting of this sort 
 was a new experience. 
 
 But still Paris Asthar smiled. 
 
 "You have not answered me yet," he said. 
 
 "Time's up!" bellowed Pickles, looking over Asthar's head. 
 
 He still searched the building with that straining look. 
 
 "I am still waiting for your answer," came from Asthar. 
 
 "Oh, you " Pickles paused for a moment, then plunged 
 "you can shut your face!" He licked his lips as though he 
 had got something off his mind. 
 
 "Order! order!" came from the middle of the hall. 
 
 "There is no time to take each one separately. I'll take the 
 gentleman on my left who I think has been trying to catch 
 my eyes for some time and then" the eyes set viciously 
 "knock you out one by one!" 
 
 "Why don't you answer the gent?" 
 
 "He's afride. Ca-ward!" 
 
 "Don't answer. Let's have the Glory Song!" 
 
 "Go on Pickles where's your bloody left?" 
 
 "Shut up!. . . ." 
 
 "Oh if I'd only got you ahtside. . . ." 
 
 And then, shrill: "Oh that will be, Glo-o-o-ry. . . ." 
 
 But the cries increased in volume as the tall evangelist stood 
 there like a baited bull, the great mouth opening itself in bel- 
 lowings that went unheard under the rising din. One could 
 only see the maw opening and shutting and the red of the 
 
36 GODS 
 
 gums as the white light struck on them from above. His arms 
 were moving his face distorted. 
 
 Voices were crossing one another. Taunts were hurling over 
 the floor of the tabernacle. The poke bonnets at the back 
 showed a tendency to lift themselves. And now the conductor 
 had given the signal and the massed bands added to the tur- 
 moil, the eyes of the bandsmen straining over their instruments. 
 
 Two men were fighting at the back of the hall; there was a 
 rush against the doors which yielded a little, held and then 
 gave way . . . and then the mob had been vomited forth into 
 the night, filling the spaces under the pale stars with curses 
 and strange cries, as though devils had been loosed. 
 
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF PARIS ASTHAR 
 
 OUT of the velvety blackness came the ticking of a clock 
 that sentinelled the time with hurried footsteps. From where 
 the blackness seemed to heap itself a little together in the 
 corner, there came a regular pulsation. The pregnant air 
 seemed to hold within it something living. A single ray of 
 gold stole from the side of what might have been a thickly 
 curtained window. 
 
 A triple chime shivered through the room like the breaking 
 of glass, a shadow crossed the line of the noiselessly opened 
 door, there was a click, and the room was filled with a golden 
 smother that came from the ledge under the high ceiling. 
 It merged the black and gold of the walls, pannelled in oak to 
 the half of their height, with the deep blue of the thick carpet 
 and of the curtains, brushed the counterpane of quilted silk 
 where the line of fine lawn ran across it, and showed under the 
 swell of the canopy of blue that hung above, the dark hair 
 which in that light was touched with red and with it the long 
 lashes and olive cheeks of Paris Asthar. 
 
 The head moved. 
 
 "Is that you, Togo?" came a sleepy voice. 
 
 The little figure, its head a trifle on one side, moved over to 
 the bed with quick stilted strides as though it were walking 
 on pins. 
 
 "What time is it, Togo?" The big man yawned and 
 stretched his arms above his head, the breast of his silken 
 pajamas parting to show the great hairless body beneath. He 
 looked at it with a certain complacency and passed a smooth 
 white hand inside the fold to comfortably stroke himself. 
 With his other hand, he smoothed the down of an Angora cat 
 which had sprung like a grey-blue ghost upon the silk of the 
 counterpane, for Paris Asthar had a passion for cats, aristo- 
 
 37 
 
3 8 GODS 
 
 cratic brutes, beautifully behaved and dainty in form and taste, 
 which had the run of the place. 
 
 "Three o'clock, sah." 
 
 "We must give up these late hours, Togo. Three o'clock 
 last night and dawn the morning before." Complacent, he con- 
 tinued to stroke himself as the little man, obediently acquie- 
 scent, inclined his head and went out of the room. 
 
 The scent of mocha came through the door as it opened to 
 show the little oriental standing there, in his hand a deep- 
 rimmed shining salver upon which a miniature coffee pot of 
 burnished silver stood over the flame of evanescent blue which 
 floated upwards, by its side a tiny cup and saucer. He laid 
 the salver upon a little lacquer table at the side of the bed 
 and went to the first of the three high windows, half drawing 
 the one-piece curtain that ran squarely across. He switched 
 off some of the lights. 
 
 And so, as he went from window to window and extinguished 
 the last light, the room was filled with the afternoon sun. 
 
 He returned to his master, crooking a paw like a piece of 
 gnarled oak around the handle of the coffee pot and poured 
 out a cup of the shining black liquid which, having sipped, 
 Asthar declared to the smiling Togo that a he now felt himself 
 able to face the horridness of reality." 
 
 After his bath, Paris Asthar in a leopard kimono of black 
 and yellow that gave to him something of the great cat itself, 
 nibbled (it was surprising how everything turned to fat in 
 Paris) some brioches and looked at a broiled kidney. The 
 peaches on the table he did not touch. 
 
 As he rose, he caught sight of himself in the full-length oval 
 mirror before him and winced. But he persuaded himself that 
 the bulge above the loosely drooping knot of the silken waist- 
 rope was kimono, not obesity. He contracted himself a little. 
 
 "Been having any more letters from fine ladies, Togo?" he 
 asked the grinning oriental. The ugly little Japanese seemed 
 to have strange fascination for Paris's lady friends. 
 
 "No, sah," piped Togo. "At least, not since the last from 
 Mrs. Swathe, sah. She thinks I'm a Buddhist, sah." Togo 
 grinned delightedly. 
 
 "Beelzebub," said Paris solemnly, taking on his knee the big 
 black cat with the absinthe coloured eyes which had been bask- 
 ing in the sunlight under the window, "listen. Beware of 
 
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF PARIS ASTHAR 39 
 
 Togo's fine ladies, who take you on their knees and tell you 
 that you are beautiful. Especially beware when they do it in 
 the name of religion, for which even your distinguished proto- 
 type had a weakness. Don't let them seduce you, my beauty." 
 
 The slant eyes of the brute on his knee seemed to stare at 
 him with understanding. It rolled over on its back and struck 
 at him lazily in covert, green-eyed delight. Togo listened as 
 he cleared away. 
 
 Having placed his master in a pair of exceedingly well-cut 
 grey-striped trousers, falling over a pair of patents upon which 
 M. de Guiche of varnish fame had done his best, held for him 
 a frock-coat in which he seemed to have been poured, and 
 handed to him a hat of glossiness inconceivable, Togo finished 
 his work by producing apparently from the small of his back 
 an ivory-topped malacca and a pair of gloves of grey suede. 
 Thus, in his own words, "the day having been aired," you can 
 see Paris Asthar's black satin tie that wound itself twice around 
 the smoothness of the collar, and great emerald, strolling, non- 
 chalant, past the House of Commons, through the St. James 
 and Green parks to Hyde Park Corner, where their owner, 
 who seemed to unfold in the afternoon sun like a flower in 
 water, cast at the Row the eye indifferent. As it turned away, 
 it caught the double-breasted reefer and curling beard of a man 
 who was passing and who seemed to be no more aware that it 
 was a scorching July day than if he had been a salamander. 
 
 The man at whom he was looking, the man with the honest 
 doggy eyes of brown overshadowed by the heavy frontal bones 
 of the forehead and who gave the onlooker a general impres- 
 sion of shagginess, was Professor Dust, prince of science and 
 the authority on trematodes, that parasitic worm which lives 
 in the intestines of animals, and of which a familiar speci- 
 men is the human tapeworm. The professor was one of the 
 most distinguished of living biologists and had not only writ- 
 ten a big book upon trematodes found in the loggerhead turtle 
 but, frankly, regarded the universe as turning upon them. Al- 
 most the only orthodox survivor of the Darwinian theory id 
 its original purity, to which he clung as to a biological bible, he 
 regarded Weismann and Archdall Reid as terrible heretics. 
 
 "Hello Professor!" cried Asthar. "Just the man I wanted 
 to see. That talk about trem-trema-trematodes" (he had got 
 it at last) "into which you inveigled me the other day inter- 
 
40 GODS 
 
 ested me amazingly. Let's hear some more about your wriggly 
 worms/' He hooked the Professor by the arm and marched 
 him down Piccadilly. 
 
 "... yes," that gentleman said with a certain eager shy- 
 ness. "Trematodes, my dear Asthar. . . ." 
 
 "Excuse me," his companion broke off quickly, unhooking, 
 and bowing profoundly to a young girl who was passing in a 
 victoria drawn by a pair of high-stepping blacks. "My half- 
 sister," he said. 
 
 The Professor, already mazed in his trematodes, had a vague 
 impression in the afternoon sunlight of a pair of hazel eyes; a 
 cloud of tawny hair cut to the neck; a slender girlish figure 
 and it was gone. 
 
 ". . . as I was saying, my dear Asthar . . . what you have 
 always to bear in mind regarding trematodes. ..." 
 
 The voice gathered weight and volume as they passed along, 
 the eyes lighting under the working of the overhanging brows, 
 the passers by catching" . . . pachypsolus undulatus, my dear 
 Sir;" with the recurrent refrain: "caretta, caretta. . . ." and 
 then "... of vital import to the whole future of biological in- 
 vestigation I might say, to the race itself. If you would only 
 give that splendid brain of yours to the study of trematodes 
 instead of to dying religions ... to ghosts . . . ghosts. ..." 
 The Professor laughed indignantly. He gesticulated with the 
 free arm, finally breaking the other out and using that also in 
 his indignant accentuation 
 
 Asthar stopped him for a moment to feel for a shilling, which 
 he gave to one of those white-faced women who live by sham- 
 ing the civilisation that is Piccadilly's. "Excuse me, Profes- 
 sor," he said . . . "and as you were saying. . . ." 
 
 The torrential "caretta, caretta" continued, the shaggy arm 
 waved the length of Piccadilly, Asthar's figure gracefully bulk- 
 ing over his squat friend, until, as they came to the turning 
 beyond Devonshire House, the big man graciously disengaged 
 himself from the scientist and floated up the steps of a build- 
 ing over the fanlight of which stood: "Esoteric Club." Two 
 young men were looking at him from one of the side windows, 
 Asthar knew it. 
 
 As he came to the door, he stopped suddenly. And it was 
 curious to see how his expression changed. 
 
 A very young girl was standing there on the squares of black 
 
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF PARIS ASTHAR 41 
 
 and white marble which formed the floor of the hall, her left 
 hand resting lightly upon the turn of the balustrade, looking 
 slenderly upwards towards where the staircase turned past the 
 stained glass window that threw its gold and blue upon the 
 marble. The sunlight streamed down upon the aureole of 
 tawn, cut to the base of the young firm neck where it came 
 up clean from the hollow of the dress of Irish green, looking as 
 though it had been strewn with gold-dust. The rather short, 
 strong nose, in profile, the eyes placed fair under the delicate 
 brows, the strong lines of the red lips where they parted over 
 the thinner line of ivory all looked upwards expectant. The 
 face, with something hollow-cheeked, hollow-eyed, might have 
 been that of the first woman. 
 
 The head turned quickly, the lips closing, as though the 
 girl had felt something. The languorous figure tautened. The 
 hazel eyes with the dark shadows in them smiled on the big 
 man. 
 
 "The annunciation," he said almost tenderly, as he went for- 
 ward and kissed his half-sister on the forehead which she bent 
 to him. 
 
 Relieved of his hat, cane and gloves by the discreetly whis- 
 kered attendant in the uniform of solemn black, Asthar was 
 crossing the hall with his half-sister, when a figure, appearing 
 from a room at the side, half limped half twisted itself across 
 the marble chessboard, now checkered by the afternoon sun, 
 and then, turning at his "Hullo, Stella!" sidled up to him. As 
 he did so, Deirdre Asthar, with an impulsive gesture, so faint 
 as almost to be imperceptible, suddenly broke from him and 
 disappeared. 
 
 She was a girl of the early twenties, her hair of burnished 
 copper, coiled low on the neck of soft-fairness, catching the 
 sun-rays through the open door. The graceful whip-like body, 
 graceful for all its high unevenness of shoulder, twisted itself 
 curiously as it progressed, with something of a limp that was 
 not a limp. The grey eyes with the tiny black irises that 
 reached upwards at the big man, had something eager, star- 
 ing. In the slightly vulpine nose with the spreading nostrils 
 set over the rather full carmine of the lips, there was something 
 hungry, biting. 
 
 "Hullo, Paris!" she said, indifferently eager but she looked 
 towards the door through which Deirdre had disappeared. The 
 
42 GODS 
 
 big man looked, too, with a little vertical line of puzzlement 
 showing itself momentarily over the base of the straight nose, 
 and then, his serenity restored, he slipped a hand in com- 
 radely fashion through the tiny arm of rounded pink that 
 gleamed softly through the white silk and passed with her into 
 the room lying beyond the curtained door. There was some- 
 thing indefinably feminine about it. The place had colour and 
 relaxation and it was cool and dark after the hot sun of the 
 street. 
 
 Figures came out of the shadows to greet Asthar, who was 
 evidently a favourite. There were both men and women, for 
 the Esoteric, as everybody knows, is bi-sexual or, as Paris 
 Asthar expressed it, "a-sexual." The young men who showed 
 themselves had something feminine in them, whilst the women, 
 most of them ultra-fashionably dressed, though not masculine, 
 could not be called feminine. There was something languidly 
 desperate, something eroding, about their tired eyes, their 
 painted lips, and their hollow slender bodies. In the Esoteric, 
 man and woman blended so nearly that they might have been 
 a third sex. A neutral sex. "Civilisation, thank God! is de- 
 veloping the neuter gender," said Asthar. 
 
 And there, Asthar, Comrade Magnificent, his arm still 
 resting within that of Stella Fay, lolled upon a sofa over which 
 hung the heavily perfumed women who puffed at the scented 
 cigarettes which they held between thumb and first finger, al- 
 ways excepting the copper-haired girl who held hers man- 
 fashion, sucking the smoke in deeply, holding it a moment, and 
 then expelling it in two thin streams from those hungry nos- 
 trils. The young men, with a tendency to long hair and hour- 
 glass waists, hung on each word as it came from the man they 
 called "The Master," who through it all seemed to be nursing 
 to himself a secret something to be held deep and gloated 
 over a secret that showed itself in the large prominent eye, 
 in the assured pose of the body, in the sleek contemplation of 
 the patent leathers. It was curious to note how he seemed to 
 swell to take new vigour as he talked and they listened. 
 
 And so, having refreshed himself, bowing farewell with that 
 bulky graciousness which was already famous, Paris Asthar 
 went out into the golden sunlight, continuing his stroll, su- 
 perbly, inclining like a prince to his intimates, showing to his 
 subordinates a condescension that had no offence but rather 
 
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF PARIS ASTHAR 43 
 
 something of benignity, but always with that secret assurance 
 that had in it something of complacency. There was an utter 
 forbearance about Paris Asthar that might have been democ- 
 racy, but might have been merely slothfulness or even superi- 
 ority. For the verminous in the gutters of Piccadilly he re- 
 served a special charm of manner. The white, rather plump 
 hand, was always finding its way to the waistcoat of grey suede 
 for the inevitable shilling. To the flower-girl outside the 
 Berkeley, his pleasant "Hullo, Mary!" might have been the 
 "Hullo, Stella!" of the hour before. With the impostor of 
 greasy smartness whose medals and brass plate bore witness to 
 the shortness of memory of an ungrateful country, he ex- 
 changed a look which might have been the compounding of a 
 felony, but which ended in the shilling. The golden ferrule of 
 his malacca he gently inserted in the stomach of the baby of 
 the peripatetic woman on the Regent Street curve, making 
 his weekly assertion to its tentative progenitor that he 
 "hated babies" and giving her the invariable shilling to 
 prove it, the lady in question, of the draggled respectability 
 of her kind, yielding however good current exchange in a 
 "Gawd bless yer, Sir," not wholly ungenuine. 
 
 And so across the street to the Continental, all eyes follow- 
 ing the bulky figure as well known to London as the Mercury 
 in the Circus. For each waiter he had his own special greeting 
 throwing a word of Italian at one, something in French at 
 another, and sending a round-faced German into gelatinous 
 delight by his "Guten Abend, Hans!" The manager, abasing 
 himself before his most distinguished customer, conducted him 
 personally to his own seat in his own particular corner. 
 
 With Asthar, enthroned in solitary majesty, there was again 
 that secret complacency. It was with him as he sat there, the 
 absinthe in his glass reflecting itself greenly on the swarth of 
 his face. It was with him that evening as he sat in the stalls 
 at Her Majesty's, gazing out over the crowd, and it was with 
 him as he walked home across the garland of the Circus; with 
 him, as the painted girls stared from under their leaded brows 
 at his great figure; and with him as he hung over the bridge 
 at Westminster watching the stars that blotched themselves 
 in the darkling waters. 
 
 He looked down past the House of Commons, across the 
 jewelled tides, whilst behind him the hot night-winds blew the 
 
44 GODS 
 
 dust-eddies about his polished boots. Towering above his head, 
 Big Ben sentinelled London with his moon face. The mon- 
 strous fagades of the Embankment glittered cold over the 
 sleeping forms upon the iron seats beneath. From a public- 
 house across the water there came the strum of a banjo. The 
 great white night lay about him, cradling the city. 
 
 But through it all his secret the secret of his own invinc- 
 ibility and immortality. Paris Asthar Immortal. 
 
VI 
 
 THE POWERS OF DARKNESS 
 
 THE tiny Japanese images that stared at little Togo in Paris 
 Asthar's drawing room at "The Cloisters" seemed as much of 
 the place as the little man himself and much more living than 
 Beelzebub who, perched sphinx-like upon the edge of the ebony 
 Erard, was as though he had been carved out of the wood in 
 which the yellow eye-slants reflected themselves. The little 
 man, after fractionally adjusting a chair or a vase, his head a 
 little on one side like one of the ivory images that grinned ap- 
 proval about him, would stand back to survey his work, mo- 
 tionless as the cat behind. The tiny figure in the suit of sober 
 black would then spring into life and with deft silent move- 
 ments would adjust an ornament, falling again into an image 
 of yellow ivory. Perhaps Beelzebub knew of what he was 
 thinking. 
 
 No women servants were employed at "The Cloisters," nor, 
 with the exception of Togo, or on those special occasions when 
 a waiter or two were imported, did the guest ever lay eyes upon 
 a servant. Somewhere, however, in the depths of the old 
 house under the shadow of Westminster, a highly cultivated 
 troglodyte chef existed, together with a man of all work and a 
 small boy. 
 
 Nobody knew much about the house. Rumour had it that 
 it was the rendezvous of very curious people indeed. Once, an 
 excited pressman had written up a cock and bull story about 
 "nightly orgies," Paris Asthar responding by an exceedingly 
 courteous invitation to the editor and staff of the paper to 
 come to one of "the orgies" at any time they liked, which made 
 all London laugh. For, had he not said that, as the most mis- 
 understood man in London, if he once started being offended 
 he would have to spend the rest of his life in actions for libel. 
 "And I don't need the money." He didn't. He was one of 
 the wealthiest young men in London. 
 
 45 
 
46 GODS 
 
 A female cook, in the days before femininity had been 
 banned, a lady with whom he had had a slight difference of 
 opinion as to omelettes, had, some years before, upon her 
 scientific removal to the front steps with her box by Togo, 
 who, in an encyclopaedic mind, found room for a knowledge 
 of jiu-jitsu, imparted to a sceptical policeman but open-minded 
 audience a story of a secret chapel. "And," she had sniffed 
 into her apron, as she adjusted her bonnet, "sich goings on. 
 I see'd it once. A lot of twirlygigs all over the ceiling and a 
 haltar wiv stone monkeys on it and hidols naked hidols one 
 of 'em, a shameless 'ussy, 'ad 'er tongue out and," losing all 
 restraint in the memory of her wrongs, "not even a shift to 
 'er back. I've seen wot I've seen and I know wot I know." 
 
 But there, outraged womanhood had let itself go, as a stray 
 news hound, the scent strong in his nostrils, who had tracked 
 the good lady to her lodgings in the Vauxhall Bridge Road, 
 quickly discovered. Whatever she might have seen, she knew 
 nothing. And although he did get a fiver for a highly imagin- 
 ative article upon "The Black Mass in England," in the 
 "Nighthawk," and referred obliquely to Paris Asthar, who 
 through his objection to taking libel actions was considered 
 fair game by all the gutter press, nobody believed him. Who 
 could believe "The Nighthawk" "a disgusting penn'orth?" 
 Of course, everybody read it, but that was another matter. 
 
 A house like "The Cloisters" was bound to encourage the 
 inflammatory imagination. There it stood at the end of a 
 cul-de-sac, its door of purple glass, behind the scroll of iron- 
 work that covered it, throwing queer lights on the snowy steps, 
 which stood starkly against its mourning fagade, its high black 
 windows shining blankly to any light that might find its way 
 over the high houses into the pit beneath. And when you got 
 inside, which was not easy in a place where Togo was watch- 
 dog, there was that indefinable heaviness of the air and the 
 high panelling of dark oak under the low ceilings. 
 
 And here was Paris himself, waiting in the gloom of his 
 ground-floor drawingroom to receive his guests, in his frock- 
 coat, high collar, and four-in-hand satin tie. The last he 
 preened in the mirror of polished steel standing over the high 
 fireplace as though he were preening his soul, and, as he did 
 so, thought satisfying things. 
 
 There was a knock at the front door. Asthar slewed slowly 
 
THE POWERS OF DARKNESS 47 
 
 round as he composed his face. Togo, his legs moving like 
 drumsticks, toddled to open it, disclosing Professor Dust in his 
 invariable reefer jacket, and looking into the depths of an 
 enormously impossible silk hat as he scratched his shaggy head 
 with one splay paw that came out from the fore-shortened 
 sleeve of his jacket out of which jutted a false cuff. 
 
 Having reluctantly surrendered the hat which, in his heart 
 of hearts, the Professor, otherwise indifferent in matters of 
 dress, regarded with secret pride, and having patted his dickey 
 into place over the flannel shirt which had protruded a trifle be- 
 tween vest and front, the bearded face, the eyebrows bushing 
 themselves apprehensively over the kindly eyes for the Pro- 
 fessor was, in social matters, a nervous subject came forward 
 at a trot into the room and Paris Asthar found his smooth 
 plump hand engulfed by the hairy paw of the man he called 
 "my friend the enemy." 
 
 But Professor Dust was almost swept on one side by the 
 onrush of the big, well-dressed man with the upturned nose and 
 beady eyes which gave something porcine to the smooth, clean- 
 shaven face, who put his diminutive hand into that of 
 Asthar, who had brought these two scientific giants together 
 because they hated the sight of each other. It seemed there 
 had been a difference of opinion as to the exact degree of in- 
 spiration attaching to certain passages of Darwin. Sir Lan- 
 caster Hogge had heterodox ideas upon environment, whereas 
 Professor Dust was orthodox to the last hair of his woolly 
 pate. 
 
 "What the devil am I here for?" squeaked the famous bio- 
 logist in a voice that sounded strange from that great cask 
 of a body. "That's what IVe been asking myself ever since 
 I left the Cromwell Road. That's what I ask." He sneered 
 high, a curious half titter, half neigh. 
 
 He really detested being there, but Asthar was to him as 
 the candle to the moth. The smile on a face of apparent good 
 humour was only to keep up appearances, and Asthar knew it. 
 
 "I'll tell you, my dear Hogge. You're here partly because 
 I asked you, partly because you're a fashionable scientist, and 
 partly because you're the most pugnacious old bore that ever 
 held to the Darwinian theory. . . . Oh, let me introduce you. 
 Miss Stella Fay Professor Dust I think you know." His 
 mouth, sardonic, twisted itself a little to one side. 
 
48 GODS 
 
 He turned to the girl with the hair of burnished copper, who 
 had just come in. "Sir Lancaster Hogge," he said, completing 
 the introduction. . . . "Why, God bless my soul! if it isn't 
 AH Baba." He broke away to greet a sinuous Indian, who, 
 exceedingly correct, presented a well-pomaded moustache and 
 two grinning rows of white teeth, which seemed to fill the 
 dark face. His host thought he looked damnable, but he 
 smiled to him almost affectionately. 
 
 Ali Hassan, or Ali Baba, as Asthar called him, was an inter- 
 esting example of the Europeanised Indian. Originally Mo- 
 hammedan, he had come to have a profound contempt, not 
 only for the hereditary enemy, the Hindu, but for his mother- 
 land, and was now engaged in delivering a series of lectures 
 in the best Oxford manner, which made satisfying demonstra- 
 tion of the helplessness of the Indian and the virtue of leading 
 strings. 
 
 The room was filling with people, some of them the men and 
 women of the Esoteric. Togo, in some way of his own, had 
 managed to pass into the room a silver tea kettle and some 
 Dresden cups and saucers, whilst every chair and projection 
 had its plate of bread and butter or cake or comfits. Every- 
 body was talking, smoking, and eating. Professor Dust, one 
 little curved leg tucked comfortably away under the knee of 
 the other, was trying to do all three at once, even using a spare 
 hand to scratch his scalp as well, looking like some well-trained 
 animal from where he sat in the corner of a divan all this to 
 the disgust of Sir Lancaster, who, for all his good-humour, did 
 not trouble to conceal his outraged feelings. But the thing 
 that really ate into him and was at the root of all his disgust 
 was that difference of opinion about environment that poisoned 
 the satisfactions of his scientific life. Dust was always cross- 
 ing him. 
 
 Asthar lolled upon the long ebony seat before the grand, 
 where he had just finished playing a Chopin nocturne to a 
 scarce breathing audience which had stopped its chatter to 
 listen, for he was a very great amateur. Out of the silence, 
 there came the high snort of Professor Hogge, who sometimes 
 had lapses as to time and place. 
 
 "They tell me you've been defending the devil, Asthar, at 
 one of those Tabernacle meetings. Good God! what will you 
 do next?" 
 
THE POWERS OF DARKNESS 49 
 
 "I thought you didn't believe in one or the other," said 
 Asthar. 
 
 "And I don't. You don't, if it comes to that. Nobody does. 
 It's a pose. That's what it is." He snorted in not altogether 
 good-humoured offence. Incidentally, he had been trying for 
 the past five years to quarrel with Paris Asthar but could 
 never manage it. Nobody could. 
 
 "Well, what do you believe in, Sir Lancaster?" asked Stella 
 Fay. 
 
 "I believe in anything that can be demonstrated. I believe 
 in what I feel or see or hear. I believe in my biology. I be- 
 lieve in mathematics. They can be demonstrated." 
 
 The girl shrugged one high shoulder disdainfully and sucked 
 deeply at her cigarette as she thought to herself what nonsense 
 it all was, without exactly knowing why. Not that she wanted 
 to know. She was too irritated for that, and irritation always 
 sensitized her intuitions whilst dulling her intellectual pro- 
 cesses. 
 
 "Anyhow what is 'belief?' Nobody can demonstrate 'be- 
 lief.' ' : The speaker was a young-old man, whose enormous 
 head, wrinkled on scalp and face, and weak curly legs, gave him 
 something of those things preserved in spirits. He had wafted 
 over to them as he spoke and now wafted away again. 
 
 "Perhaps I can't. But neither you nor Asthar can demon- 
 strate the gods and devils in which you pretend to believe." 
 The Professor was becoming steadily more irritable. "What 
 I can demonstrate are my facts." 
 
 "Will you die for your facts?" asked the girl with the copper 
 hair. "People before now have died for gods and devils." 
 There was nothing in the words, but she conveyed offence 
 inexpressible. 
 
 "Belief," said AH Baba in a highly cultured accent and 
 showing his rows of grinning ivories "belief is a mattah of 
 opinion. I quite agree with Sir Lancaster." He tried to look 
 as though, for all his lightness, he had thought it all carefully 
 out. He was, as a matter of fact, thinking of nothing. 
 
 That eminent scientist looked at the smiling Indian with 
 intense dislike, the little nose snubbing itself a trifle. 
 
 "What I can demonstrate is that men have come from mon- 
 keys," he said, looking hard at the unconscious Indian. 
 
50 GODS 
 
 "Can you?" asked Asthar. "Are you sure that monkeys 
 did not come from men?" 
 
 "Very good, very good. Ha-ha!" grinned Ali. 
 
 "I don't see how anyone who had not had a scientific train- 
 ing could doubt it," inserted Stella with an offensiveness that 
 was quite her own, slowly expelling a thin stream of smoke 
 from her left nostril. 
 
 The Professor laughed in high irritation. "Proof," he said. 
 "Proof." 
 
 "Proof. Who wants proof? What do you think the female 
 of the species has her intuitions for?" 
 
 "Intuitions!" snorted the Professor contemptuously. " l In- 
 tuitions !> We can leave those to 'the female of the species."' 
 Professor Hogge was an apostle of the Male Principle and the 
 girl had been very provoking. 
 
 "If it comes to that, the intuitive is at least no more unre- 
 liable than the unscientific, as the volte-faces of science during 
 the last century prove." Paris was blandly informative. 
 
 "You'll tell me next that the poet is the best scientist," 
 sneered Sir Lancaster. 
 
 "I don't need to. The century-old vision of the poet is the 
 scientific fact of to-day. Have you ever heard of Shelley or 
 Yeats or the first chapter of Genesis, Professor?" 
 
 "Perhaps you don't believe in the scientific method?" said 
 the eminent scientist, in a voice that hinted at blasphemy. 
 
 "The result, which is fast becoming the object of the scien- 
 tific method of which you speak, is the blurring of the intui- 
 tive, which, incidentally, is one reason why 'the female of the 
 species' is necessary as a corrective to keep clean the windows 
 of our souls. And, incidentally, every new discovery of science 
 is the result of those antennae of intuition which the scientist 
 puts out into the ether to catch the breath of inspiration, as 
 the fisherman casts his line into deep waters, and which are 
 the stages of the intellectual process. In fact, there is no 
 intellectual process." He looked round him with bland inso- 
 lent delight at the effect of his paradox. 
 
 "What's all that got to do with your nonsense of monkeys 
 coming from men?" asked Professor Dust, butting into the 
 discussion to the extreme annoyance of Sir Lancaster, who 
 frowned majestically. He looked, as he crouched in his corner, 
 like a very intelligent but bewildered ape who, for the first 
 
THE POWERS OF DARKNESS 51 
 
 time in his life, had come across a nut too hard for him to 
 crack. 
 
 " Where's your proof?" he continued, scratching his shaggy 
 head with one of his great hands. 
 
 "Proof of what?" asked the girl. 
 
 " Proof that Asthar 's theory is correct." 
 
 "Have you ever visited the Zoo, Professor?" asked Asthar 
 from where he lolled. "Have you ever watched our poorer rela- 
 tions a perfectly scientific definition, incidentally making 
 love or scratching themselves?" He said it again, maliciously: 
 " 'scratching themselves?' Can you look into their faces and 
 not see that they are only degenerate humans, intensely old 
 and wise? Darwin's theory was all right, but he got it upside 
 down. Evolution implies descent as well as ascent." 
 
 "Proof," said Sir Lancaster, monotonously. "Proof." 
 
 "Exactly," said the Oxford hybrid. "Exactly, Miss Fay. 
 Proof." The dark-faced speaker said it vaguely. He was won- 
 dering in his heart whether to poison the Professor, to whom 
 he had conceived the intense dislike of the slighted man, or to 
 sacrifice the girl whose hair of shining copper and the white- 
 ness of whose neck filled his dark head with fancies. 
 
 "You shouldn't talk about proof," said the girl looking at 
 the Indian, cryptic and poisonous. She turned away. "Proof 
 is only for scientific idiots. Whoever heard of a woman's in- 
 tuitions being wrong and whoever heard her prove them? 
 Pshah!" She lapsed into contemptuous silence. 
 
 Sir Lancaster looked at the amazing girl, sighed angrily and 
 titillated his little snub nose with a dainty piece of cambric 
 which he took from his coat sleeve. 
 
 "When Asthar tells me he believes in the devil, I ask him to 
 prove it," he said in a high atheistical voice. "When he tells 
 me he believes in the soul again, I ask him to prove it." His 
 smiling eyes showed a trifle of brutality. "I cannot find either 
 the one or the other. In my lecture which I delivered before 
 the Rationalist Truth Society on 'Where does the Soul lie?' in 
 which I have compared the heart and brain weights of monkeys 
 and men I declare that I have been unable to find a soul. 
 The modern European finds he has no soul. Europe, thank 
 God!_has abolished the soul and with it the devil." 
 "How can it abolish what has never existed?" commented 
 
52 GODS 
 
 Asthar absently . . . "but I am glad that you don't forget to 
 thank God." He chuckled. 
 
 "That was only an atavistic slip." 
 
 "Man in religion is atavist," said his antagonist. "He slips 
 eternally back into the eternal. Dogmatic science, like its 
 bastard brother, dogmatic religion, is bankrupt, dying. But 
 the gods are eternal." The others had closed in a trifle as the 
 big man leant there on one elbow, an eye turned upwards, lis- 
 tening to the words that came in that curiously high voice 
 from the silver trumpet of his lips. 
 
 "Good God!" 
 
 The exclamation, muttered, irrepressible, which followed 
 Asthar's words, came from the corner of the divan, where 
 Professor Dust, in growing amazement, had been listening. 
 
 "You'll excuse me. Felt it my duty not to keep quiet any 
 longer." The shaggy man was very solemn. He hesitated a 
 moment. . . . 
 
 "I hear a cultured Englishman. . . ." 
 
 "Irishman," said Asthar, laconic. 
 
 "Irishman, a gentleman whose intellectual keenness has 
 made its name through Europe, talking of gods and devils. 
 Gods and devils!" There was amazement in the voice as it 
 rose a trifle from its depths. "Gods and devils!" The words 
 came in puzzled solemnity. "Gods and devils and we are 
 living on the threshold of the twentieth century, when every- 
 body knows that there are no gods and there are no 
 devils. . . ." 
 
 "Who's 'everybody'?" 
 
 "Your correction is reasonable, my dear Asthar," said the 
 scientist "perhaps I should have said the people with prop- 
 erly ordered and trained minds, that is to say, scientifically 
 trained. Science has abolished all this talk of gods and devils, 
 as it has de-materialised ghosts, spooks, call 'em what you 
 will." He went wide for a moment as a ship yawns in a 
 seaway. "Nobody believes in such things to-day except. . . . 
 except ..." he stumbled a little. . . . 
 
 "Except Mr. Pickles, General Bliss, the Archbishop of Can- 
 terbury, Alfred Russel Wallace, Sir William Crookes, myself, 
 and three-fourths of the world, civilised and uncivilised." The 
 young aristocrat was exasperating. 
 
 "We don't believe in devils. We men of science. We say 
 
THE POWERS OF DARKNESS 53 
 
 there are none, and there aren't!" He was becoming more 
 and more dogmatic in his earnestness. "There really aren't," 
 he added, his eyes slightly staring. 
 
 "In other words, you replace the dogma of affirmation by the 
 arch-dogma of negation, the scientist taking the place of the 
 priest," inserted Asthar with smiling suavity. 
 
 Dust caught the smile, and lost himself a very rare thing 
 with him. 
 
 "People who believe in such things ought to be locked up 
 for their own sakes and others in asylums!" 
 
 "Leaving a fourth of the race outside to watch the three- 
 fourths inside?" 
 
 "When we are dealing with hysteria, the hysteria of gods 
 and devils, we don't know where we are; but when we are 
 dealing with the material, with facts, such as . . ." he hovered 
 a moment, then swooped, triumphant, "such as trematodes, 
 we know where we are." 
 
 "When I tell you that I have found a specimen of the 
 Pachypsolus undulatus in the loggerhead turtle (Caretta, car- 
 et t a) in the Mediterranean, entirely new and distinct from 
 species found in the stomachs of the turtles captured in the 
 Gulf of Mexico by Professor Bludgett in the year 1891; and 
 when I tell you that exhaustive microscopic investigation 
 has disclosed the existence of a collar-like cephalic ridge of 
 the type that characterises the Pronocepkalidce, we know where 
 we stand, for we are dealing with facts. When we compare 
 this species with the Rhyditodes cymbiformis. . . ." the Pro- 
 fessor was now mounted and riding, but some hazy realisation 
 of time and place finding its way to the dark recesses of his 
 brain, he pulled up. 
 
 "Enough of that, however," he went on snorting a trifle like 
 a blooded charger stopped in full career. "It is enough for 
 us here and now to say that trematodes are facts, their knowl- 
 edge of profound importance to the race . . . but ghosts. . . ." 
 he snorted contemptuously . . "ghosts!" He was silent in 
 his indignation. 
 
 Paris Asthar held courteous silence, waiting for his friend 
 to continue, but, finding him speechless, he went on solemnly 
 as though no interruption had taken place: 
 
 "To come from the trematode to the god, and gods are made 
 of trematodes, the stuff is the same, it is only the form that is 
 
54 GODS 
 
 different. Dogmatic science, as I have said, is dying, but the 
 gods are eternal." He paused a moment. 
 
 "Listen," he said, and there was command in the voice, 
 from which the lightness had fallen, "of all reigns, materialist 
 science has had the shortest. Half a century." The voice hard- 
 ened. The olive face, splendidly assured, shone in the half 
 light. "Its temples, like the temples of those other dogmas, 
 are being deserted, its high priests blaspheme their beliefs in 
 the scientific associations themselves. It is the scientists them- 
 selves who have begun to fall into the crudest beliefs it is the 
 penalty that materialism pays to religion. And through it all, 
 the mass of the people are untouched. Nominally the religion 
 of the educated, like the dogmatic religions that preceded it, 
 dogmatic science is passing. This is the age of the flux of 
 faiths. Now, my gods," he paused a moment, sweeping upon 
 his audience a dark eye in which the red lights seemed to be 
 the reflection of the last rays of the sun that came over the 
 rooftops outside, "dwell in temples not made with hands." 
 
 "Who are your gods?" asked Hogge, sarcastically. 
 
 "They are the eternal gods the gods of power." 
 
 "How perfectly wonderful!" commented a woman who 
 leaned her superfluous yard of back across a sofa standing out 
 in the room and who had been listening to Asthar, adoringly. 
 It was Togo's Mrs. Swathe. 
 
 "I don't believe in a God," announced AH Baba irrelevantly. 
 "I learned not to at Oxford." On his face was a superior grin. 
 "There is no good and no evil. Those are only terms." 
 
 "Good boy, Ali Baba! Quite correct," said Asthar in deli- 
 cate irony. "Good and evil are but parallel lines which, pro- 
 duced in space, meet, as every mathematician knows. The 
 devil, who is the king of mathematicians as he is the king of 
 science, also knows it. He can prove anything. He is a 
 brainy devil. But you believe in magic, don't you, Ali?" He 
 glanced at him maliciously. 
 
 "Oh, that's different," said Ali Hassan, hesitant. "You see, 
 I've seen things out in India things . . ." he stumbled, con- 
 fused. 
 
 "Yes, he's seen things," said the man like a thing in a bottle, 
 wafting forward out of the shadows, and then disappearing. 
 
 "How wonderful," said Mrs. Swathe, wriggling half a yard 
 of back, ecstatic. This lady's faith was satisfactory and 
 
THE POWERS OF DARKNESS 55 
 
 simple. It was that only good existed, and she got over such 
 trifles as toothache and delirium tremens by saying that they 
 were only good, disguised. 
 
 "Yes, isn't it?" said Asthar, smilingly. 
 
 "But what nonsense is this about science being bankrupt?" 
 put in Professor Hogge, who had been vainly waiting to get in 
 a word. "Do you think the world is going back to its beliefs 
 in gods and devils?" 
 
 "It has never left them," retorted Asthar. "This age of 
 materialism was but a phase a mask. The centuries have 
 seen many such phases. Some day, the gods will fling Europe 
 into the crucible of war to burn off the last incrustations of 
 to-day's materialism. People will say in that day of war that 
 it has come because somebody wants Morocco, or because 
 some nation has misbehaved itself, or because of nothing but 
 it will come to tear down the veils between the worlds, and 
 for no other reason. On the fields of death, the veil wears 
 thin. . . . For no other reason," he added after a moment 
 from where he half reclined. "The gods use strong medicine." 
 
 Togo, who had been flitting from place to place, his head 
 on one side, stopped in his clearing away. He was staring at 
 the ceiling. Under the ochre of his face there spread a slow 
 grin of scepticism that passed as it came. The silence was 
 only broken by the high snuff of Sir Lancaster. 
 
 The shadows had fallen in the old room in which the figures, 
 shadows themselves, had drawn in around the music bench, as 
 around a throne. The man sitting there had lifted himself a 
 little, the eye with the red lights in it shining whitely as it 
 looked out through the windows, looking as though it saw 
 something. In the turn of the head there was tremendous 
 certainty. 
 
 He went on, and now the voice that came through the 
 round of the lips was as the voice of another and delivering the 
 message of another of others: 
 
 "You think the gods are dead. The gods never die. They 
 have never been more living both the gods of power and those 
 others, for the gods, like mortals, fight together. The prin- 
 ciple of godship, as of mortality, is struggle. You think that 
 this life of the concrete, if you will, of the conscious, this life of 
 eating and drinking, buying and selling, lovemaking and death 
 is the life. It is but the shadow of life all these things are 
 
S 6 GODS 
 
 but shadows of the things behind, pin-points in space for the 
 realisation of the end of life consciousness. The things that 
 you say have no existence, the things of superstition or magic 
 or faith, are reality this earth-life, the unreal. Everything 
 exists. There is no non-existence. Everything that can be 
 thought, exists, for thought is the creator. 
 
 "The things seen in the ravings of a madman, the delirium 
 tremens of the alcoholist have these things no existence be- 
 cause you cannot see them? Has the ether no existence be- 
 cause it cannot be seen or weighed? Are there not sounds too 
 great or too tiny to be heard forces too fine to be measured? 
 And do not the gods exist because you cannot see them or feel 
 them?" 
 
 The only thing that showed itself in the now darkened room 
 was the white of Ali Baba's eyes where they turned sideways 
 to look at the glint of a sun ray upon the copper hair of Stella 
 Fay. The shadow near the door might have been Togo. 
 
 "You who stand for the concreteness of fact, which, for like 
 all, you must have your God, you have deified. Where have 
 you been able to secure foothold for the negation of unbelief? 
 How many of the millions of these islands do not believe? 
 How many of Europe's white millions have no belief, secret 
 or avowed? In this continent of the material, the gods still 
 sway the secret thoughts of men. The financier, like the book- 
 maker, consults the occultist in secret. The gods hold their 
 sway in the kingdom of the gods, in the souls of men, in those 
 chambers of flickering consciousness where men's actions are 
 born. The European no longer worships his gods in churches, 
 he worships them in a temple not made with hands in his 
 heart. He worships even whilst he blasphemes, believes whilst 
 he denies. On the threshold of what men call death, the atheist 
 falters." His own voice trembled a little as he added "For 
 even the devils believe and tremble." 
 
 "The gods are not dead in Europe because the milk-white 
 gods of the Christian with their humility and repentance are 
 passing because in their place are coming the gods of assured- 
 ness, consciousness, power, and with them, the new religion, the 
 Religion of Consciousness. The gods are not dead because 
 we are now witnessing one of the age-long struggles for power 
 between the White Gods and what men call the Powers of 
 Darkness, for we are seeing the rise of mysticism and the 
 
THE POWERS OF DARKNESS 57 
 
 gods of power at last coming into their own." He spoke in a 
 sort of suppressed passion as though these things were being 
 forced out of him. 
 
 "The gods do not lack devotees because the European is 
 not building new temples. The gods are worshipped in men's 
 hearts they are fed, nay, they are created, by their thoughts. 
 The gods are always worshipped, unconsciously or consciously. 
 When the materialist speaks of the passing of the Idea of 
 God, he means the passing of the church. He does not know 
 that the deepest life of a nation is its subjective, not its ob- 
 jective life its unconscious, not its conscious, existence. The 
 great mass are as unconscious as the toad in the rock. Like 
 children, they have no past and no future. They live only 
 in the present. It is only in moments of stress that the sub- 
 jective rises above the threshold of consciousness, for trans- 
 lation into action, because it lies deepest. In moments of 
 stress, national and individual, the belief in the unseen rises 
 as surely as dead men rise out of deep waters. . 
 
 "You say that the gods of other ages have died. They have 
 not died. They have died but, like their symbols, to take 
 new life under other names and forms, for with the rise of 
 mysticism to-day, the power of the symbol returns the swas- 
 tika, the Cross, the Crescent, these things have always been 
 and always will be, in one or another form. The goddess of 
 the flesh that has been worshipped as Astarte and Anunit, 
 Astharoth and Belit, Mylitta and Tanit and Venus, is not 
 dead because she has changed her names and ritual. She is 
 worshipped to-day in every European city; she dominates still 
 in dark and awful forms the souls of men. To her the 
 thoughts of millions pay their tribute daily. She and only 
 she occupies a third of our waking and sleeping lives In 
 thought or act. The gods live on that on which they feed 
 on the prayers and thoughts of men. Without their food 
 they die, for the gods are mortal. They are born again, for 
 they are immortal. 
 
 A little sigh came out of the shadows. It might have been 
 Stella Fay. 
 
 "The gods dead? Social Democracy, like Science, came out 
 to destroy them, but to-day the Social Democracy of our time 
 is pregnant with its gods the gods of Democracy if you will, 
 for Democracy has created its own gods in its own image- 
 
58 GODS 
 
 that Democracy which has become a cult, the songs of which 
 are hymns, its speeches prayers. And opposed to it, power 
 and a power-class, whose gods are my gods, the gods of power, 
 whose litany is made to Caste, worshipped by unconscious 
 followers who, like their antagonists, invoke their invisible 
 leaders whom they have taken from the old gods of Hebrew 
 and Christian that they have transformed. And now, even 
 the democratic gods themselves are becoming gods of power 
 as Democracy itself climbs to the seats of the mighty. 
 
 "Or, if you leave the continent of the concrete, you will 
 find that the gods of power, driven by the gods of the Chris- 
 tian back to their ancestral fastnesses in Asia where un- 
 counted millions have raised their hierarchies tier upon tier 
 since time was young, are once more stealing back. In India, 
 where the gods who walk the earth still live in the abodes of 
 men. In Russia, whose millions give lip-service to the white 
 gods, but who build their altars and make their sacrifices 
 to those others. Or will you pass to Africa where the gods 
 of the lower worlds form a hybrid phantasmagoria of god- 
 ship, in which the black magic of the negro holds its sway 
 against all the pulings of the missionary? Egypt, the time-old 
 home of the occult, where all the teachings of Islam as of 
 Christ have been unable to displace the invocation of the 
 gods of power, that Egypt the pyramids of which were once 
 the houses of initiation of the novitiate of the religion of 
 power and magic, that Egypt which will once again be the 
 nursery of the gods. 
 
 "Or will you turn to South America with its inextricable 
 tangle of white and black gods, whose sons worship the 
 bloody gods of Aztec even whilst they bow themselves under 
 the Cross? For the gods of power are jealous gods. They 
 stay where they were bred. Or to North America where a 
 new religion rises every twenty-four hours and where one day 
 a great world-religion will come out of the travail of the 
 sects a white religion for America, with Ireland, will be 
 the last stronghold of the white gods?" 
 
 The shadows had drawn closer in the room. A single ray 
 of sunlight found its way into the corner behind the blue 
 curtain. 
 
 "You speak of your science that is itself but an attempt 
 for man to become god, for the finite to demonstrate the in- 
 
THE POWERS OF DARKNESS 59 
 
 finite. Look to the four hundred millions who in the dead 
 centuries passed through that stage . . . and found nothing. 
 China, a mirage of intellect, the apotheosis of the material, 
 believing nothing, hoping nothing. There, amongst the yellow 
 myriads, lie the ashes of the scientific method as of Science, 
 and you would thrust mankind back on to what has only been 
 a bridge from the instinct of the animal to the intuition god- 
 like intuition of man. Man cannot always stand on his 
 bridges." 
 
 The little yellow figure that had slipped through the door 
 and now stood behind the fold of the blue curtain, was 
 listening. But it did not smile. 
 
 "Science." The speaker laughed. "Humility. Self-sacri- 
 fice. Faith." He laughed again, high, assured. "The gods 
 of power are coming back to their own. Men shall learn 
 power, not humility. Realisation, not sacrifice. Conscious- 
 ness, not faith. The gods are waiting they are here they 
 are listening. . . ." 
 
 He flung up his hand in passion uncontrollable. The last 
 ray of sunlight disappeared from the window. They sat 
 there in the silence. 
 
VII 
 
 FINN WRESTLES WITH THE DEVIL 
 
 As Finn left the Tin Tabernacle on the night of the revival 
 meeting which had ended so disastrously, a pamphlet was 
 thrust into his hands by a greybearded man in a soft wide- 
 awake. As he caught the eye of the man, he had that feeling 
 which had come to him sometimes in the case of others, the 
 feeling that he had seen the man somewhere before, quite re- 
 cently, and then he remembered it was the Lanthorn hat 
 and the Lanthorn beard and eye, only that the eye was 
 harder, less "fluid." But even as he thought it, he caught 
 sight of his father, a little bent, walking by his side and it 
 might have been his father. Many times had it come to him 
 that some of the faces about him were as of one family, as 
 though he had known these people at other times and in other 
 places, that there was some hidden connection linking them 
 together and with him. 
 
 Yet these faces, so alike, often belonged to people who had 
 nothing in common. A touch, and the face of the atheist 
 became as the face of his father, a believer. A turn in the 
 grey filament of the brain, and the thing that made this grey- 
 beard in the wideawake, propagandist for rationalism he had 
 read the title of the pamphlet: 'There is no Hell." might 
 have made him perhaps Lanthorn and sent him into the ranks 
 of the spiritualists, or, with another turn, given him the awe 
 and veneration that was his father's. 
 
 It was all very confused and yet a confusion that only 
 needed a touch to make it plain. It was like the dream which 
 had been with him as far back as he could remember the 
 dream of a veiled figure which he followed down an endless 
 twisting lane, the face of which he expected to see at the next 
 turn, but which he never saw. At any moment the answer 
 might come. It was just like that. 
 
 Why was it? Finn was at this time in a continual state 
 
 60 
 
FINN WRESTLES WITH THE DEVIL 61 
 
 of interrogation. As his father said: "Why can't you behave 
 yourself like a reasonable boy? What for do you always want 
 to be asking the reason of everything? You're a young 
 atheist, that's what you are." And then, having done his 
 duty, Jemmy would go back to bury himself in Martyr and 
 MacGlusky's Specials. 
 
 His sweet little grandmother, to whom he sometimes ap- 
 pealed on these difficulties as to the Higher Court of expe- 
 rience, for which youth, despite its bravado, has haunting re- 
 spect, would tell him to "trust in the Lord and his Word." 
 That it troubled the little woman at times was apparent, 
 for Finn had heard her at the foot of the three steps that 
 led from her bed, when one morning she had fallen down all 
 three she was getting a little feeble pray, as, slightly 
 stunned, she sat on the floor at the bottom: "Oh Lord! bring 
 the dear boy to his loving Saviour and stop his questions. 
 Amen." And so she sat in her nightgown of unbleached 
 calico comfortably at the bottom, waiting to be picked up, and 
 calling "Jemmy!" at intervals in her quavering treble. 
 
 But it was Finn who kissed her and put her on her feet 
 and fetched her red flannel petticoat, and then, like a decent 
 man, went out of the room. 
 
 Old Mrs. Fountain never wasted any time in praying for 
 herself. She always feared to go out of the world before she 
 had done her best at the throne of grace for those about her. 
 And when she fell down, which she not infrequently did, she 
 always feared it might be the end, and prayed accordingly 
 for others, not herself. 
 
 When Finn got home from the meeting, he smuggled some 
 petroleum out of the cupboard in the scullery and filled his 
 "penny stinker," as the ribald storekeeper called the brass 
 lamps he sold in the little general utility shop at the bottom 
 of the road, just opposite the Methodist chapel, which he 
 flouted on Sundays by tinkering with an ungodly paraffin 
 motor which was in the habit of giving out a series of ex- 
 plosive stinkings as the faithful went into chapel. 
 
 This lamp he took up to his room with the sloping ceiling 
 under the slates at the top of the house, sleuthily ignoring 
 his mother's warning: "Now, don't let me find a light under 
 your door ten minutes from now. Wasting the oil indeed!" 
 Mrs. Fontaine had a nasty habit of stealing up the two flights 
 
62 GODS 
 
 from the connubial chamber on the first floor to see if Finn 
 was "reading in bed" a capital sin to which he was much 
 addicted. Finn chanced it, and opened his pamphlet. 
 
 It was a fascinating pamphlet in its ashen cover. It started 
 out with confident assertion: "There is no Hell," and proved 
 its hatred of dogma by a series of dogmatic questions, to 
 which it returned a series of perfectly satisfactory dogmatic 
 answers. "Has anyone ever been to hell?" "Has anyone 
 ever seen the devil?" "Has anyone ever come back to tell 
 the tale?" "Has anyone ever seen God?" "Has anyone ever 
 been to heaven?" And wound up by asking: "Are these ques- 
 tions fair and square or are they not?" 
 
 Now all this was very fair and square and above board, 
 if not, for some obscure reason which would doubtless later 
 be plain, very satisfying. But what could man have more 
 than the truth? Finn himself was an interrogative animal. 
 He trembled with excitement as he read. Here, anyhow, was 
 assurance and consciousness. The people about him old Crux 
 at the office, his father and mother and aunts at home, the 
 people he met in trains and churches none of these had con- 
 sciousness or certainty. Old Crux, who had sung the Glory 
 Song with the rest at Billy Pickles' meeting the other evening 
 and who gave with both hands to the Salvation Army and to 
 charity, thought nothing of sending half a thousand little 
 investors to starvation by "bulling" or "bearing" the stock 
 market, or, for that matter, of nearly working a clerk to 
 death and then "firing" him, all the time keeping wages down 
 to the bone. His son Parker taught in a Sunday-school, but 
 on week days "operated" without questioning in John L. Crux, 
 Limited, with as little compunction or doubt as its founder. 
 
 Yet both men, in their way, were genuine. His father, for all 
 his praying and concealed Methodism, made qualmless state- 
 ments about Martyr and MacGlusky's products which he 
 knew had no foundation save in an imagination fertilised by 
 competition that is, until he reached the point when he be- 
 lieved his own prevarications. The curate at the church in the 
 High Road was a regular port wine curate who snobbed to 
 Bishops, who was always talking about "taking a little wine 
 for the stomach's sake," and taking it pretty often. You 
 couldn't expect much of him but what about his rector, 
 a bearded straight-nosed man of inflexible principle who had 
 
FINN WRESTLES WITH THE DEVIL 63 
 
 spoken to Finn solemnly about the personal purity and clean- 
 ness of heart necessary for anyone taking the Holy Com- 
 munion he called it "the Eucharist" and then had handed 
 the chalice without a word to old Branberry, the lushy old 
 brewer who owned half a dozen gin palaces, whose life was 
 a running sore, and had even beatified him in a way from the 
 pulpit after he had given the money for the repair of the 
 steeple. And the rector, he had to admit, was an honest man, 
 after his lights. And there was that day when he had seen 
 Blackburn, the great amateur athlete and county cricketer, 
 whom he personally had canonised, get his century against 
 Yorkshire on the county ground. A fine, clean-limbed, lis- 
 some specimen of manhood he was, but as he stood outside 
 the dressing room, worshipping distantly at his shrine, he 
 heard him tell his companions a story as he sipped his glass of 
 whisky which even now brought the blood to his face. He 
 himself was a teetotaller and non-smoker to him tobacco and 
 alcohol were questions of religion, of inner, natural decency 
 to others, only questions of training or "wind" or convenience. 
 
 Finn Fontaine was puzzled to death at the mad world about 
 him a world illogical and unconscious. Only youth was 
 logical. It sometimes seemed to him that he was made of a 
 different stuff to those others. It was not that they were 
 worse or better. It was only that there was a difference of 
 quality, something basic, unchangeable. 
 
 Now he had at last got on the track of logic. It had all 
 this time been hidden in the ashen bosom of the Rationalist 
 Thinkers' Union, which, instead of going around things, say- 
 ing and pretending one thing and doing another, sidestepping 
 the obvious and never replying directly to a question, an- 
 swered a downright "Yes" or "No." It was all quite simple. 
 "Did God exist or did he not?" The Rationalist Thinkers did 
 not begin to answer in the way of the grown-ups: "Well, it all 
 depends upon what you mean by God. . . ." Instead, they 
 asked another plain question: "Has anyone seen God?" 
 "No." "Then there is no God." 
 
 Something straggled across the retina of his mind like one 
 of those insects that skate on the surface of ponds: "No man 
 hath seen God at any time." It disturbed his self-satisfaction. 
 But he got rid of it. "Dogma," he said. He read on. ... 
 
 The pamphlet showed exactly how the Idea of God had 
 
6 4 GODS 
 
 arisen in the mind of primitive man that great ape which 
 had risen from all fours to stand upright by reaching after 
 the fruits on the trees, and then to tower over the trees and 
 over the world. How the Jahweh or Jehovah- Jah of the 
 Israelites was only one of a hierarchy of gods (he said that 
 word "hierarchy" over several times, he liked new words and 
 it seemed a sort of sheet-anchor for his new ideas) only 
 one of a hierarchy of gods, and had been taken over by the 
 early Christian church and finally made into the one anthropo- 
 morphic (he said that word also over again and very proud 
 and intellectually stiff-necked he felt when he had done so) 
 God which that church thought it worshipped to-day. That 
 was all very satisfying. At last he had found anchor-hold in 
 the shifting sands of life. 
 
 The penny stinker burned itself out as he neared the last 
 page, which he had to read upon a vast expenditure of matches. 
 It finished with a series of clinchings: "What you can't see, 
 can't exist can it?" "What you can't prove, can't exist 
 can it?" "What nobody has seen can't be can it?" 
 
 The next few days he went about like a sort of superior 
 ape in a wilderness of monkeys and with a quiet satisfaction 
 which made his grandmother think he was ill. "Do take a 
 herbal, ducky," she would say, commending her infallible 
 remedy for all ills whether of mind or body. "A good clearing 
 out is what you want, boy." (She pronounced it "bye," one 
 of the things that always disgusted his mother.) But Finn 
 preferred his mental constipation and went about looking 
 darkly at his father, mother, and aunts, and saying to him- 
 self: "If you only knew how I could smash you all up with 
 your God and your Devil and your heaven and your hell. 
 Is there a hell? Yah! Heaven? Pjah? What you can't 
 see, you idiots, can't exist can it?" And so on. But he 
 never looked darkly on his grandmother. 
 
 He even sat down to write a pamphlet himself. This pam- 
 phlet was to be different to anything that ever had gone be- 
 fore. It was to cause a revolution in thought. He was simply 
 going to ask a mad world, which at these moments in the 
 present case for the purpose of his pamphlet he persuaded 
 himself to be sane, a series of questions, opposite which in a 
 parallel column he set down the answers. Thus: 
 
FINN WRESTLES WITH THE DEVIL 65 
 
 Question. Answer. 
 
 Is there a God? How do you know? 
 
 No, that was no good. It was no use answering a question 
 by asking another, which was Finn's usual method, although 
 he did not know it. So he began again: 
 
 Question. Answer. 
 
 Is there a God? No. 
 
 Why? Because you can't see him, and 
 
 what you can't see, can't exist. 
 
 That looked better, but savoured of plagiarism. However, 
 he tried again, and at the end of a week had produced a sort 
 of "Magnall's Questions" which made him think that writing 
 was not quite so easy as he had always believed it, a con- 
 viction which had originally come to him after the first article 
 he had ever written in his life, written, impellent, after the 
 Tabernacle meeting and the ash-covered pamphlet. This ar- 
 ticle, which was a more or less sanguinary attack on revelation 
 as revealed at revival meetings, he had sent out to the "British 
 Weekly," and afterwards to the " Church Times," the former 
 having been introduced by his Aunt Bella, who had literary 
 lapses, the latter being the fortifier of his mother's orthodoxy, 
 which, however, she only skimmed both she and Jemmy were 
 "skimmers." Both had returned to him and in doing so had 
 sandbagged his faith for the time. 
 
 Desperate, he had told Father Lestrange all about it and 
 had given him the MS. which he had written on his type- 
 writer during office hours. (Where art was concerned, Finn 
 was soundly unmoral.) And this MS., in some mysterious 
 way, had appeared in "The Lanthorn," headed by a little 
 italicised note from the editor, who had printed it, he said, 
 as "a light from an unbiassed young mind upon to-day's re- 
 ligion." 
 
 Finn thought the article wonderful, although "the unbiassed 
 young mind" stuck for some reason or other in his throat, but 
 it was really very crude. 
 
 The MS. of the pamphlet he had begun to write he kept 
 by him in case he could alter it and he began to haunt the 
 bookstalls. There was one with a steeple on the top of it 
 under the shadow of the Mansion House which always had 
 a tray of second-hand books and a very nice young man in 
 
66 GODS 
 
 a rather seedy morning coat, who was wont to gaze owl-like 
 from the doorway through two magnifying spectacles which 
 spanned his pimple of a nose, an enlarged one of the many 
 that covered his face. This young man one day having asked 
 him, to his extreme confusion, as to the kind of book for 
 which he was looking, and a conversation ensuing, it eventuated 
 that the pimple-nosed young man was a passionate ration- 
 alist, with a determination to believe nothing, which rather 
 upset Finn's ideas about the division of the world into propa- 
 gandists and indifferents, for he had somehow or other always 
 associated really violent propaganda with the Christians. 
 
 It was he who sold Finn an ash-coloured Rationalist 
 Thinkers' "Life after Death?" which proved to Finn the next 
 morning about 4 o'clock that when he was dead he was dead 
 and that was that. He was rather confused and puzzled to 
 find that a draught had begun to blow upon the intellectual 
 self-satisfaction of the previous weeks. It was as though he 
 had let a ghost into a well-warmed house. 
 
 He went to sleep and dreamt that the pimple-nosed young 
 man the same young man, but who somehow, in the way 
 of dreams, was really his father his eyes ominously enlarged, 
 an ash-covered book in his hand, the other under his coat 
 tails, was standing over him and proving to him, to his own 
 intense satisfaction, that there was no heaven, there was no 
 hell, and soon there would be no Finn Fontaine. He awoke 
 in a cold sweat. 
 
 He could hardly meet his father's eye the next few weeks, 
 and suffered, literally, a hell of a time, dragged as he was 
 between intellect and inspiration, with the latter, illogically, 
 pulling deeper. In the mornings he would awake a rationalist, 
 rational to the marrow of his backbone, but as the autumn 
 evenings drew on, he would lapse into superstition and a 
 joyous assurance of immortality. 
 
 It was in one of these stages of flux, when all the world 
 seemed to be melting under his feet and when, for the first 
 time, he learned the meaning of "his heart turned to water," 
 Finn flung his big, bony length down by the little stretcher- 
 bed in his room and prayed, his long inexorable nose in his 
 hands: "Oh God! give me assurance give me certainty!" 
 It was horrible as he crouched there to find how quickly the 
 first flush of feeling was passing. It made him desperate. 
 
FINN WRESTLES WITH THE DEVIL 67 
 
 "Show yourself oh God! if you exist," he prayed brutally, 
 challenging the Infinite. "Give me a sign." 
 
 He looked up, expecting to see something. He looked 
 through the little low window at the stars coming out in the 
 velvet of the autumn night. He did not know what he ex- 
 pected to see but he did not see it. It was no good. It was 
 all nonsense. The Rationalist Thinkers were right. 
 
 But even as he thought it, there came that old longing for 
 infallibility. Above all, the desire to love. Rationalism, some- 
 how, had no room for love. 
 
 It was then he discovered that he had never given up the 
 Idea of God, which lay in the depths as something shining 
 in dark waters. 
 
 In his despair for a rock upon which to build his beliefs, 
 there ran across his mind Father Lestrange's: "And upon this 
 rock will I build my church, and the gates of hell shall not 
 prevail against it." He would go to the Jesuit. 
 
 He found him in a narow high white-washed study, the 
 walls of which were only broken by a steel engraving of the 
 Jesuit "general" and a common plaster crucifix, the wood of 
 the cross standing starkly against the limewash. It was 
 lighted by a single high window facing a blank wall. 
 
 There was an asceticism about the place that repelled him. 
 It was a sort of sterilisation chamber in which ideas were 
 limned with surprising clarity and was the reverse of the 
 sensuousness with which he had always associated the Roman 
 Communion, for, with the exception of that solitary visit to 
 the Westminster chapel, he had never been inside a Catholic 
 Church "it was the tasting of meats offered to idols," his 
 father had said. His mother had not been so sure. 
 
 In that nakedness, he felt like a soul unshrived, naked to 
 some unseen Eye that watched. But he forgot the bareness 
 of the place in the warm, strong handclasp of the tall priest, 
 who in that whiteness looked drawn. But the dark fiery 
 eye rolled itself on him in that intimate humanity which al- 
 ways acted as solvent. 
 
 The priest did not give him a chance to blunder into an 
 explanation of this, his first visit. He took the boy over to 
 the bookshelves, taking down book after book, and although 
 he did not interest him, for Finn was always too much occupied 
 with his own thoughts to be too deeply interested in those 
 
68 GODS 
 
 of others when they did not bear directly on his own, it 
 served to put him at his ease. 
 
 Then it came from him. He told him the story of the ra- 
 tionalist books and waited for the tall man to fall on him. 
 Instead, he took him back to the bookshelves and pointed out 
 to him upon a high shelf a row of ashy volumes. "I have 
 them all here," he said. "And many more." He took down 
 a handful. "Here is one you must read 'Was Christ an 
 Epileptic?' and this other 'An Exposure of Roman Cath- 
 olicism.' You shall go through them all." 
 
 Father Lestrange looked at the boy, fleetingly. "You have 
 read Renan, of course? You must read his 'Life of Christ.' 
 A beautifully sincere book. Well written. And here is an 
 old friend Tom Paine. And Voltaire. . . ." 
 
 The boy was used to this strange man, but he hesitated a 
 moment as the little choking question came: "But, Father 
 .... all these books are .... rationalist .... 
 infidel .... what .... I. ..." He broke off. 
 
 The priest with that gracious gesture of his waved him to 
 the hollow of the horse-hair arm-chair, the only thing of com- 
 fort in that austerity, as he seated himself opposite on the 
 straight-backed, inflexible piece of oak. "I know, Finn," he 
 said. "I understand. But I want you to read all those 
 all of them and when you have read them, Finn, for I know 
 you, you will be several steps nearer heaven. If my Church 
 feared those books what would my Church be? Infallible? 
 Invulnerable? She would only be the mortal staff of her 
 opponents. Read them. 
 
 "Rationalism is as old as literature itself," he went on, 
 "older even than Ecclesiastes. Its cold, clear light has again 
 and again risen upon the horizons of men to drive away 
 the ghosts of the ages. But the ghosts come back." 
 
 "But the Rationalists say there is no hell," said Finn, hoping 
 most irrationally that hell existed. He had never wanted 
 that before. "They say there is no fire and brimstone." 
 
 "And there isn't," said the priest, smiling at the boy, who 
 felt strangely disappointed. "The rationalists are right. Hell, 
 like heaven, is of the compass of the human heart, in which 
 we carry- both that is, it is broad as the universe circum- 
 scribed as the chalice of passion in which the heart is con- 
 .He got up from his chair, went to the high, white 
 
FINN WRESTLES WITH THE DEVIL 69 
 
 window and looked out against the blank wall opposite. The 
 dews stood dank on the high, white forehead. There 
 was memory in the face. He turned: 
 
 "The word is but the husk. There are so many ways to 
 understand." 
 
 "But your church teaches there is a definite hell?" said the 
 boy, who for the moment was angry with the priest. It was 
 the old uncertainty stealing back, even here in this room of 
 certainty. He wanted infallibility. He did not want com- 
 promise. 
 
 "Why, Finn, you're a better Catholic than I," said the priest. 
 "My church tempers the wind to the shorn lamb. Some- 
 times it has to speak in symbols, in allegory, like its great 
 Master. 'There are many things I would say unto you, 
 but ye cannot bear them now.' Hell may be none the less 
 real because it is a hell of thought. You ought to know that, 
 Finn. Purgatory. We all have our purgatories. And you 
 should know that." 
 
 There was a spiritual camaraderie, an understanding, that 
 was subtly delicious to the boy. The Jesuit had taken him 
 up to his level, had admitted him to a brotherhood of equal- 
 ity, of consciousness. But the long nose and the green eyes 
 would not be turned. He wanted "Yes" or "No." 
 
 "Then you don't believe in hell and your church doesn't, 
 Father. Now I know why it is your church does not go out 
 into the street like the Socialists because it doesn't believe. 
 Why, if people believed" and now Finn was thoroughly 
 roused and therefore, as always, fearless "they would rush 
 out into the streets and preach like mad people until they 
 fell exhausted, preach like John the Baptist. If they believed 
 that the cost of unbelief was eternal torture, without hope, 
 endless, they would go mad, and going mad would save them- 
 selves. But they don't believe." 
 
 The boy sat there, stubborn, contemptuous. No flattery, 
 no compromise, could ever soften the white heat of his tem- 
 per. That white flame in which he saw all things clearly. 
 He at least did not believe in cool head and cool vision. Vision 
 came in flashes out of fire. 
 
 The Jesuit was silent. He glanced at the boy, in that char- 
 acteristic fleeting way, and there was love in his look. Even 
 
70 GODS 
 
 Finn, catching his glance, saw that, and it puzzled him. It 
 did not mollify. He felt he had to go on. 
 
 "Belief," he said. "Nobody believes. Belief is only for 
 Sundays. It is only for another world. Not for this. Why," 
 he said, and he could be very rude when angry, forgetting 
 his natural shyness, "the very building in which we are was 
 raised by that horrid old Duchess of Duckleworth and every- 
 body knows what her life has been and how she treats her 
 tenants. And your own church holds her high and takes her 
 money and. . . ." 
 
 It poured out of him. The lack of consciousness of the 
 world. The segregation of religion for Sundays and churches. 
 The unaccountable shyness of speaking about what should be 
 the most important and most discussed thing on earth. The 
 people called "socialists" anyhow saw this. He had heard 
 one of them, a fiery John the Baptist, at the corner of the 
 road under the "Lord High Admiral." He had shown it 
 up. ... 
 
 "Like your Rationalists, Finn," said the Father, speaking 
 for the first time. "Eh, Finn?" 
 
 The boy was silent. Somehow the fires of his rationalism 
 which had blazed up again under the bellows of his indigna- 
 tion were damped. Things with him had a habit of sometimes, 
 in a moment, seeming very far away of receding like things 
 in dreams. That had always been so. Rationalism seemed 
 only the echo of something, as he sat there. 
 
 "Listen, Finn," said the priest gently, and he looked softly 
 on the boy. "There are more ways of cheating the devil 
 than the world knows. And there is a devil. Mr. Asthar the 
 other evening at the Tabernacle was right in that. Satan at 
 least is no figure of speech. We Jesuits are the missionary 
 priests to civilisation ours is the silent propaganda. To 
 cheat the devil we have often to play him at his own game and 
 use his own weapons," he went on, as though half speaking to 
 himself. "Sometimes we even use him to defeat his own 
 ends .... you have mentioned the Duchess," he said, 
 smiling. "If we went out to the street corner and threw 
 revelation at the heads of the people, it would cease to be 
 revelation it would only be mathematics. The one thing 
 that the people of our times cannot bear is the direct state- 
 ment because the people of our times are unconscious un- 
 
FINN WRESTLES WITH THE DEVIL 71 
 
 conscious partly because they are living in an age of flux, an 
 age of more spacious horizons, of greater complex. Even a 
 century ago, with narrower horizons, men had a greater con- 
 sciousness. Consciousness always means limitation. 
 
 "Unconsciousness is the devil's weapon and, like the devil, 
 it can only be met by itself, that is, by the weapon of the 
 indirect, the suggestive, but this weapon can only be wielded 
 by those who themselves are conscious. Rationalism, like 
 Socialism, is the religion of consciousness using the direct 
 statement and ignoring the subjective, that is, the spiritual, 
 and Socialism, like the Rationalism that is now dying, will 
 one day also die. We undermine men's souls not men's in- 
 tellects. The change in intellect is the change mechanical 
 the soul-change is a change of substance. 
 
 "Our weapon is the symbol our symbol the Cross and in 
 that sign shall we conquer," he went on, as though speaking 
 more to himself than to the boy opposite, a trick he some- 
 times had when talking to Finn, who seemed to act as a 
 stimulus for thoughts that even he himself only understood, 
 "through a glass, darkly." "Our dominion is over the souls of 
 men, by suggestion. Our kingdom is the subjective not the 
 objective the invisible, not the visible. The symbolism of 
 the High Mass at Westminister is more potent to conquer 
 than all the direct ravings of the Socialist under its shadow." 
 The jaw set. The eye took harder lights. 
 
 "But we do not hide from ourselves that the final battle 
 will be between the direct and the indirect between Socialism 
 and the Church. The price of life is eternal struggle between 
 the dogmas of this world and those of the world to come. 
 
 "We shall never have religion in the counting-house. We 
 shall never have religion in the weekday. We could never 
 have it till the world was spiritually conscious and the world 
 will never all be conscious, for spiritual consciousness is only 
 for the few and this world a dwelling place for imperfect souls. 
 Some day the dominion of the Church will extend over the 
 whole world we are taught to believe that but when that 
 day comes it means that the great unconscious many will have 
 learned to bow themselves to the spiritual consciousness of the 
 few, that it will be a trained consciousness a consciousness 
 of suggestion from above, to the great unconsciousness below." 
 
72 GODS 
 
 It was with Finn as he walked down the winding drive from 
 the Seminary. A trained consciousness from above. And 
 now the ashen books seemed very far away. 
 
 "He is wrestling with the devil," his father said, piously. 
 
VIII 
 
 Mr. Trevor Titterling crouched over the kitchen range and 
 cleaned his nails. Occasionally he would place an ochreous 
 finger inside his mouthful of very white, false teeth, with 
 which he would press back the quicks, viewing them afterwards 
 through his ribbonless monocle with a pale and fishy eye to 
 see the effect. All this without removing the dissipated cig- 
 arette stump that hung from the corner of his mouth. Nobody 
 had ever seen Mr. Titterling with a whole cigarette. 
 
 The scragginess of his lower extremities was, despite the 
 frosty London morning outside, draped in a fine grey cash- 
 mere, a large grease spot standing out on the left knee. His 
 feet, clad in silk socks, with an arrow "clocked" up the side, 
 were thrust into what had once been dancing pumps, a "new 
 potato" showing through the left heel. Mr. Titterling rather 
 gave a general effect of faded magnificence. 
 
 The head bent towards the red glow showed the scanty 
 nondescript hair parted in the middle and coming down in 
 horns to his sorrowful, pale eyes. His nose, high, pale Roman 
 organ, fell over his weak, humorous mouth, matching the eyes 
 above. His very high collar was a trifle frayed and, in spite 
 of its gloss, looked dirty. But that might have been the light. 
 From above, there came a low voice singing as it moved about 
 the house: "... a fountain filled with blood, drawn from 
 Emanuel's veins. . . ." 
 
 "Now look here, young John the Baptist, chuck it!" he 
 admonished, humorously blasphemous. He stopped for a 
 moment the devil's tattoo which he had begun to play with the 
 poker on the bars of the grate, as his third youngest, a six-year- 
 old with long wire hair, who was engaged in an attempt to 
 emulate Cain, assisted by his elder brother, Plantagenet, who 
 for dramatic purposes was, at this very moment, Abel, and 
 at the same time to avoid Bluggins the bulldog where you come 
 
 73 
 
74 GODS 
 
 round by the fender, had gone head first into his father's ribs. 
 
 Seymour (the Titterlings had a weakness for fine names) 
 really looked a John the Baptist. You could almost smell 
 the locusts and wild honey as you looked at his hair, and his 
 garments, of a kilt-like nature, were mere superfluity. Sey- 
 mour, who was the terror of his brothers and sisters, being 
 said by his father to be possessed of a devil, always played 
 the unpleasant parts from the bible, which was the only mental 
 food of the Titterling young, such as Goliath or Cain. Esau 
 was a favourite part. He was a very hairy boy. Once he 
 had tried Herod with a nearly fatal realism for the two 
 youngest. Albemarle, the baby in arms, had a near go. 
 
 Occasionally, however, "bears and lions," a zoological drama 
 of a ravening nature, displaced the bible. But this was largely 
 due to that ghostly cellar beneath the house, of a cave-like 
 gloom, which had obviously been made for the purpose. 
 
 The other two boys were under the kitchen table making, 
 in the words of their progenitor, a hell of a noise "and you 
 just wait young Larkin" (that was the second youngest, 
 named after a prospective uncle who had hitherto not matured) 
 "until your mother comes down playing on Sunday." 
 
 They might have been playing, but it looked like the real 
 thing. At that moment, little Elizabeth, aged four, having, 
 through a trifling chronological confusion, as a Christian 
 maiden, been abducted by Esau the Terrible, disguised as 
 Larkin, who, for purposes of actuality, had covered his arms 
 with a pair of rabbit skin mats tied with string, but who loved 
 Jacob, in this case Plantagenet, her body was now being 
 fought for by both gentlemen, who were quietly smothering 
 each other over a supposedly senseless body which was dis- 
 playing unsuspected qualities of nail. They weren't afraid of 
 "father," who had only to be feared in extreme moments as, 
 for instance, when he was out of cigarettes. 
 
 Mr. Titterling drew in the rest of his cigarette stump, held, 
 and then expelled the mixture of air and tobacco from his 
 lungs. 
 
 "Gawd's truth!" he said, jumping into sudden energy he 
 could be very East-endy at times, from bad associations, could 
 Mr. Trevor Titterling "Gawd's truth!" He jumped for the 
 table, put down a hand, and, after fishing a little, hooked 
 young Larkin, dragged him into the light of day, and cuffed 
 
"BRANDS FROM THE BURNING" 75 
 
 him on what he called "the earhole." He then took him by 
 the seat of his obviously reduced father's pants, opened the 
 door, and flung him into the passage, from where such a series 
 of howls escaped that even young Seymour was held up in 
 his wild career. By the time he got back, the kitchen was 
 empty, except for Elizabeth, who sat in the middle of the 
 floor showing rather more red drawer than was perhaps quite 
 consistent with Christian maidenhood. 
 
 Mr. Titterling felt in his pocket, "drew a blank" in his own 
 words, and went down on hands and knees to scrabble for 
 cigarette stumps in the firebox. Having got one, he lit it, 
 with the calm satisfaction of duty done. 
 
 "Shut up! you little devil," he shouted through the door 
 to the howls, which suddenly ceased. There was a noise as 
 of cooing, and the next moment the door opened to admit a 
 little girl-mother, still in her first decade, with grey eyes and 
 hair of smoky-black, leading by his dirty little hand the now 
 quietly convulsive Larkin, who exploded at intervals, geyser- 
 like. 
 
 "You ought to be ashamed of yourself, father," she said. 
 "Just look at Larkin's ear. You know what I said before." 
 
 Mr. Titterling looked caught in the act. Depressed, he 
 mumbled something behind his cigarette stump and hung a 
 trifle more over the fire. His eyeglass had disappeared, as it 
 had a habit of doing in moments of abnegation. 
 
 The others had come back and were playing quietly. The 
 little mother began to clear away the dirty breakfast things. 
 In a surprisingly short time she had made the place look clean 
 and neat. 
 
 "There is a fountain filled with blood. . . . 
 
 Drawn from EmanuePs veins, 
 And sinners plunged beneath that flood. . . ." 
 
 The strains in a tempered alto were gradually approaching. 
 The door opened. There stood in the doorway a sweet-faced, 
 grey-eyed woman, her hair of rippling brown smoothly parted 
 in the middle, something of shining wonderment, of revelation, 
 in her eyes. The eyes searched out her husband, now look- 
 ing sorrowfully into the blaze. A straying shaft of sunlight 
 shone upon her as she stood there, inscrutable, her figure in- 
 formed by the new life she was soon to give to the world. 
 
76 GODS 
 
 Mrs. Titterling had been married to her husband when she 
 was seventeen years old and when he was twenty-five. She 
 was one of those women who love only once, and for ever 
 who do not know restraint but give all and sanctify sin by 
 sacrifice. She had given everything she had to give to her 
 husband before she married him, and she would never have 
 married him and would have died brokenhearted but for one 
 of his moments of self-abnegation and repentance which made 
 him give his first child a name a month before birth. Since 
 that day eighteen years ago, she had borne him ten children, 
 of whom seven were left. The others had died easily of 
 whooping cough and pneumonia and in one case at least of 
 underfeeding, for the Titterlmgs had not always been fortunate 
 in their choice of new neighbourhoods and trusting trades- 
 men. 
 
 How her husband really earned the bread for the house, 
 with its infrequent butter, Mrs. Titterling did not know. Mrs. 
 Titterling was one of those women who never know anything. 
 If anybody had told her and of course nobody did that he 
 was a billiard "shark," irregularly a bookmaker, with a flick 
 of the cards in between, it would have had no more effect than 
 if she had been told that Trevor Titterling got his living by 
 murder. She would not have believed it, and if she had be- 
 lieved it, it would have made no difference. She had a splen- 
 did capacity for ignorance. At least, if she suspected any- 
 thing, she said nothing. She only knew that he was some- 
 times away for days at a time especially in the summer, 
 when he would go out dressed in a box-cloth coat, a high white 
 hat and white waistcoat with a pair of glasses slung round 
 him, and return home, sometimes in a devil of a temper, and 
 sometimes hilarious but conscience stricken. 
 
 That was Trevor Titterling's trouble, he could never quite 
 free himself from an inconvenient nonconformist conscience. 
 He was the black sheep of the family a Strict-Baptist family 
 of inexorable theology who believed that in total immersion 
 lay the only or at least the chief way of escape from hell. 
 His two brothers were perfectly respectable members of society 
 and of a violent religion one a prosperous west-end dentist, 
 the other a Baptist preacher. 
 
 Trevor was only admitted to the paternal roof on sufferance, 
 and the the fatted calf was never killed. If "godless Trevor," 
 
"BRANDS FROM THE BURNING" 77 
 
 as his parents called him, had ever given them occasion to 
 do so, they would have been considerably amazed and perhaps 
 considerably annoyed, for he had fallen quite naturally and 
 satisfactorily into place as the horrible example. He was cut out 
 of his father's will, he knew that, damned in this world and 
 of course damned in the next, and the worst of it was that 
 he personally was quite as assured of the reality of the latter 
 damnation as of the former. It was the potent "suggestion" 
 of the first years of life doing its work the thing that also 
 kept him a teetotaler. 
 
 He had been apprenticed to medicine, had had "a shot at" 
 being a missionary, but a green cloth, a piece of ash, and three 
 balls of ivory had upset all calculations. "The billiard table 
 is the road to hell," as his father put it, and Trevor Titterling 
 had drifted as inevitably into billiards as some men drift into 
 medicine or missionaryship. 
 
 He had aptitude extraordinary without the capacity to grind 
 necessary to become a professional, which in billiards is a trifle 
 less difficult than to become a violinist of the first rank. From 
 this into bookmaking, and then into various phases of cards, 
 ending up with "find the lady," generally known as the three- 
 card trick, was a natural sequence. 
 
 His family prayed over him offensively and defensively, and 
 he groaned in unison. His wife prayed, and little Mary, the 
 little grey-eyed mother, prayed. Member of the Spirit's Elect, 
 an offshoot of the 'Plymouth Brethren, with a dash of Cal- 
 vinism, Mrs. Titterling had the melancholy satisfaction of 
 knowing that all were predestined if father was to be saved 
 he was to be saved if damned, then damned. His family 
 rather felt it would be the latter, deriving therefrom a cer- 
 tain satisfaction. His wife never gave up. She was a woman 
 who would have snatched salvation out of the pit itself. 
 
 "Trevor," said the lady in the doorway, "will you not dress 
 yourself? You know Finn Fontaine is bringing his two aunts 
 this afternoon to tea." 
 
 "Oh! bust Finn and bust his aunts!" said Mr. Titterling 
 inexpressibly. "I haven't got any Toddy's Carnation Flake. 
 I don't dress till I have some. Can't Mary go out and get 
 it?" 
 
 "On a Sunday, Trevor," said his wife, reproachfully. "On 
 the Lord's Day." She looked heart-broken. 
 
78 GODS 
 
 "Oh! bust Sunday too," said Mr. Titterling, throwing his 
 eye-glass into his eye. 
 
 "You know Finn is the loneliest boy in the world. He 
 knows nobody but us. Let's be ready for him. He's so sensi- 
 tive. He'll think we don't want him." 
 
 "Yes, father," said little Mary. "I love Finn. He is my 
 own dear boy." 
 
 "Why I believe you are in love with him, Mary," said her 
 father. The little thing blushed. "Oh Finn's all right. He's 
 a good sort. But I'm not myself. Got a pain in me stomach. 
 Bust it! " Mr. Titterling was a martyr to pains in the stomach 
 and the head. At least he said so. 
 
 The Mr. Trevor who received the little procession in the 
 hall some four hours later was another Mr. Trevor: he was a 
 glossy, not to say dazzling, Mr. Trevor. From his monocle 
 to his patents one of them with a crack over the little toe 
 and up to his pomaded hair, he shone. His wife and daughter 
 looked quite drab by the side of him. 
 
 First came Aunt Maria with Aunt Judy's nose behind swing- 
 ing from side to side like one of those big-horn rhinoceroses 
 as she guided Aunt Maria before her, that lady filling up the 
 passage and only revealing Aunt Judy at intervals. Behind 
 all, Aunt Bella, her Choctaw feathers dominating the passage, 
 sniffing, towering, black-avised, and resenting strongly. She 
 was a regular witch-finder and smelt another brand of dissent 
 from her own. She was not going to be shepherded into a 
 rival fold, unprotestant. 
 
 Facing them, Mrs. Titterling, smiling a welcome, a little 
 behind her, Mary, all eyes for Aunt Bella, and behind her 
 again, showing a mouthful of two-guinea teeth, not paid for 
 and worth the money, Mr. Titterling himself, who had for- 
 gotten to remove the fag-end that stuck on his lower lip cor- 
 ner. Mr. Titterling at these times was politeness itself a 
 little too anxious as always to show himself a gentleman to 
 be a gentleman. It was something in him that always dis- 
 tressed Finn, who despised and liked him. 
 
 In the little drawing room with the tiny piano and the 
 chairs that had never seen better days, Aunt Judy revelled 
 despairingly in her latest congregation the Spirit's Elect. 
 Aunt Bella sniff. Aunt Maria fatly sceptical. But all the 
 time little Mary studied the tall black-avised aunt. 
 
"BRANDS FROM THE BURNING" 79 
 
 Aunt Judy rested her head sideways on the back of the low 
 easy chair, the goat-like eyes looking out through the imita- 
 tion French windows into the garden. Her sister Maria, who 
 had truncated into her chair, setting herself down layer by 
 layer, looked out vacantly. Aunt Bella sat bolt upright, her 
 black eyes darting from side to side without turning her head, 
 rather like a gigantic fox terrier on the look out for rats. 
 Mrs. Titterling, in her resigned, sweet-faced way, waited for 
 an opening. 
 
 It came. Her husband, whose mind was at that moment 
 running upon the scented Carnation Flake cigarettes he hadn't 
 got he had a tendency to "druggy cigs." as he said him- 
 self but who smiled excessively, turned to Aunt Judy: 
 "Beautiful weather for this time of the year," he said, look- 
 ing vaguely towards the French window. 
 
 "If it doesn't rain," replied Aunt Judy, who was in a pes- 
 simistic mood. 
 
 "Why should it rain? Don't be ridiculous, Judy," said her 
 sister Bella. "Some day you may be glad for a drop of rain," 
 she remarked cryptically. She sniffed. It was one of Aunt 
 Bella's sniffing days. Aunt Judy laughed her little heartbroken 
 laugh and held her silence. 
 
 "We should be thankful," said Aunt Maria, largely. "If 
 it rains, it is good for the crops if it doesn't it is good for 
 us." One eye wandered in a trifle towards the base of the 
 nose. 
 
 "True, quite true," said Mr. Titterling, taking a very dirty 
 pocket handkerchief from his pocket with an air. "True." 
 He placed his high Roman organ within its folds and trum- 
 peted genteelly. ("It's a bloody awful world," he said to 
 himself.) 
 
 "Some day we shall all be satisfied," remarked Aunt Maria 
 piously. "And how beautiful that will be." 
 
 ("Yes, when there's skating in hell," confided Mr. Titterling 
 to his monocle, which he had dropped into his left hand for 
 cleaning purposes.) "Beautiful indeed," he said, faintly echo- 
 ing to the unconscious lady. 
 
 "Oh! how beautiful it will be when we meet in a better 
 world," continued Aunt Maria, encouraged, and developing 
 quite a flow of conversation. 
 
 "Take care we don't meet in Another Place," jerked Aunt 
 
8o GODS 
 
 Bella vindictively, in a dark, prophetic voice. "Even though 
 Finn is too clever to believe in it. Rationalist literature!" 
 She sniffed. 
 
 Little Mary for the first time turned her great grey eyes 
 from Aunt Bella to her nephew. She looked at him in horror. 
 
 "It's not true," she said. 
 
 The little assured voice fell like the swing of a sword in that 
 atmosphere of constraint. 
 
 "Crickey! She's put the kybosh on it!" said Mr. Titter- 
 ling in a whisper which was audible to Aunt Bella, who had 
 ears like a lynx. 
 
 "How are the friends opposite?" said Aunt Maria, muzzily 
 diplomatic. Paying her first visit to the Titterlings, and 
 knowing nothing at all about it, Aunt Maria had conjured 
 up "the friends" from her well of good intentions. 
 
 "Finn," said little Mary. "You know there's a hell, don't 
 you?" 
 
 "He'll know it some day," said Aunt Bella, sniffing again 
 and jerking her head downwards in the way that she had. 
 The scar twitched on her face. "Won't he, Mrs. Titterling?" 
 
 "If he's predestined, he's predestined," said Mrs. Titterling 
 with that calm sweet face of hers as she looked out through 
 the window. 
 
 "He's predestined to salvation, mother," said Mary, sol- 
 emnly, and then compressed tightly her little red lips. 
 
 "How do you know, Mary?" asked Aunt Bella, her eyes 
 turning sharply on the child, the head following quickly. "Do 
 you know what I caught Finn reading? 'Was Christ an Epi- 
 leptic?' What do you think of that? Now perhaps you're 
 not so sure." She looked more like a giant fox terrier than 
 ever but a terrier that had pounced. 
 
 Mr. Titterling's glass fell into his lap unheeded and rolled 
 on to the floor. He stared at Finn in dismay uncontrollable. 
 
 "Well, I'm damned!" he said religiously under his breath. 
 
 Aunt Judy, her great nose still resting against the back of 
 her chair, turned one eye upon Finn. It was a curious, not 
 a frightened eye. 
 
 Mrs. Titterling sat there perfectly sure and placid. She was 
 not shocked. In a world where only the handful of the Spirit's 
 Elect were to be saved and where everything was determined 
 
"BRANDS FROM THE BURNING" 81 
 
 from the beginning, this thing did not matter nothing mat- 
 tered. 
 
 Finn through all this sat without speaking. Now, Mary 
 had moved over to him, stood by his side, and placed a slender 
 arm around his shoulders. 
 
 "I don't want to go to heaven," she said. 
 
 "Blasphemy! blasphemy!" said Aunt Bella. "You wicked 
 child." But Mrs. Titterling sat unmoved. Her husband alone 
 ventured on a "Chuck it! Mary." 
 
 "I don't want to go to heaven if Finn won't be there," the 
 little thing said. 
 
 Aunt Maria sat in unspeakable terror, the left eye, semi- 
 eclipsed, rolling widely and independently under its flickering 
 eyelid. "She know not what she sayeth," she murmured, re- 
 ligiously ungrammatical. 
 
 The child had clung tighter to the boy, who had put up one 
 big bony hand over her arms. "I will go wherever you go, 
 Finn," she said, tensely. He pressed her arm. 
 
 "Better to be in hell with you, than heaven with those 
 others," she whispered despairingly, looking at Aunts Bella 
 and Maria. "Only for mother. . . ." She broke off, wist- 
 ful. "And father. . . ." She brightened. "But perhaps 
 father will be with us .... and perhaps . . . ." 
 she hesitated one breathless moment, "perhaps God would let 
 mother come to us, or ... let us come to mother. Per- 
 haps there is nothing fixed for ever. Perhaps .... if 
 prayer can do things here, why not there? When people love 
 
 She looked out into the coldly westering sun, a light in her 
 eyes. 
 
 "Shall we pray?" asked Mrs. Titterling suddenly. "Finn 
 will lead us in prayer." 
 
 "I'm not going to stay in any place where an infidel prays," 
 said Aunt Bella, decidedly. "Come, Maria," she said. "Come, 
 Judy." 
 
 She bowed darkly and distantly to Mrs. Titterling and went 
 towards the door with the art muslin curtain over it, fol- 
 lowed by her fat sister, who was obviously in a mazy con- 
 dition, and, as she said, when they got outside, "ready to go 
 off." 
 
 Mr. Titterling sprang to his feet and opened the door, bow- 
 
82 GODS 
 
 ing ceremoniously as he did so, his politeness being marred 
 by young Seymour who at that moment dashed along the hall 
 in one of his forays and cannoned Aunt Maria, who promptly 
 sat down in the passage. (Aunt Maria always went to earth 
 in moments of stress, for safety's sake.) Mr. Titterling picked 
 her up, cursing her heartily as he did so, under his breath, his 
 monocle staring glassy at her bonnet which sat over her left 
 
 ear. He got them to the door. 
 
 "It is a beautiful evening," he said. Aunt Bella's sniff, 
 as she went out of the gate, was his only answer. 
 
 But Aunt Judy had stayed behind. 
 
 He went into the kitchen to potter for cigarette ends in 
 the fender. When he got back to the room, Finn was shoot- 
 ing out three inches of white sock from his foreshortened 
 trousers where he knelt by the window, praying. Mrs. Titter- 
 ling, her face sunk in her hands, her beautiful hair, smoothly 
 braided down over the white slender neck, was kneeling by the 
 music stool, Mary by her side, her smoky hair tumbling down 
 to hide her face. Aunt Judy was kneeling, but he could see 
 the outline of her nose where she had turned to watch Finn 
 through her hands. 
 
 Mr. Titterling himself looked a moment, and then sank 
 down, stirred by those emotions which swept so easily over 
 him, placed his distinguished organ between his slender white 
 hands, first removing his eyeglass, and listened. 
 
 " .... I don't believe in you, oh God," Finn was 
 saying. "You know I don't. And yet I do believe. I don't 
 believe in your hell, but perhaps I believe in your heaven. 
 You can't threaten me, oh God! If you exist, show the proof, 
 the light. But, oh God! I want love. I want to love I 
 want to save the world to save myself. . . ." He had 
 passed from stereotyped recital to that blank unconsciousness 
 of environment which sometimes possessed him, in a voice, 
 still in the breaking stage, grotesque in its sudden jerks into 
 the high pitches of adolescence, that came gustily but surely 
 from behind the two big lean hands which stuck themselves 
 out of the frayed coat. It ceased. Finn had remembered that 
 he was not alone. He pressed his hot blushes back into his 
 face. 
 
 Mrs. Titterling had risen. She had come over to the boy 
 who now stood upright, and her eyes were shining. "Love 
 
"BRANDS FROM THE BURNING" 83 
 
 Finn " she said, and the voice trembled a little. "Love. 
 Yes that's it. Perhaps love can do all. Perhaps love is 
 stronger even than predestination." 
 
 She looked out into the dying sun and a veil fell over 
 the clear shining eyes. 
 
IX 
 
 THE FIGHT FOR POWER 
 
 Finn Fontaine was in the scullery, his foot on a high rickety 
 stool, trimming his trousers and blackening with the end of 
 one finger, which he inserted gingerly into a tin of blacking, 
 a crack in his boot. His arms had pushed themselves a trifle 
 more since the preceding year through the sleeves of a morn- 
 ing coat by which the Kensington Clothiers, Limited, with 
 branches throughout the City, had justified the last word of 
 their title. This* was unfortunate, as Finn's shirts had passed 
 the stage of trimming and had reached that other when the 
 edges become serrated torture. In the winter, his wrists, 
 unequal to the strain, sometimes showed tendency to fissure. 
 
 The occasion was important. Crux, Unlimited, having twice 
 assured him of their disinterestedness in refusing a rise to a 
 boy of eighteen, which, Parker Crux himself, who always at- 
 tended to such matters, said, upon the authority of his father, 
 had been known to send youth to the devil, "cigarettes and 
 the theatre and even worse," Finn had been writing, literally, 
 furiously. He would have written anyhow. He could no 
 more help writing than talking, because, despite an unusual 
 capacity for silence, he wanted to tell the world what he 
 thought of it. 
 
 That is to say, being unjustifiably elevated by the printing 
 of his first article on the Tabernacle meeting, he had sent 
 several others, including some on Ireland, after sundry talks 
 with Father Lestrange, to Lanthorn, who, the novelty of a 
 youth's impressions having worn off, impressions with a crude 
 power as entirely unsuspected by their author as their imma- 
 turity, "did not want any more just now." He had discovered 
 that the original editor was a sort of gelatinous but tentacled 
 creature, which clouded itself in streams of inky vagueness, 
 with a maw that swallowed everything and gave out nothing, 
 and which for each tentacle cut off by the victim, that is the 
 
THE FIGHT FOR POWER 85 
 
 literary aspirant, sprouted two in its place to draw him in and 
 choke him down into the gulf of oblivion. 
 
 In spite of his borrowing the office paper, which, having 
 a narrow conscience, he always meant to replace at some 
 future date, and the office time, which from Parker Crux he 
 knew to be invaluable and therefore quite irreplaceable, in 
 furtherance of his literary aspirations, his offerings remained 
 sacrifices. He did not spare himself troublesome ingenuity 
 either. Sometimes he wrote long confidential covering-letters 
 to his editors, and sometimes he even tried to bribe the Al- 
 mighty by promising perfectly impossible performances if some 
 particular MS. stayed out, always, to his surprise, without 
 success. 
 
 Amongst the many things he could not understand at this 
 time was why "The Churchman" and "The British Weekly" 
 did not print his contributions upon churches and chapels. 
 He had so much to tell them about Christianity which they 
 obviously did not know. 
 
 Now, Finn, who was a very shy but very desperate boy, 
 found himself impelled to one of those periodic determina- 
 tions which never seemed to lead anywhere. He was about 
 to see Lanthorn himself at the office of "The Lanthorn." 
 
 He had no appointment. Finn's method was the storm- 
 method. When he came under the great lantern in Chandos 
 Street, and, entering, presented himself outside the swing doors 
 in his abbreviated morning coat and trousers with the bowler 
 hat that perched itself loftily upon his uncut hair, to shadowily 
 survey the interior, the commissionaire kept a broody, not 
 to say, bodeful, eye upon him. 
 
 "Thought 'e was arter the gamps," he said afterwards, 
 conscience-stricken, as, in his own words, "the guv'nor saw 
 the gent first blow-off." 
 
 "The guv'nor" sat behind his mahogany with that far-away 
 moist eye which Finn knew from the Tabernacle meeting. 
 He waved him to a chair with a friendly air of equality which 
 brought the boy's heart to him, and rose as he shook hands 
 with him. 
 
 Finn told his story of failure with many hot blushes and 
 an expenditure of perspiration preposterous upon a rather 
 chilly September afternoon. Lanthorn listened. "What was 
 he to do?" 
 
86 GODS 
 
 Lanthorn jumped up suddenly with a quick nervous ges- 
 ture. "I was just going out to see Thrum. Come along with 
 me and get the advice first hand from the man who holds the 
 world in the net of his newspapers." 
 
 Finn knew that the man opposite him had interviewed the 
 Czar and the Sultan and had talked to both like a journalis- 
 tic father confessor. But Thrum. That was different. Thrum 
 wasn't a man, but a newspaper. Thrum was "The Earth," 
 the newspaper which he owned and edited. Thrum did not 
 call his paper "The Daily this or that." Just "The Earth." 
 And left it. 
 
 It seemed only the next moment that he, a palpitating and 
 sweaty Finn, was seated with Lanthorn before a massive 
 writing table, upon which stood a bust of the German Em- 
 peror, whilst two yards behind stood Thrum, a frockcoated 
 man with shining coal-black hair, parted at the side to sweep 
 formidably down across the brown, stinging eyes, matching 
 the short, crinkled black moustache from which, clenched 
 between the white teeth, jutted craggily a long black cigar. 
 He was one of those tall men of a powerful corpulence with a 
 tendency to shortness of limb, and his diminutive hands and 
 feet were of a part with the short snub nose with the pugnacious 
 lump at the end. He had an ugly that is the only adjective 
 jaw, and the eye above was luminous with power. 
 
 But the thing to which Finn's attention kept returning 
 was the lock of white hair which almost fell into his eyes and, 
 lying apart from the rest, had a personality of its own. He 
 was to learn that this lock, the index of the great man's tem- 
 per, was in constant uproar upon Thrum's head. 
 
 Lanthorn had explained the presence of Finn, towards whom 
 the man with the cigar nodded shortly, and then both he and 
 Thrum had forgotten the boy in a conversation which seemed 
 to come to him from a great distance. Finn never knew how 
 he got the impression that Lanthorn was trying to induce the 
 great man, for some unexplained reason, to tell him the re- 
 ligion behind his newspaper. It seemed to him he had caught 
 the words or was it a thought? " . . . everything and 
 everybody, every newspaper as every atheist, has a religion. 
 I want to tell the world in the columns of 'The Lanthorn' 
 the religion, the faith, behind 'The Earth'. . . ." Then there 
 had been another interminable stream and then . 
 
THE FIGHT FOR POWER 87 
 
 "We pull the strings, and the kings dance. I have my 
 church throughout the world 'The Earth' is its temple. A 
 temple not made with hands its faith, the faith imperial 
 the faith of, in, power that is the foundation of all faith and 
 of all faiths. But that is not for publication." 
 
 It came incredibly out of the maze of thought which had 
 risen in the boy's mind this voice of low, insistent concen- 
 tration. This man also was a propagandist, of a terrible, 
 narrow consciousness, preaching, like Billy Pickles, a new faith. 
 
 Then he remembered, hazily. It came to him like the sound 
 of distant trumpets, a ghostly fanfare that seemed to have 
 run through all the leaders he had ever read in "The Earth" 
 that was his father and mother's second bible. Not that 
 Thrum's name ever appeared. It was kept as steadily out of 
 the columns of his own paper as his picture out of the general 
 press, a personality that held all the threat and imminence of 
 a ghost before materialisation. But the rumble of the voice, 
 as of those leaders, was Thrum's, that name which in his mind 
 was like the approach of one of those big express engines 
 when, as a boy, he listened to them with ear to the rails as 
 they thundered, still invisible, towards him over the sleepers. 
 It was the name that stood for religion and power a Fidei 
 defensor for an Imperial Dogma that was to him, still, cloudy 
 and undefined. 
 
 To the millions who read it on the waterless plains of 
 Australia, in the snows of Canada, on the South African karoo, 
 as throughout the homes of the mother country, the man with 
 the name like distant thunder stood for religion for the em- 
 pire above all, for power. 
 
 The voice was low. Low but heavy and pregnant. When 
 he spoke, it was like that evening with Billy Pickles it was 
 as though something behind him were speaking. He stood 
 there, one little white hand grasping his cigar as it might have 
 been a sword, and talked. And as he talked, Finn noticed a 
 terrible concentration but also a terrible genuineness. This 
 man, he knew, was an idealist would give the last half- 
 penny of his millions to carry through the thing in which he 
 believed. Money to him was nothing it was only the frank 
 to power. The attacks upon his honesty in the complacent 
 columns of certain newspapers which had been left about Ash 
 Villa by his Aunt Bella, who subscribed to a rival organ, 
 
88 GODS 
 
 seemed like the pea-shooters of gamindom against a strong 
 man armed. 
 
 This man was a white oxygen flame, so tense and concen- 
 trated that he could have melted and often did melt the locks 
 of that poor average humanity which, in order to keep the 
 solitary treasure of its soul, it instinctively sets against the 
 masters of its destiny, and Finn felt something of this. 
 
 He was afraid. He needed all his self-belief, that splendid 
 boyish exaggeration of confidence, to prevent himself from 
 being cowed into running from the place. But it was the man's 
 indifference as he spoke that really impressed him as indiffer- 
 ence always impressed him, because he himself was indifferent 
 to nothing. It was the predestination of the Spirit's Elect. 
 It held an assurance without cavil. 
 
 His eyes fell absently on Finn, fell on his poor clothes, his 
 singular appearance, and Finn wondered, even as he feared, 
 how he dared to look at him from the entrenchment of his 
 well-fitting clothes and his millions. There seemed some- 
 thing shameful in it shamefully unfair. 
 
 "And your young friend?" 
 
 "Oh yes," said Lanthorn as though coming out of a dream. 
 "He wants to write. Doesn't want to have his manuscripts 
 returned. He says he writes things to have them printed. 
 Queer fellow. What do you advise?" 
 
 "What does he want to write?" asked Thrum as though 
 they were speaking of some specimen under glass, 
 
 "He wants to write on the Universe," said Lanthorn, a- 
 twinkle. 
 
 "Hum!" rumbled the big man. He took out a crocodile 
 skin case which, like his clothes, was plain but good. There 
 was nothing ostentatious about Thrum except "The Earth." 
 After he had offered the case to Lanthorn, who lit the strong 
 cigar with gusto, he took another cigar for himself, lit it 
 from the ashes of the last, and, as he did so, fastened that 
 formidable gaze upon Finn. 
 
 "Better stick to the earth," he said, shortly. "Safer. I 
 do." 
 
 Finn despised him for his earthiness, but the "I do" angered 
 him. Did Thrum think that because he did something, Finn 
 Fontaine should also do it? That was preposterous. But he 
 was too overawed to say anything. Overawed, and yet, as 
 
THE FIGHT FOR POWER 89 
 
 he so often found himself, in a very real sense unimpressed 
 and unconvinced. 
 
 "Listen, Lanthorn," went on Thrum, still with that air of 
 Finn's non-existence. "Did you ever hear of the 'Chrysalis?' ' 
 
 "You mean that halfpenny comic that I am always catching 
 my office boys reading in office hours?" 
 
 "Yes and if you go into the other offices of this country 
 you'll find exactly one and a quarter millions of other office 
 boys doing the same. 
 
 "It was away back in the days when fighting was fun. 
 Now it's slaughter. I had just got through with my first real 
 success that crimson-covered weekly 'The Taleteller.' 
 Bought it for an old song " he stopped a moment to look 
 with satisfaction at the long grey ash that had formed on the 
 end of his delicately pointed cigar. He continued: "Well, I 
 started the 'Chrysalis.' Oh I'm not ashamed of my half- 
 pennies 'The Earth' itself costs only a halfpenny. The 
 British Empire rests on the halfpenny. 
 
 "Well, the 'Chrysalis' didn't go. But its editors did. I 
 sacked three in six months. Never keep a failure Lanthorn. 
 Let him start again elsewhere. Success is the condition of 
 living. One day there came a knock to my door and when 
 I shouted 'Come!' I found a youngster of sixteen standing 
 there. A white-faced young devil he was, with a bright eye 
 and pale wispish hair all nerves and eagerness. 'What d'ye 
 want?' I asked. 
 
 " T want the "Chrysalis," Sir,' he said. 
 
 "I thought he'd been drinking or something, but that eye 
 of his held me. 
 
 "What do you want to do with it?" I enquired. 
 
 " 'Want to make it go,' the young devil said. 'I'll double 
 its circulation in six months,' he says. 'Not enough blood' 
 and fun in it. Too moral, Sir,' he said. 'I'm an office boy 
 meself. I know.' 
 
 "I reached for an editor's contract form. 
 
 "How much are you getting?" I said. "What are you 
 office boy you say?" 
 
 " 'Yes Sir fifteen bob.' 
 
 "All right, we'll call it five pounds a week plus percentage. 
 If it goes, well and good. If it doesn't you do. Right?" 
 
 " 'Quite right, Sir/ he said. 
 
90 GODS 
 
 "In six months he had trebled the circulation of 'The 
 Chrysalis.' In twelve, he owned a motor-car and to-day, he 
 is only twenty-two, he has a couple of houses and is thinking 
 of a yacht. " He paused a moment, looked absently at Finn, 
 and added: 
 
 "But he didn't get that, writing on the universe he held 
 to old mother earth." 
 
 This man might have his head in the clouds, as mediocrity 
 alleged, but he had his feet rooted in solid earth. 
 
 Finn caught the note of omnipotence. His heart sank. He 
 hated this man with a sort of impersonal hate, but he 
 feared him, too. He recognised in him an enemy. Not his 
 enemy, but something more, something other. He felt hope- 
 less about his writing that writing which was to be his escape 
 from Crux hopeless about everything. He only wanted to 
 get on the other side of the door, which, however, solved his 
 troubles by opening. 
 
 A smart young white-haired secretary, frock-coated and a 
 respectful echo of his master, entered the room and held a 
 card on a level with Thrum's eyes. Thrum glanced and called: 
 
 "Come right in, Asthar. Here's Lanthorn. Tells me you 
 raised hell the other evening at Billy Pickle's circus. Come 
 right in." 
 
 But it was not a man who came through the doorway. It 
 was a girl, a girl with something hollow-cheeked, hollow-eyed, 
 that reminded Finn of an engraving of Eve he had once seen 
 in an old bible commentary, beloved of his grandmother. 
 
 She stood for a moment, hesitating, looked from Thrum to 
 Lanthorn and passed through Finn, who had risen awkwardly 
 with some misty memories of "Manners for Men" in his mind. 
 He had had social ambitions, had Finn. 
 
 She was a girl with a curious length of line, although she 
 was little if anything above middle height. Everything about 
 her was slenderly graceful. As she moved, her dress of some 
 fine blue cloth revealed unsuspected beauties of limb. 
 
 As she moved quickly across the room, where the sun com- 
 ing through the window seemed to tangle itself in the hair 
 of bushy tawn that was cut short to the neck, her eyes to 
 Finn were as darkling, shining water upon which a shaft of 
 sunlight is lying, with a gleam of blue like the flash of a king- 
 fisher's wing as it slants across it. 
 
THE FIGHT FOR POWER 91 
 
 There was something shy, yet bold, about her as she 
 went up to Thrum and held out her hand with a queer little 
 impulsive gesture. 
 
 "Here, Thrum," said the big man in the doorway, who had 
 come a little behind, "Fve brought Deirdre here because she 
 insisted. What do you think she wants to do?" 
 
 "What?" said Thrum smilingly as he threw away his cigar. 
 
 "She wants to write." 
 
 "What, another?" said Lanthorn, who had shaken hands 
 with both as with old friends. They all ignored poor Finn, 
 who had shrunk back into a corner but who felt anger at heart. 
 He hated them all, this girl, Thrum, and especially the big 
 man. 
 
 "I don't know what my father will say," went on Paris 
 Asthar. "He disapproves strongly of girls writing or doing 
 anything but looking picturesque. However, if you know 
 Deirdre you'll know it doesn't much matter what he thinks. 
 With Deirdre nothing matters except .... Deirdre." 
 
 All at once he turned to catch sight of Finn, in the corner, 
 his eyes fastened on the others. The prominent eye softened 
 with understanding. He saw the neglected boy with the 
 awkward arms in the ill-fitting clothes, and in a moment, Paris 
 AstlTar who, for all his vanities, never left misery untouched, 
 turned half towards Lanthorn, enquiring. 
 
 Lanthorn, who seemed to be coming out of one of his day- 
 dreams, recollected himself. "Mr. Fontaine," he said. "A 
 young friend." 
 
 "Glad to meet you, Mr. Fontaine," said the big man, going 
 up to Finn and pressing his hand. "You have a distinguished 
 name. One of my French ancestors was a Fontaine." 
 
 Finn put out a clammy hand, the sweat bursting from his 
 forehead. He found it enclosed in one that was warm and 
 dry. 
 
 "My sister," said Paris Asthar. 
 
 Deirdre bowed distantly and a trifle contemptuously. At 
 least Finn thought so, and sweated again. He hated her. 
 
 The face, with its rather short, straight nose, softened as 
 it turned to Thrum, with that half shy, half impulsive way. 
 
 "Well, what are you going to do about it? as the Americans 
 say," she asked, challenging Thrum. 
 
92 GODS 
 
 "What do you want to do, Miss Deirdre? Write for 'The 
 Earth?' " He said it in a way that left no doubt as to where 
 he thought his paper stood. It was "The Earth." 
 
 The girl looked out at him, made as if to speak, hesitated, 
 and then said, urgently: 
 
 "You needn't imagine your 'Earth' is above the contribu- 
 tions of imperfection. The earth is not meant to be perfect 
 not even your 'Earth' it is a place of passage for imperfect 
 souls .... like you, and me," she added after a moment, 
 laughing. 
 
 The big man was about to say something. For all his 'smile, 
 there was thunder in his eyes. 
 
 But the girl had drawn in to herself again, hiding behind 
 the veil of her hair which she shook around her face. 
 
 "There is somebody else here who wants to write for 'The 
 Earth,' " inserted Lanthorn, looking towards Finn. 
 
 "Oh, that," said the girl disdainfully, peering out of the 
 veil of her hair for a moment. It was a pity. It spoiled all 
 the beauty of her face, which lost its soft flexibility, its lights 
 and shades. 
 
 "Oh! I'm so hot," she said impulsively. "I'm going to 
 take off my hat." 
 
 And take it off she did without further comment, throwing 
 it down on the table and shaking back the hair from her eyes, 
 to show the delicate curves of brow and a new pair of eyes 
 which now had something of hazel-grey in them. She was 
 like a spoiled child. But Thrum only laughed. 
 
 Finn had drawn back into himself again, not knowing 
 whether to go or to stay. He felt profoundly miserable but 
 unafraid, as he looked at the back of the slender blue figure 
 crowned by its tawny halo. To him she was the incarnate 
 presentment of all that he had ever hated fine clothes and 
 fine houses and leisure and cultivated voices and manicured 
 nails and perfume especially perfume he could catch it 
 stealing to him, impalpable, from her body. 
 
 And there was Thrum. Yes, he owned 'The Earth,' but 
 he did not own the soul of a single man who could hold 
 himself free. And Asthar, now fanning himself luxuriously 
 in the overheated room as he lounged in his chair that was 
 the young spendthrift who was the talk of London, about whom 
 
THE FIGHT FOR POWER 93 
 
 the papers were always hinting dreadful unknown things on 
 which Finn had puzzled so often. Yes, he was another de- 
 generate. 
 
 And then it all seemed ridiculous. Thrum was no degen- 
 erate but a man of formidable strength. And Asthar .... 
 he had spoken kindly to him he could no more hate him than 
 he could hate Lanthorn. Yet he hated them all except Lan- 
 thorn. But that was a sort of spleen -an unreasoning spleen 
 from which he had always suffered. 
 
 "What do you want to write?" Thrum was saying as he 
 came out of himself. "I want new blood. I want youth. I 
 am youth's man." He was looking at Finn as he said it. 
 
 It was as though he had been galvanised. It was oppor- 
 tunity knocking at his door. Oh! to let her in before it was 
 too late. He felt as he had felt in his nightmares, as he felt 
 with that veiled dream figure he followed down the twisty 
 lane. He choked a moment 
 
 But the girl had made as if to speak, coming out once 
 more from the veil of her hair. She should not. She should 
 not get in his way. For the time, Finn was a crushing de- 
 structive animal which would have killed anything that got 
 in its path. He had a kind of frenzy against this dilettante 
 this girl who, rolling in money, only wanted to pass her time. 
 To him, his writing was life and death. It meant something 
 not to himself but to the world. There was so much he 
 wished to say. 
 
 Then it came, full-mouthed: "Let me write on Ireland!" 
 he erupted. "My grandmother has talked to me about nothing 
 else since I was a baby. And Father Lestrange, who is an 
 Irishman, has told me much more. I read your leaders every 
 day on Ireland, Mr. Thrum. My father reads 'The Earth.' " 
 He hesitated an instant, then blurted it out: "They are 
 nonsense. I don't know why but they are nonsense. They 
 are old. You want youth why don't you let youth write? 
 I know nothing of Ireland direct, but your leader-writer knows 
 less." 
 
 "Pity my poor father!" murmured Paris Asthar. "If he 
 could only be here. Shades of Delphi! (It was old Asthar 
 who wrote the Irish leaders for Thrum.) 
 
 "What do you know about Ireland?" asked Thrum. 
 
94 GODS 
 
 "What do I know? I know I know. . . ." Then it came 
 to him that he did not know .... yet he did know. 
 
 "I know everything." The words came blatant, shameless. 
 It was as though old voices were speaking to him and through 
 him. It was as though the things of a dead past were whis- 
 pering to him. "I am going to Ireland for my holidays," he 
 said. "Let me write." 
 
 The girl surprised out of her Idisdain had partly turned to 
 look at this strange incursion. This ridiculous scarecrow of a 
 boy with his bony arms and foreshortened poverty, standing 
 there talking like a mad thing. She looked at him a moment, 
 the little lips half opened, the eyes bright. Then she turned, 
 disdainful, to her former position. 
 
 "Let him write," said Lanthorn. "He'll do it. I'll put 
 my head on it. And I have seen some of his Irish stuff. I 
 never made a mistake yet about a writer. . . . It is not 
 he who will write," he said in the allusive way he sometimes 
 had. "There will be others behind." 
 
 "Yes, let him write, Thrum," said Asthar. "Give him a 
 chance. You've never been talked to like that before, have 
 you?" 
 
 "All right," said Thrum, looking at Deirdre Asthar, but 
 speaking to Finn, and thinking of how often he had made sim^ 
 ilar mad experiments and how often they had succeeded. 
 "Send me some articles upon the Irish question. I don't guar- 
 antee to print them, but I will consider them." He hesitated 
 a moment. 
 
 "But what is The Irish storm-centre to-day? It is always 
 shifting?" 
 
 "Dunhallow," said Asthar's half-sister, putting her head out 
 for a moment. "That is where I was born." 
 
 "I say, old chap, you come to my place in Westminster 
 after your return. I'd like to have a talk with you," said 
 Paris to the boy whose pulses were hammering. 
 
 All at once the girl put her hand out as though to check him. 
 "No no!" she said as though half to herself. She flushed 
 to her eyes. 
 
 And thus was joined the battle for the soul of Finn Fon- 
 taine, though only one person there knew it, and that was not 
 Finn, 
 
THE FIGHT FOR POWER 95 
 
 But what could you expect a boy to know who did not dis- 
 cover until long afterwards that when he thought Thrum had 
 been speaking to him as he asked: "What do you want to 
 write?" because he had been looking at him, Thrum had really 
 been speaking to Deirdre Asthar. 
 
PART II 
 IRELAND 
 
X 
 
 IRELAND 
 
 John L. Crux, Unlimited, had had his eye on Ireland. 
 Hitherto, he had only had his eye on the world. It was a 
 hard, grey, bitten eye. There it stood, as he looked at the 
 map, cut off from the rest of Europe, its heart, despite the 
 four millions it had sent across the Atlantic as hostages to 
 fortune, as untouched by Big Business as though its inhabi- 
 tants lived on another planet. Ireland had to be gathered in. 
 John L. Crux, with business houses in London and New York, 
 from which he controlled operations of a delicate complexity, 
 was the man to gather it. 
 
 "Big Business," he said into the long face of his son Parker, 
 who sat on the other side of his desk gnawing his underlip 
 and patting into position one refractory hair across the high, 
 hatchet-shaped dome, "will be the saviour of Ireland." He 
 spoke with a certain solemnity. "The Lord is on the side 
 of big business .... look how it succeeds." The argu- 
 ment was unanswerable. 
 
 "I've had my eye on the south for some time. It's rather 
 outside the business of the firm, but I think a few hundred 
 thousand dollars sunk in the herring fishery with a plant for 
 drying the fish is going to give cent, per cent. It's a sure 
 thing. We could knock Scotland out, Parker. The Irish are 
 a lazy lot but they haven't learned the tricks of Trades Union- 
 ism .... as yet. Fellows there think they're doing well 
 when they pull down five dollars a week, I'm told. Do 'em 
 good to work 'em hard. It's a great chance for them and 
 for us." 
 
 The eye of granite, a tiny light in it, screwed itself out 
 into Salisbury Circus, as though it would bore, gimlet-like, 
 through space, the jaw set into its socket with a click that 
 might have been the false teeth but might have been bone, 
 
 99 
 
ioo GODS 
 
 itself. One sinewy hand clutched the edge of the desk, until 
 the long nails marked the mahogany. 
 
 "There are blackberries and mushrooms jam factories 
 pickle factories . . . . "he added irrelevantly. 
 
 Parker's jaw fell a trifle over the high white collar, under 
 which the tie adjusted itself in millimetres. It was his way 
 of nodding. 
 
 "There's a place called Black Rock." The old man pointed 
 it out on the map before him, a queer little nick, due south. 
 "I'm told they're a barbarous lot down there call 'em the 
 Black Rock Turks speak only Irish. Papists." The last 
 word came from the steely jaws as though it were vermin that 
 had escaped. 
 
 "We'll send Slick over. Make 'em Primitive Christians." 
 
 He went on as though it had only been an interjection, 
 as he passed one hand back the length of his hairless skull 
 and nape. "Heavy weather down there dangerous coast 
 these Turk fellows go out in their half decked boats to wrecks 
 see what they can get their hands on, I expect and make 
 a good living by it and by life-saving." The voice was like 
 a saw. "Fine fishermen, but apt to get their clumsy boats 
 'hookers' they call them dashed to pieces. They want new 
 boats. New gear. What they want is Steam!" He paused 
 a moment. "Steam and a breakwater. Should like to elec- 
 trify them, but they're too far back for that. There's money 
 in it, Parker. And the saving of souls." 
 
 It sounded a queer mixture, but the man who was speak- 
 ing was in deadly earnest. One had only to look at his face 
 to see that. 
 
 "To the glory of God! Crux, Unlimited," said Parker, his 
 long white face breaking up like the ice on a pond under a 
 sudden thaw. It was not a smile. It was a break up. Just 
 that. It was his nearest approach to humour, and it hurt. 
 
 The recalcitrant hair was now in place. He folded one 
 smooth white hand over the other and laid them both upon 
 the striped trousering that draped his long thighs. 
 
 "Whom shall we send?" It was Parker speaking. "We 
 only want an intelligent underling to spy out the land and give 
 us a general idea in the beginning." 
 
 "That's settled. Here's a letter from Thrum. Got a hunch 
 to send young Fontaine to Ireland to write for 'The Earth,' 
 
IRELAND^- .-'. 
 
 I don't know many of our people, not half a dozen in a hun- 
 dred, and wouldn't know young Fontaine only that I've seen 
 him taking down your letters once or twice. Didn't know 
 he could write did you?" 
 
 Parker's long face took on a shocked expression. "I'm 
 afraid Fontaine has been neglecting his work. I've used him 
 at a pinch when Miss Potts was ill. A queer fellow. Heard him 
 one day holding forth on art to a youngster named Jackson 
 in my department. Thinks himself an artist. Says artists 
 are different from all other people. My conviction is that he 
 has been writing on the sly. Young fool. . . ." 
 
 " 'He that calleth his brother a fool . . .' " interrupted 
 his father. He said it solemnly enough. 
 
 "Sorry, father." A faint flush stole to the white cheeks be- 
 fore him. The thin lips muttered a moment as though in 
 prayer. "I mean a fool to his own interests. And besides, 
 it is rank dishonesty tiring himself out at night and so giving 
 the firm poor service the next day. Though I must say Fon- 
 taine works hard enough," he added, obviously trying to be 
 fair. "But, how would I put it? . . . . his heart is not 
 in his work." 
 
 "Well, Thrum tells me that the boy is going to Ireland for 
 his holidays and wants us to give him an extended vacation. 
 We couldn't refuse Thrum if we would. His 'Earth' helped 
 us with that disgraceful strike at the Sulanda works. And 
 he wants him to go to a place called Dunhallow which is the 
 nearest town to Black Rock. 
 
 "Now I'm going to give this boy the chance of his life. 
 He has Irish blood in him and therefore he has brains," Crux 
 spoke with all the American's admiration for the Irish race 
 "and he shall go over and kill two birds with one stone. For 
 us he shall report on Black Rock and its possibilities. If he 
 does it the right way, he is a made man." 
 
 John L. Crux spoke like a man who knew himself to be 
 possessed not only of all the attributes of Benevolence, but, 
 the thing that mattered, the power to give them effect. 
 
 And so it was arranged. 
 
 Before Finn went to Ireland, he called on Mrs. Titterling 
 and his little friend, Mary, to say good-bye. The immediate 
 result was that Mrs. Titterling took him into the back draw- 
 ing-room and prayed with and for him as for one who was 
 
GODS 
 
 going to the home of "the Scarlet Woman." There were also 
 points in her supplication at the throne of grace over which she 
 hovered in prayerful doubt, from which Finn inferred that Mr. 
 Titterling had had "a good day," with corresponding uneasiness 
 even to his unsuspecting spouse, whose eyes were beginning to 
 open under an unwonted succession of bank notes. 
 
 So far as Finn's family was concerned, it, generally speaking 
 and always excepting his little grandmother and Aunt Judy, 
 who was in one of her flaunting desperate stages and there- 
 fore, according to Mr. Titterling's liberal interpretation of 
 her mood "didn't care a damn," regarded him very much as 
 though he were going into the West African bush. His mother 
 talked about the "wild Irish," especially before his grand- 
 mother, who looked across at the hard brown eye in her soft- 
 eyed, glistening, prayerful way. Jemmy, despite a sneaking 
 sympathy with his mother, really believed his wife to be cor- 
 rect and viewed the experiment with a doubtful eye. So far, 
 Finn had said nothing about Thrum. 
 
 Ireland, in spite of "that great, good Mr. Crux" and his 
 interest in it, came to Mrs. Fontaine as a place where people 
 bedded with the pigs, lived exclusively upon a potato diet 
 (the skins played a prominent part in her imagination, if not as 
 an edible, then as clothes she was not sure which), and 
 were Romanists of an order not far removed from the heathen 
 themselves, with a tendency to landlord shooting by moon- 
 light and general subversive low-typed rebellion. For her 
 part, she always saw the Irishman, a long-lipped, slightly supe- 
 rior modification of the gorilla, in knee breeches and lidless 
 topper, crossed by a dirty clay pipe, crawling behind ditches 
 with a blunderbuss loaded to the muzzle with rusty nails, 
 and always under a full moon. 
 
 But little Mary Titterling had pulled his head down and 
 had kissed him gravely on the lips as she whispered: "I wish, 
 Finn dear, you could take me to Ireland. I love Ireland. I 
 once had a book of Irish Fairy Tales but mother took it 
 away." She had pressed herself against him in her child- 
 passion, and had then run out of the room. 
 
 And so it Was that Finn Fontaine came one evening of 
 golden September into Dunhallow, where it lay in grey and 
 gold under the purple shadows of Croagh Cromlech. As the 
 toy train with the green engine puffed its way from between 
 
IRELAND 103 
 
 the bluffs out into the sunlight of an old stone causeway which 
 spanned the tideway, he saw stretched before him the spacious 
 calliper-like sweep of Dunhallow Bay lying in its opalescent 
 greens, shot by the fires of the sun, with the black menace of 
 the head of Carrickmore bounding it on the right, with a 
 spawn of white-washed cabins clustered like mushrooms at its 
 foot. On the other side of the bay, the low dear country 
 running to the left point of the callipers where the white light- 
 house stood like a ghost by the edge of the sea. Between 
 the points, in midchannel, the black shadow of the Carrick- 
 dhuv rock showing its fangs above the eternal hiss and roar of 
 the tides that even in dead calm muttered uneasily upwards 
 from the cauldron that boiled beneath. 
 
 Then, behind, another and smaller callipers of grey and 
 silver where the harbour with its circle of quarried limestone 
 connected with the great bay by a narrow neck of water, 
 over which hung the shadow of a ruined castle, through which 
 the tide ran like polished jade, strong and smooth; and then 
 behind again where another and still smaller circle of water, 
 fed from the harbour through the gullet of the red sandstone 
 bridge where the waters choked and gurgled, brimmed to the 
 distant foothills at the foot of Croagh Cromlech. 
 
 Somewhere, sometime, he had known the old bridge, the 
 green tides, the purple mountains. It was all as dear and as 
 familiar as a place seen in a dream. 
 
 Above his head, a flight of starling travelled like winged 
 quarrels over towards Croagh Cromlech on their long migra- 
 tion. Somehow, from then, Dunhallow was always with him 
 as a flight of starling, flying to some unknown country, over 
 the hills and far away. 
 
 He had come home. 
 
 The ash-coloured books seemed very far away. 
 
 He stood there on the little gravelled station and he seemed 
 to know every stone of it. His eye ran along the thick lime- 
 stone wall that fringed into infinity the bay lying under the 
 foothills, and he knew every break of it he could almost 
 see the velvety brown moss, the whitey-grey lichens that par- 
 terred the stones. The scent of September was in the airs, 
 with the tang of peat, that warm intimate scent which 
 for some reason made him think of cabins resting perilous 
 on the edges of mountain bogs and there, coming up to greet 
 
104 GODS 
 
 him from the railway track itself, stood a foxglove, speckled 
 and friendly, bending towards him in welcome. And then, 
 feeling for some association, it came .... fairies. 
 
 Yet Finn had never seen a fairy, unless it had been within 
 the covers of some book, nor had the tang of peat ever be- 
 fore crossed his mortal nostrils. Yet all these things were 
 his own they were the dear familiar things of a shadow- 
 country where he had wandered and lived. 
 
 A curlew called somewhere over the flats. 
 
 Something was quartering the gravel as it scuffled towards 
 him on a pair of heelless carpet slippers. Around its shame- 
 less trousers a frock-coat fluttered its signals of distress. Its 
 waistcoat, a double-breasted woolly contraption, was held to- 
 gether by one button, half a dozen pins, and the love of God. 
 It had a stiff dickey, fringed by something that had once 
 been a collar a one-piece arrangement which was both stud- 
 less and collarless. That it was also tieless did not matter, 
 as the owner had a beautiful nut-brown curling beard of 
 his own growing up to a pair of bewilderingly blue eyes. 
 
 "Johnny the Saint, sor," was his greeting, as he took Finn's 
 pride, a Gladstone bag of brown paper leather which he had 
 bought from a gentleman in Southhampton Row who had had 
 some difficulty with is "w's" and "th's." 
 
 London was very far away. It was more distant than any 
 city of a dream, and it came to Finn that perhaps this life 
 of ours, sleeping and waking, was but a dream or was il 
 that the dreaming life was the real, and the waking, illusion? 
 All things were possible in Ireland, where dream and reality 
 merged. 
 
 The white limestone road that travelled so fast between 
 the wheels of the side-car was friendly. Johnny, sitting on 
 the other side of the jarvey, the tail of his coat hanging un- 
 concernedly over the wheel, was friendly friendly to Finn's 
 bag around which he had placed one long shirtless arm, and 
 friendly to Finn to whom he gave warnings as needed: "Hould 
 on tight here, sor, or 'tis your honour that might be jolted 
 into the bosom of the Blessed Virgin .... there's a hole 
 in the road over there, but trust to Johnny the Saint . . . 
 the mare'll be takin' this corner on one wheel, 'tis the crathure's 
 way. . . ." 
 
 As they rattled over the grey patchings of limestone from the 
 
IRELAND 105 
 
 station, which lay some little distance outside the town, he 
 saw across the empty circle of the stone quay, empty save 
 for an ancient brigantine with a weather-worn figure-head of 
 Our Lady of the Seas stretching in disconsolate gilded bounty 
 over the green waters, a solitary wall, standing up out of the 
 centuries like a broken tooth, and, crouching under its foot, 
 a square-towered abbey, looking blindly over the waste of the 
 bay towards Carrickmore. For the first time he noticed, jut- 
 ting out into the great bay, a spit of sandy peninsula, across 
 the end of which the green tide frothed its fury as it raced 
 towards the little grey town, leaving behind, under the lee of 
 the spit, a miniature bay, its waters silted with the sands 
 of the ages dyed black and gold under the setting sun. 
 
 As he was thrown out upon the stone pavement and almost 
 into a door which stood hospitably open and leaning on one 
 hinge in the middle of a high stone wall, the sound of a bell 
 came stealing over the tides. Johnny, who was about to take 
 his bag through the door, dropped it, took from his head with 
 a sideways hooking gesture the old cap that covered the 
 straggling brown curls that dropped around his head, and 
 crossed himself. It was the Angelus. 
 
 To Finn himself had come an insane desire to remove his 
 own hard hat and cross himself. A prayer almost crept from 
 his lips as he looked at the blue eyes of Johnny the Saint 
 staring straight before him, now filled with a moony iridescence 
 of the spirit in which the eyes seemed to swim, detached. 
 He looked like a Christ down at heels. Finn thought of his 
 father. 
 
 The Reverend Cornelius O'Dempsey, P.P., with whom 
 Father Lestrange had arranged that he should stay, and who 
 was filling up the door in the stone wall, was a giant of a 
 man with a long barrel-like body set on legs of a mould that 
 almost transcended the limits of humanity. The eyes en- 
 folding Finn seemed to be part with the grey walls out of 
 which they looked the eyes of his father and Lanthorn and 
 Mary Titterling. The nose was straight and strong as a 
 Greek's. One long arm stretched out with a "That's all right, 
 Johnny boy!" relieved Johnny of the bag. The hand of the 
 other took that of Finn in its warm muscular clasp. Finn 
 Fontaine had had heart-searchings about travelling in his 
 former best suit and had been regretting the new clothes which 
 
io6 GODS 
 
 a family subscription had provided and which were packed 
 away in the Gladstone. These heart-searchings left him as his 
 eyes looked into those of the priest and fell upon the gold cross 
 which hung from his black mohair watch-chain. 
 
 They were eyes with infallibility and humour and under- 
 standing in them, set in a face like a sound red apple that 
 creased itself easily. It was at that precise moment he be- 
 came conscious of a little face looking out at him from under 
 the priest's arm. For a moment he thought it was his imagina- 
 tion, for all the walls seemed to be full of faces then he 
 saw it was a little woman with two burning shrunken eyes 
 fastened on him, her hair, almost non-existent, yet parted nat- 
 tily low down on the narrow forehead. 
 
 A little critical hand came out with a weazened, doubtful 
 "well, we'll do our best for you with the help of God," and 
 the two little eyes bored into him. 
 
 "Ah, go along wid ye, with your cavortings and blandish- 
 ments!" 
 
 Finn was startled, but the last words were not for him. 
 For all this time, Johnny the Saint had been executing the 
 involved set of curtsys, quartering the flagstones, lifting the 
 cap with the broken brim repeatedly, bowing his head, and 
 expressing, especially by his feet, the hopeless passion which 
 had illumined and saddened his life for the previous quarter 
 of a century, from the time when Kitty O'Halloran, now the 
 priest's housekeeper, but then known as "Kitty the Divil," 
 had set the town aflame with her enchantments. For this 
 little woman, crabbed virgin that she was and tightly cor- 
 setted to her throat, the once delicate curves of chin, nose, 
 and mouth sculptured by time into a nutcracker, had once 
 been the beauty of Dunhallow, inflaming even mere boys, as 
 Johnny then was, to violent emotion. Those angry shrunken 
 eyes of nondescript colouring had once made young men, and 
 beautiful young men at that, queer about the knees. Those 
 feet, now encased in shapeless corny boots with the cross- 
 slashes that brought back his father to Finn, had once been 
 crammed into No. 3's and had had poetry written about them. 
 Those spindle limbs, which, as Finn discovered to his shame- 
 ful confusion a minute afterwards, as white-stockinged they 
 preceded him up the stairs, were clothed in natural wool 
 trouserings with a tendency to slipping, had sent Jim O'Grady, 
 
IRELAND 107 
 
 one of the catches of the county, to seek four bullets from a 
 firing squad in the revolution of a South American republic, 
 directed, more's the pity, by a South American Irishman 
 of the name of O'Higgins, and had troubled the confessionals 
 with the admissions of callow youth. 
 
 Whether in the admireful or critical moments of her con- 
 temporaries, Miss O'Halloran usually hated to be called "Kitty 
 the Divil," but there were weak moments when she would 
 take a sort of contrary pride in it, the gleam would come back 
 to the shrunken eye, little will o' the wisp lights would show 
 themselves in the embittered features, and so Kitty the Divil 
 would boast ruefully of her past misdoings but never before 
 Father Con, whom, in all other things, she treated as a sort 
 of holy baby. 
 
 But she was still unmated. Kitty could never make up 
 her mind in those days of long ago. What she had wanted, 
 she hardly knew herself. But it was to be something in uni- 
 form Kitty had always had an official weakness for uniforms 
 and had once lost her heart to a member of the Royal Irish 
 Constabulary, one of those fifty-inch chesters with a wife 
 the other side of Belfast but, as she said, when she found 
 him out: "What could you expect out of the Black North?" 
 Finally she had withered into the consolations of religion and 
 of Father Con O'Dempsey, who informed Finn confidentially 
 that evening, after the supper had been cleared away: "She 
 is the only thing of which I am afraid, Mr. Fontaine except 
 God and the Devil and faith! God forgive me for saying so 
 I think I fear her the most, for she is the most real . . . 
 and there's no getting round her." 
 
 From his bedroom on the upper storey of the two-floored 
 stone house with its roofs of purple slate, Finn could just 
 see over the high wall upon which, in summer, grew the 
 friendly wallflowers, great velvety fellows who breathed their 
 heavy scents across to the window, mingled with those other 
 scents of tarry ropes and salt tides from the harbour below, 
 or over which, in May, peered the lilac clusters, when Johnny 
 the Saint would come round for a few to decorate the altar 
 of our Blessed Lady. It was the only time in the year that 
 Miss Kitty O'Halloran had a trifle of unbending for Johnny, 
 with something of a wintry smile lighting up the dimples of 
 her crab-apple face. 
 
io8 GODS 
 
 It was this which made the month of May something to be 
 looked forward to for a whole twelve months by Johnny, who 
 put it down to religion, although it was really the spring. 
 But even in her most snaky moments, she always had a cup 
 of tea for Johnny, for she herself, in her own words, "drenched 
 her insides with tay" throughout the day and always had the 
 little black pot on the hob: "for isn't tea a spiritual drink?" 
 she would say. 
 
 In the shadows of evening, with Croagh Cromlech now but 
 a blur in the heavens and the seep-seep of the waters under 
 the old bridge the only sound, Finn looked out whilst he 
 washed his hands and face in the strong yellow soap in the 
 minute chiney-ware jug and basin, waiting for Father Con. 
 
 Father Lestrange, who seemed to know everybody and to 
 whom even Thrum himself seemed to be known in an intimate 
 way, had given him a letter to Father Con, who had looked 
 at him curiously for a moment after he had read it. "It seems 
 that we still entertain angels unawares," he had said half to 
 himself. 
 
 "You've come to solve the Irish Question," the big man had 
 gone on. "Some think it a century old, some, seven centuries 
 but it is as old as time itself. 
 
 "You shall have the solution in the chapel of the Abbey to- 
 night, or, rather, the explanation. In Ireland there is no flux 
 in religion or politic" .... and then he had stopped . . 
 . . "the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, and the gates 
 of hell shall not prevail against it." In it was something tre- 
 mendous, ex cathedra. He had paused again and then went 
 on: 
 
 "There's a gentleman named Pickles breaking chairs in 
 London to the glory of God: let him come here and break as 
 many chairs as he likes, he will not break the Catholic Faith 
 here where politics and faith are one. And yet," he added, 
 with that queer little smile dragging at his lips, "Ireland in 
 a sense has no faith hers is a faith so great that it embraces 
 all faiths nor am I speaking of Catholicism or of Catholic 
 dogma. She has drawn some of her greatest sons from your 
 own church, Mr. Fontaine Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone 
 and Parnell and he was an Englishman. The best Irishmen 
 are Englishmen," he had added whimsically as the rosy face 
 
IRELAND 109 
 
 creased itself again. "Ireland is the house of spiritual alchemy 
 to which all things yield and in which even the base becomes 
 precious, just as it is the only country in the world in which 
 the people simply don't understand non-belief. 
 
 "Nobody knows anything about us, but we have left our 
 marks on the world the marks of faith, impalpable but in- 
 effaceable." 
 
 As they walked together over the bridge and along the old 
 raised causeway that, under the rising September moon, swung 
 its white length between the lines of black chains, inside which 
 men moved as shadows, the priest was silent. The cottages 
 ghosted themselves out of the massy shadows away at the 
 other end, in a light that seemed to come from the earth itself. 
 As they walked through the night, there came to them the creak 
 of a pulley, the distant cry of a sailor, the "peep" of a sea 
 bird, the laugh of a girl a full throated chuckle like the 
 chuckle of a blackbird that sent Finn's pulses a-beating. For 
 one single moment, the inconsequent memory of that girl with 
 the hair of bushy tawn flamed across his consciousness it 
 was just that a flame that rushed across him and was gone. 
 
 They passed along the low stone wall skirting the harbour 
 and the narrow channel leading to the expanse of waters out- 
 side, now black and sullen under the great orange moon, 
 across which, as they looked, a gigantic sea fowl slowly flapped 
 its way into the heart of the blackness. And as Finn looked, 
 there came to him the pulsing of a bell, as bells must sound 
 on Sabbath evenings in heaven not full toned, not even 
 sweet, with something of the harshness of dogma in it 
 but part of the night and of Ireland. 
 
 Then looming before them the jagged fang of wall, beneath 
 it the peep of lights, oranges and blues and crimsons where 
 the coloured panes jewelled the night, and then the square 
 tower. The bell had hushed. They had passed inside for the 
 incense to steal to them, and the Father had dipped his fingers 
 in the font of holy water at the side wall and blessed him- 
 self. Some of the drops sprinkled on Finn. His hand in- 
 stinctively stole up to his forehead .... and then he re- 
 membered. He was not a Catholic. Protestants did not bless 
 themselves. 
 
 Out of the twilight, with the solitary starlight burning up 
 there before the Lord made flesh, came the murmur of voices. 
 
no GODS 
 
 It rose and fell, swelled and died away in a sort of aspiring 
 chaunt. On the altar, lights were moving. 
 
 Finn found himself in the melting pot of Ireland in that 
 "house of spiritual alchemy." On his knees beside the priest 
 he let his soul wander out through the shadowy roof up to 
 the firmament of star and velvet above out through the 
 darkness with the seabird out over the face of the waters 
 into the heart of infinity. 
 
 As they walked back, the words of Father Con came 
 again, and yet again, to his memory: "The same, yesterday, 
 to-day and forever .... and the gates of hell shall not 
 prevail against it." . . . and the gates of hell. . . . 
 
 As he climbed into his feather bed that night, with the 
 words of Johnny the Saint still in his ears: "And may the 
 heavens be your bed this night!" it was to find himself in a 
 new but a very old world. He could hear the tide rushing 
 under the bridge .... swoosh .... swoosh .... 
 the place where dreams come true. 
 
 Ireland. 
 
XI 
 
 THE LAND OF SHADOWS 
 
 When Finn had been a month in Ireland, he received two 
 letters one, in the stilted handwriting of his mother with a 
 certain unsuspected insubordination in the capitals, the other, 
 in the upright painted characters of his Aunt Bella with some- 
 thing uncompromising about them in a Chinese way. 
 
 The former was interesting in the way that a patchwork 
 quilt is interesting and was not without that literary touch 
 which had made Mrs. Fontaine the shining light of the Forest- 
 ford Church Mutual Improvement Society, at the discussions 
 of which she read short introductory papers upon such wildly 
 interesting subjects as "Why I am Church"; "Is Cleanliness 
 next to Godliness?" and so on. 
 
 From it he learned that his father, faced by a combination 
 of MacGlusky, short weight, slack and religion, had been 
 driven more deeply into the soap trade. He had managed to 
 sell half a ton of "Beauty" to an eccentric spinster, a tall 
 rank creature who with her smirk and iron-grey curls inhabited 
 a lonely house on the borders of Epping Forest, overlooking 
 the vast dormitory of Walthamstow, who had asked him for 
 one hundred enlargements of her photograph. 
 
 It seemed that Jemmy had booked the order, in his ex- 
 citement falling over the glazed bag into the hall, and had 
 had the photo enlargements delivered by a special van, accom- 
 panied by himself, and on the road, the road to fortune, al- 
 lowed his mind to play lightly around the airy castles which, 
 by the time he had reached the house, had assumed precipi- 
 tous dimensions. Upon, however, trying to deliver the soap 
 and collect the money, the eccentric spinster had professed 
 complete ignorance of him and his soap, there had been a 
 lamentable scene, and finally she had set the dog on him with 
 unfortunate results to Jemmy's trousers and nerves. 
 
 Then he discovered that what he had taken to be eccen- 
 
 iii 
 
ii2 GODS 
 
 tricity was just lunacy, although the lady had not been so 
 mad that she had not held on to a dozen of the enlargements, 
 for which he himself had been forced to pay. 
 
 All this had had a very depressing effect on him, and they 
 would have been in a bad way at Ash Villa had it not been 
 for Mr. Buldger Spellbind and the Happy Homes of England, 
 Limited. From what his mother wrote, it appeared that his 
 father had "done a deal" in some of the shares, which he 
 had bought. She called it "investment" two lines further 
 down, regretting her plunge into technicalities. He had "come 
 in low and cleared out high," which, from what Mrs. Fon- 
 taine said, was the whole art of investment. 
 
 It seemed that the Happy Homes was a golden adventure 
 in bricks and mortar, of which that little man Spellbind, whose 
 photograph was constantly appearing in the papers, was the 
 pillar, as well as a pillar of the Wesleyan Methodist church in 
 the suburb where he liveJ. Finn remembered him from the 
 illustrateds. A bulging foreheaded little frockcoated man with 
 an enormous top hat that endeavoured vainly to get on terms 
 with the coping of his forehead, who was always referred to 
 as "a pillar" of this or that and who was always springing 
 new schemes, involving millions. As he said himself: "I can't 
 think in thousands. Don't know how." He was the pet of 
 tens of thousands of little investors, many of them drawn from 
 the nonconformist chapels, who followed him blindly in all 
 his schemes and who, to give them their due, had in the mass 
 no more idea that the Happy Homes were really the ugliest 
 slum wilderness in London, inhabited partly by women of 
 the streets and partly by the criminal classes, from much of 
 which the landlord could only collect his rents through the 
 medium of "key-men," themselves denizens and usually crim- 
 inals, than they had of the prize-ring and the theatre against 
 which they fulminated. 
 
 Strom, the lodger, had been giving more trouble at Ash 
 Villa with "his foreign fads and notions." His particular 
 God needed a vegetarian diet for his, understanding and 
 digestion, and it seemed that Mrs. Fontaine had been having 
 what she called "a tiff" with him upon the subject of suet 
 in pie-crusts. He had also begun to display an inconvenient 
 habit of lying about clothed in nothing but his rectitude. He 
 called it "taking a sun-bath" .... and then Mrs. Fon- 
 
THE LAND OF SHADOWS 113 
 
 taine had been silent with a discretion horribly suggestive. 
 His Aunt Bella had however supplemented with one of her 
 bitter-sweet explanations from which it appeared that it would 
 not really have mattered had it, not been that "one of the 
 friends opposite," a maiden lady of no uncertain years, had 
 discovered that by standing tiptoe on two books laid upon 
 her table, she was enabled to glimpse the holy man literally 
 in puris naturalibus, and had complained strongly to the 
 neighbourhood. 
 
 The Latin and the malignant black characters brought back 
 to Finn that erratic but unsubduable Cuthey tendency to 
 writing and the still-born MS. commenced by his Aunt Bella 
 in youth and never finished. It was to have been called "Our 
 Village" and was a caustic analysis, freely barbed by Latin 
 quotations, of the little Nottinghamshire village where she 
 had lived the first twenty-four years of her life. But it 
 had never reached fruition and had been abandoned with some 
 lavender scented letters in a drawer where Finn's enquiring 
 nose, poking where it had no business to poke, had found it. 
 This had happened when Bella Cuthey, after the accident to 
 her face which had spoiled her beauty, had "got religion" and 
 renounced the devil and all his works, amongst which were 
 presumably the manuscript and the .letters. 
 
 The only gleam in his mother's letter was the story that Mr. 
 Paris Asthar had been flaunting it in Regent Street in a pleated 
 frock-coat that had caused a sensation and a bitter schism 
 in the young men about town. This, Mrs. Fontaine told with 
 a certain satisfaction, referring to Asthar as "your friend." 
 It was the Cuthey weakness for the aristocracy. In a weak 
 moment, Finn had mentioned the Thrum interview and Mr. 
 Asthar's invitation. 
 
 The letter finished upon a note of condolence at his situa- 
 tion "amongst those Irish heathen in that place with the out- 
 landish name," much as though Dunhallow or Black Rock 
 were Crusoe's Island, which brought Finn back to reality. For 
 all those things of London seemed remote here in Ireland. 
 They had nothing to do either with him or with living. 
 
 He was still gathering facts for his Irish articles and already 
 there had commenced in him the first outpost affair of a battle 
 between ethic and ambition. For he had received a letter 
 from "The Earth," saying they wished him to give special 
 
ii4 GODS 
 
 attention to the irreconcilable differences between Catholic and 
 Protestant in Ireland. However hazily, he felt in it an indi- 
 cation as to how he was to write. But Finn Fontaine was of 
 the sort that hates "indication." He wanted to be free. 
 
 Ever since he had landed in Dunhallow, he had been trying 
 to divide Ireland into Catholics and Protestants, Home Rulers 
 and Unionists. He found Ireland incapable of division. He 
 had tried to make that hitherto infallible division of people 
 into "propagandists" and "indifferents," the division he had 
 made at the Tabernacle meeting and had been making ever 
 since he could think. But here, in the land where belief was 
 always at white heat and where matter was dominated by 
 spirit, there was no propaganda. In all his month he had not 
 been able to find any attempt by Catholic to convert Protes- 
 tant, or by Protestant to convert Catholic, and so far as 
 politics were concerned, here in the South at any rate there 
 was no attempt at prosyletisation. In Ireland one instinctively 
 thought of politic and religion, that is the religion which 
 lies behind dogma, as one and the same. As for the people of 
 the ash-covered books, it never occurred to either Protestant 
 or Catholic that they existed. The nearest he ever got to 
 an Irishman's consciousness of the existence of such people 
 was one day when Father Con, who had been reading an ar- 
 ticle in "The Tablet" upon the decay of faith and morals 
 throughout Europe, said: "Some day the Almighty God will 
 get mad and there will be a great war .... or something." 
 
 It seemed to him that every Irishman he had met, irre- 
 spective of his particular dogma, was so entirely assured of the 
 efficacy and assuredness, not of his religion, but of religion, 
 as the only thing in the world that mattered, that it never 
 entered into his mind "to take it out of the hands of God," 
 as they phrased it. Ireland was the end of faith, not of faiths. 
 Ireland was one whole. 
 
 In his attempts to find out what was this faith that was 
 of Ireland, he had discovered that not only was there no 
 propaganda, but no jealousy. Father Con, a fervent Catholic, 
 himself spoke well of the little body of local Methodists who 
 met in a bandbox over a stable. "A stable is a good place," 
 he said, "sure wasn't our Blessed Lord born in one?" They 
 were shepherded by Sam Sligo, a tub-bodied man with puny 
 arms and a voice like a rasp, whose nose snubbed itself out 
 
THE LAND OF SHADOWS 115 
 
 of an undergrowth of whisker. In some unexplained way he 
 reminded Finn of a picture he had once seen of Karl Marx, 
 the founder of economic Socialism. He found in him, in the 
 moments of his more fervent bellowings, which he made in 
 good dissenting fashion with one knee on a chair, as a protest 
 against two-kneed Papistry, an entire belief that the Lord pros- 
 pers the godly man, a belief which he shared both with John L. 
 Crux and with Finn's father, although, like them also, the 
 next moment he would commit himself devoutly to the state- 
 ment that "him that the Lord loveth, he chasteneth." He 
 found here, as so often before, a sort of unity of faith; a 
 philosophy; a synthesis; which seemed to unite the most 
 differentiate. It was a unity of human beings that was always 
 discovering itself, and against all reason and even conviction. 
 
 He also was a hell-fire man, but of another type to the Gen- 
 eral and Billy Pickles, for he took the damned, that is to 
 say, the Catholics, pretty easy, all things considering .... 
 perhaps because anyhow they were sure to go to hell in the 
 fullness of time. In this world at any rate they were his best 
 customers and very good friends. 
 
 He was a draper in the main street and prospered before 
 the Lord, wherefore he rejoiced exceedingly on Sundays, and 
 always through his little snub nose. Like his congregation 
 and his friends the Catholics in the chapel across the road, 
 one of the three Catholic chapels of the town, he was en- 
 tirely assured of his own immortality and was of a conscious- 
 ness exceedingly defined. 
 
 But though there was peace between Protestant and Cath- 
 olic, there was no peace between Protestant and Protestant. 
 There was the ^Reverend Dick Despard, "Don't-care-a-damn- 
 Dick," as he was affectionately known by the Catholics. 
 This easy-going lovable clergyman of the Church of Ireland, 
 with his ragged beard and moustache, rolling eye and rakish 
 billycock hat set at a most unclerical angle on the side of his 
 reverend pate, had, Finn discovered by accident more than 
 anything else, for no one thought anything about it, been 
 caught apportioning the church funds to his own very real 
 necessities, which included a small wife and thirteen large 
 children. (There had been an item of paint for some gates 
 that had never been painted and there were other things 
 collection shortages, etc.) But he was beloved of the 
 
n6 GODS 
 
 "Papists." He was shamefully underpaid "and who would 
 be afther blaming the honest man?" said the Catholics who 
 had a lenient eye for this sort of thing when it concerned 
 the rival church. 
 
 The children of Dunhallow loved him and his bulls-eyes a 
 powerful peppermint concoction and unfailing preventive of 
 "wind," and his pennies (possibly purloined from sacramental 
 sources), and his popularity often caused theological pertur- 
 bations in the mind of Catholic youth which had been taught 
 to uncover to the priests of God and to none other. Despite 
 his tendency to "appropriation" and "a dhrop of the crathure" 
 in canonical moments (he had a habit of retiring during the 
 singing of the first hymn), which, unlike his enemy, the 
 Reverend MacDougal, unfortunately went to his head and 
 not to his stomach, there was hardly a woman in the place 
 that did not give him the ecclesiastical "bob" nor a child 
 that didn't take off its hat when it had one. 
 
 But he was faced by a splitting half of a congregation, 
 shocked at his shortcomings and the leniency of a good-natured 
 Bishop, who were ministered to by the above-mentioned Rev- 
 erend Jock MacDougal, known locally as "the Reverend 
 Mac," a raw-boned broad-shouldered Antrim Scotsman with a 
 raw-boned voice, in a little upper chamber hung in red like 
 a sacrificial altar that matched the red whiskers and face 
 of this Presbyterian priest, who when he preached seemed to 
 carry a claymore in his hand. He was the only Protestant 
 there that Finn had met who seemed to feel that the Catho- 
 lics were other than one flesh with their heretic brethren. 
 But, as the Reverend Dick himself had said to Finn in easy, 
 sleepy good-nature, his hands deep in his cross-pockets, his 
 billycock over one eye: "What can you expect, Mr. Fon- 
 taine, out of the Black North?" But that was an expression 
 he often heard from other lips and especially from Miss Kitty 
 O'Halloran, with whom he was now on terms of crabbed 
 friendship. 
 
 Not that this by any means exhausted the sects. There 
 was a rumour that the local Inspector of the Royal Irish Con- 
 stabulary, a perfect giant of a man with a back like a tomb- 
 stone, had some wonderful back-parlour faith of his own which 
 he kept entirely to himself, to his tiny nonentity of a wife, 
 who spent her time in producing children, mostly in bunches, 
 
THE LAND OF SHADOWS 117 
 
 for she had a tendency to twins, and to the children themselves. 
 Nobody knew what that faith was, but no one had ever seen 
 them inside any of the orthodox places of worship. 
 
 And finally, there was old Groyle, the black-faced atheist, 
 locally known in derisive friendliness as the begaun man, be- 
 cause of his dealing in eggs, to which he added blackberries 
 and mushrooms, in the season. However, when Finn went to 
 him to absorb local information for Crux upon the blackberry 
 and mushroom possibilities of Dunhallow, and, knowing his 
 local reputation, began to sound him upon the ash-covered 
 books, he found out that his antipathy to religion was not to 
 religion in the abstract but in the concrete. It seemed it was he 
 who had led the secession from the Reverend Dick, but had 
 afterwards quarrelled with the Reverend Mac upon certain 
 knotty questions of dogma. He had tried to lead a second 
 secession, but, having failed, had gone into the outer agnostic 
 darkness. It was anyhow obvious that he called himself an 
 atheist more from deviltry than conviction. 
 
 One by one Finn's ideas and his prejudices, political, re- 
 ligious, social, had been going in "the house of spiritual al- 
 chemy." 
 
 It was after this last interview that he had gone out to Black 
 Rock on a jaunting car with Johnny the Saint as Jehu, to 
 inspect the fishing possibilities for Crux, who was always firing 
 telegrams at him to keep him up to the mark. He needed 
 it. He was apt to let everything go in the soft south-west 
 wind and rain of Ireland. 
 
 They drove out to Black Rock, along the side of the hills 
 that fringed with mossy green the right of the bay, in the 
 beautiful September morning. The road winding up and 
 down the length of the hills in its white loneliness, ran be- 
 tween their wheels until they came almost to frowning Carrick- 
 more itself, after which they dropped down by easy stages 
 to the little mushroom village nestling beneath. Above them, 
 perching perilous on the very edge of the precipice, clung 
 a little grey stone chapel, one end fallen into ruins, looking 
 bleakly out across the wastes of the Atlantic towards the har- 
 bours of heaven. To Finn it seemed that in it lived the soul 
 of the place, over which it watched in tender austerity. 
 
 In his pocket he had an introduction from Father Con to 
 Father Joseph Hennessey, the parish priest of Black Rock. 
 
n8 GODS 
 
 "For," said Father Con, "to try and storm Black Rock with- 
 out first getting round Father Hennessey, who is an enemy 
 of me own, is the same thing as to storm heaven without 
 going through purgatory." To Finn's enquiring look, he had 
 gone on: " 'Tis like this, Finn boy" (for they had got to 
 that stage) "I believe in fairies, though maybe it's against 
 me religion there's a lot of pagan in the Irishman but now, 
 there's Father Hennessey, he doesn't believe in them he 
 hates them:" he said it in wistful savagery. "And there ye 
 have the head and the tail of it." 
 
 Finn began to think on this cryptic pronouncement after 
 he had followed the directions of a Hercules enswathed in a 
 blue sweater, a three days' growth of iron-grey stubble on 
 his face and with the keen blue eye that conies from salt water 
 and hard weather. " 'Tis up there, yer honour." One great 
 arm had pointed up the hill. 
 
 He walked through the one and only street of the village, 
 for he was going where a horse could not follow, and he had 
 left Johnny the Saint with his animal at the little public house 
 where they had been both pounced upon by the proprietor, a 
 little yellow-bearded griping man with a nose half-way be- 
 tween a hawk and a parrot and a pair of burning brown eyes. 
 As he walked between the whitewashed cabins with the 
 thatched roofs, the women, some of them, the older ones, with 
 pipes in their mouths, which, in courtesy to the stranger, they 
 smoked under the lee of their aprons, continued to carry on 
 their conversation in the Irish which was the language of the 
 place, though some of the "Turks" "had a little English" for 
 use in the dwellings of civilisation, such as Dunhallow, where 
 they went in their hookers to sell their fish, and some of the 
 younger ones spoke it quite well. He felt the delicate con- 
 sideration of these mothers and wives of the giants who 
 lounged over the half doors of the cabins who did not let the 
 silence come that would have told him they were watching the 
 stranger. 
 
 He caught a stray maidin bragh or "modd'n-bedaw" as it 
 sounded to him, which he was to know was the Irish "Good- 
 morning! " and found as he advanced that he was preceded by a 
 light cavalry of boys or girls, he could not tell which, for 
 many that looked like boys were dressed in petticoats, who, 
 long-legged, bright-eyed and keen-faced, fled before him, the 
 
THE LAND OF SHADOWS 119 
 
 bare legs skirmishing under his eyes into the doorways, dis- 
 placing the slumbrous pigs which, with the fowls, had the free 
 run of the houses. The blue smoke from the cabins seemed 
 to blend with the bluer air and drove down a little into the 
 narrow way, carrying that tang of peat which from the day at 
 Dunhallow station had become for him the scent of Ireland. 
 Up aloft a great sea fowl slid down the wind which had begun 
 to call to him over that booming of waters of which he was 
 now, as he came up to the higher ground, for the first time 
 aware. Below him, the rocks ran black and sullen back to- 
 wards Dunhallow in one unbroken line far as the eye could 
 follow under the shallow green waters of this iron coast, save 
 in one place, directly beneath, where the iron was broken by 
 a submarine cleft of a deep dark green that made into a little 
 circle of deep water at the coast end of which he saw the life- 
 boat shed. Beyond it, curtseying like ducks upon the long 
 heaving swell outside in the open sea, a dozen half-decked boats 
 at anchor, clumsy bluff-bowed affairs which foreshortened neck- 
 like masts, at the head of each mast a pulley like the head 
 of a fowl, which, for all their clumsiness, seemed instinct with 
 life and rode the swells easily and dry. 
 
 The priest's house lay on the top of the rise commanding 
 the village. It was a square house built of grey limestone 
 and roofed with slate. To Finn it looked a stronghold of the 
 faith, but it had an air of stark comfort. About it, pecked a 
 small mob of hens and cocks whilst a dozen ducks paddled in 
 the weed of the stream that ran past it. 
 
 As he walked up the steps, the smell of bacon and eggs 
 with a more indistinct smell of whisky, which he first thought 
 was peat, met his nostrils. He was shown by a little house- 
 keeper, who was almost a duplicate of Kitty, into a hard horse- 
 hair parlour of shiny chairs and a sofa, with a miniature book- 
 case filled with volumes that looked as if they had never been 
 read, the whole of a bareness that brought back for a moment 
 Father Lestrange's room at the Seminary. 
 
 a ls that the sort of thing ye're bringing to his riverence, I 
 ask? Ah! Take it away and bring him another. De ye think 
 I'd be insultin' a holy man like the Father with that thing 
 of bone and feather? that . . ." 
 
 The voice came piercing to his ears. He looked out of the 
 window and saw a wretched, dejected-looking woman, her face 
 
120 GODS 
 
 downcast under the shawl that had fallen back upon her thin 
 neck, taking back from a hand that showed itself across the 
 edge of the window a miserable looking chicken. It was her 
 offering to the Godhead, the widow's mite, but it had been re- 
 fused. 
 
 In the passage he heard a puffing and blowing, and then 
 the door burst open, disclosing an apoplectic round face with 
 some scant grey hair on the head, all set upon that gargan- 
 tuan body which he had begun to associate with Irish theology. 
 The whole was clothed in a priest's coat, covered with ancient 
 snuffings and gravyings. 
 
 "Ah, good mornin', Mr. Fintaine," said the big-faced man. 
 "Ye're from England, I hear." There was a hurricane note in 
 the voice, a note of bluster that was almost a threat. It was 
 not what he said, but the way he said it. 
 
 Finn remembered the chicken and began to understand 
 Father Con's explanation about the fairies. But it took him 
 that interview and many others that were to follow to dis- 
 cover that Father Joseph Hennessey was one of those tyrannic, 
 loud-voiced, bullying, whisky-drinking prelates who are fortu- 
 nately rare in Ireland. He was the tyrant of the village, which 
 feared him as the vicar of God on earth. 
 
 Finn explained the object of his visit, to which the priest 
 listened with heavy indifference, until he said: "Mr. Crux is 
 anxious to bring some money into Black Rock." 
 
 At the word "money" a little light came into the two small 
 grey eyes. The body took on an aggressive interested corpu- 
 lence. The veins in the thickened temples swelled. 
 
 "Ah," said his reverence, "now you're talkin'." 
 
 "You're a heretic, Mr. Fintaine, Father O'Dempsey tells 
 me." (He always pronounced Finn's name in that way.) "But 
 ye see the House of God, the house of the one and true 
 church," he said it pugnaciously, "up there on the hill. Sure, 
 'tis the shame that we can't put in a coloured window behind 
 the altar. Sure isn't it that that's a disgrace to civilised peo- 
 ple? Bring the money into Black Rock that'll decorate the 
 Housej}^ God, and I'm your friend. 
 
 "We'll be havin' a glass of whisky on the strength of it," 
 he added after a moment, and looked as nearly shocked as a 
 man of his habit could when he learned from Finn's bash- 
 

 THE LAND OF SHADOWS 121 
 
 ful lips that he was a teetotaler. For Finn's father and 
 mother had brought him up in a holy fear of alcohol. 
 
 "Well I'll have wan myself," he said as he leant down to 
 some little recess under the bookcase, from which he took a 
 bottle of what he said "never paid the Queen sixpence" and 
 drank a pretty stiff tumbler neat, and then another. After 
 which he took up the matter of the fishing with Finn. 
 
 "There's a good friend of mine, and of the church, down 
 there a man named Higgins. He owns a public house and 
 the people call him the gombeen man, for he lends a trifle of 
 money now and then to oblige his neighbours. We must talk 
 to him about it." The little eyes measured Finn a moment, 
 and then added, dryly: "I expect he'll be wantin' a finger 
 in the pie. Make him your friend, Mr. Fintaine, if you take 
 my tip." He smiled slyly. 
 
 There was venality, cupidity, cunning, in that smile. It 
 was the same man who a moment before had been talking about 
 decorating the House of God, the little chapel up there on the 
 edge of the cliff. And talking earnestly, as Finn saw. It was a 
 new view upon the faith of Ireland. 
 
 Finn found that he could no more divide Ireland into sheep 
 and goats than into Protestants and Catholics. The thing that 
 twined itself in and about all was religion, and that religion 
 Catholicism. 
 
 Although they did not know it, Sam Sligo, the Reverend 
 Dick, even that monk-like inspector of the Royal Irish Con- 
 stabulary, all these people and their congregations were Catho- 
 lic. Only one of two things were possible in Ireland either 
 Paganism or the Catholicism which had displaced it. Ire- 
 land was Catholic, She was the Land of Shadows and of Faith. 
 
XII 
 
 IMPERIAL DOGMA 
 
 Finn returned to London to find it meaningless. He was re- 
 turning nominally to report to Crux, but actually to find out 
 why articles on Ireland had not been appearing in "The Earth," 
 which he had seen every day. Each morning he had opened his 
 paper with that anticipatory pringling in feet and solar plexus, 
 a pringling to be followed by the sinking at the pit of the 
 stomach in the heavy leaded silence of the columns. And so he 
 would turn from his breakfast with loathing. Finn's eating 
 was much affected by his emotions. 
 
 There had been articles by Billy Pickles and the General, 
 which had resulted in a solemn fulmination by Professor Dust 
 about the revival of superstition. Matters had been still fur- 
 ther complicated by something that had shocked the scientific 
 world the incursion of the very distinguished physicist, Sir 
 Raymond Hilary, into the debate, as he said, "on the side of 
 the angels," when he had disgusted his scientific brethren by 
 his defence of miracles, whereas, as Sir Lancaster Hogge, who 
 had rushed in head down, pointed out in high snorting phrases, 
 there were only the miracles of science. 
 
 It was into this melee that the Bishop of Whitechapel had 
 poked his benevolent but bewildered head, losing a good deal 
 of wool, both to Sir Raymond and Sir Lancaster, in the process 
 the former gently patronising to "old-fashioned conceptions," 
 the latter, savage, and worrying the old gentleman bulldog 
 fashion before being called off by the editor himself, who closed 
 the correspondence, but not before somebody, who signed him- 
 self "Lucifer," and whom Finn suspected to be Paris Asthar, 
 had got in amongst the lot of them, and, literally, raised the 
 very devil. 
 
 Jock McAdam, the Socialist fanatic, whom Lestrange had 
 once called "the spiritual leader of the Social Democracy," and 
 who himself was a deeply religious man, had also joined in, 
 
 122 
 
IMPERIAL DOGMA 123 
 
 probably for ulterior purposes, for he was the most persistent 
 propagandist in England. He wrote well enough, but had ob- 
 viously no business in that galley, and his pungent periods 
 about Internationalism as the new world-religion seemed to 
 Finn far-fetched and remote. They had nothing to do with 
 reality, although MacAdam and his gospel seemed real enough 
 to many. When, however, he asked himself what reality was? 
 he could only reply "Ireland," which was, of course, ridiculous. 
 
 As he got into the Forestford train at Liverpool Street, he 
 saw Mr. Titterling on the platform saying good-bye to a pretty 
 young woman who was about to become a mother. Despite the 
 cheerless November day, he looked very well dressed indeed 
 in a close-fitting coat of blue Melton, eyeglass and shiny topper. 
 Finn knew the signs. He was obviously after "a good day," 
 and, as a matter of fact had been "pigeon-plucking" in a 
 Shaftesbury Avenue billiard saloon where he had lost two 
 games at moderate stakes to what he called "a gilded mug," 
 and had won the third at 50 a side. 
 
 He was so earnestly engaged with the young woman, who 
 seemed to be tearfully expostulating, that he did not see Finn, 
 who, from his corner, saw the girl attempt to kiss him as the 
 train moved out and the man, who had been scanning her 
 through his monocle with an air of good-natured despair, drew 
 back. 
 
 The impression it had made on him quickly passed when 
 he reached Ash Villa to find the Fontaine affairs desperate, his 
 mother in tears, his little grandmother in praise and prayer 
 in her bedroom, and his father dumb before the Lord. Aunt 
 Judy, after giving Finn one of those rare smiles of hers, which 
 so transformed her ugliness, for they were very fond of each 
 other, sat in the background, resting her nose against the 
 pattern of the wallpaper. 
 
 The coal trade had been going from bad to much worse, 
 the MacGlusky becoming tougher as he became more religious, 
 a combination regarded by his father in admiring confusion. 
 The slack had increased and the weight decreased. Some of 
 the customers had become mutinous, others blasphemous. The 
 door had been banged in his face the length of a road, and 
 one man had even threatened "to take the law into his own 
 hands," whatever that might mean. "I am a 'ornery cuss," 
 he had said, "when I'm roused. "Now I'm roused." He had 
 
124 GODS 
 
 begun to remove his coat to Jemmy's dismayed astonishment, 
 and he, the bag, and the notebook had been forced into stra- 
 tegic retreat. 
 
 And all this was being complicated by his boots, now dis- 
 integrating. 
 
 He had been spending his days in running backwards and 
 forwards to the coal depot, trying to make things right, and 
 had been received by the terrible MacGlusky with contumely 
 and invidious comparisons with a smart young fellow who, with 
 the advantage of not possessing a conscience, had just come 
 on. When he had timidly asked his tyrant how he could re- 
 concile short weight with religion, that gentleman had taken 
 refuge in blasphemous metaphysics. 
 
 Finally, Finn heard, as a sort of addendum, that his father 
 had been "investing" in gold. It was one of the Spellbind 
 companies. 
 
 There was something in the grey eyes of his father, now 
 venous and glassy, that reminded him of a rabbit he had 
 once seen chased by dogs. He was scared. His beard was 
 straggling and grey and his head seemed to have shrunk. 
 
 Whilst his mother was in the midst of this recital, before 
 which his father sat, dumbly, they heard a voice in the hall 
 which voluntarily brought to Finn the bull of Bashan. 
 
 It had been said of his uncle Robert, his father's brother, 
 that he was the most offensively healthy man in London. It 
 was certain at least that Robert Fountain, or Bobs, as he was 
 usually known, had a most depressing effect upon the sick 
 and ailing, whom he made to feel as worms. Bobs Foun- 
 tain was a fresh-air fiend, who worshipped a triune deity of 
 water, onions and nuts. For all his sixty-five years, he thought 
 nothing of walking the twenty miles to Forestford on a Sun- 
 day morning from his rooms in Muswell Hill, lying on his back 
 in the garden to absorb anything that might be going whether 
 of sun or rain (he was cold-proof, as shock-proof), eating 
 a score of onions out of the little bag that was his invariable 
 accompaniment, and then walking back in the evening. They 
 heard him now in the passage: 
 
 "Nuts, my boy! Nuts! Concentrated sunshine. That's 
 your mark!" He filled the passage with his roarings. 
 
 His voice came in a Jovian blast, which blew open the door 
 of the little back sitting room to admit a remarkably vivid 
 
IMPERIAL DOGMA 125 
 
 gentleman of fresh complexion and snowy hair, which sprouted 
 from scalp, brow, ear and nostril. Behind him, like a bird 
 of ill-omen, stalked Aunt Bella. 
 
 "Jemmy, old cock, buck up! Just blew in to wish you 
 luck." 
 
 He advanced upon his downcast brother, whom he hit in 
 the small of the back with a hand like a piece of gnarled teak. 
 
 "Bella here has told me all about it. Never say die till 
 you're fly-blown." He bore down upon his shrinking sister- 
 in-law, who hated him as the plague, but who met his smacking 
 salute with a perfunctory peck. 
 
 "I've been telling Robert, Fanny, all about it," explained 
 Aunt Bella. Finn knew that explanation. A thing of hints 
 and malignant suppression. 
 
 "We must bear what the Lord sends us," she went on in 
 pious aspiration. She looked on Jemmy with savage com- 
 miseration. 
 
 "But this is what comes from wobbling. The Lord hates a 
 wobbler. Even worse than he hates the unbeliever." She 
 darted a glance at Uncle Bobs, who was quite unmoved. 
 
 "Nonsense," said that gentleman. "Nothing of the kind, 
 Bella. Haven't been in a church for thirty years, except the 
 great Church of Nature" (he always spoke in capitals) "and 
 look at this." He took Aunt Bella's black-gloved hand and 
 holding the first and second fingers stiffly between his own 
 darted them into the middle of his thigh, to that lady's aston- 
 ished indignation. "Nuts, old girl, nuts. And fresh air!" 
 
 "Cheer up, old son, you'll soon be dead, and when you're 
 dead, well you are dead." Uncle Bobs had no doubts about 
 mortality, but his mortality was as nearly immortal as any- 
 thing earthly could be. It was his universal panacea for any- 
 one in really low health to tell him that his sufferings would 
 soon be over, in a jovial rationalist voice. 
 "Judy, my jewel, my light o' love!" (Uncle Bobs had the 
 occasional lapses of a life that had been freely natural), "how 
 goes it? Still in the doldrums? Won't you give us a kiss?" 
 It was Uncle Bobs' affectionate plural. 
 
 He skipped over to her, but Aunt Judy, her nose still rest- 
 ing against the wall, turned her goat-like eyes to smile a 
 little at her irrepressible brother-in-law, whom, though no- 
 
126 GODS 
 
 body knew it, she had once loved in secret. Aunt Judy had a 
 tendency to secret loves. But they remained secret. 
 
 At all this, Finn's mother stared in a sort of coma. There 
 she sat, fixing her hated brother-in-law, Medusa-like. 
 
 Finn knew the atmosphere. Since Ireland, it was unbear-* 
 able. He wanted to escape from it as from a prison. He 
 sneaked out of the room, caught his hat off the hatstand, and 
 walked over to the Titterlings, as he always did when he was 
 in trouble. Mrs. Titterling, in her way, which took some- 
 thing of its comfort from the smoothly parted hair over the 
 grey eyes, acted as a sort of balm to him, and little Mary 
 as something else he could not say what. But he loved to 
 speak with her. 
 
 The door was opened by Mr. Titterling, a subdued Titter- 
 ling and quite other than the Titterling of Liverpool Street, 
 although he was still in patent leathers. His face looked as 
 though he had been fighting with sweeps, and the high glossy 
 collar was streaked, from which Finn gathered that he had 
 "run short of " 'baccy" and had been skirmishing in the grate 
 for stumps. One dirty forefinger was placed upon the weak 
 mouth. 
 
 "They're here," he said dolefully, and let him in. 
 
 There came the drone of voices from the little back draw- 
 ing room, into which Finn was shown, to find two theologi- 
 cally constipated elders. They looked extraordinarily alike, 
 although they really were not related, as they rose in their 
 dark nankeen-blue frock-coats, quartered by large plaited 
 horse-hair buttons, with their white hair parted in precisely 
 the same place on the right, the hair falling over the left eye, 
 and their long shaven upper lips and fringe of grey beard, 
 with the strong, rather cruel noses with the deep pits on each 
 side. 
 
 They were introduced by Mrs. Titterling as Elder Parkin- 
 son and Elder Tomkins, and then they sat down. 
 
 In his hand he found that of Mary, who had been waiting 
 her chance. She snuggled close to him, drawing down his head 
 to kiss. The elders dropped their eyes. Mr. Titterling sat in 
 the corner, rather like a naughty boy who has been caught in 
 the act, muttering to himself unutterable things. The room 
 stank intolerably of tobacco. 
 
 Mr. Titterling was badly frightened. Before Finn's en- 
 
IMPERIAL DOGMA 127 
 
 trance, the two elders had been talking about hell, with spe- 
 cial reference to backsliders, and the only thing which pre- 
 vented another instantaneous conversion of Mr. Titterling 
 was the feel of the twenty crisp 5 notes in his inside pocket, 
 which he had won that morning. "I'm damned if I don't think 
 a 5 note will yet stand between me and salvation," he was 
 saying to himself. 
 
 ". . . hell," one of the elders was saying. "Can we 
 imagine what that simple word means? Eternity. Can we 
 imagine what that means? And then hell through eternity? It 
 is an awful thought. If each blade of grass on the earth 
 represented a million of years, and one added them all to- 
 gether, that would not be eternity. If each grain of sand 
 were a million of years, that would not be eternity. If each 
 molecule of each grain were the millions of millions of years 
 represented by all the grains of sand of the world, that would 
 still not even be the shadow of eternity. If the time repre- 
 sented by all these molecules were multiplied by a million times 
 a million and the result multiplied by itself each second since 
 time first was to the end of the world, even that would not 
 be eternity. And through all these aeons of time, unmeasur- 
 able by man, never ending, must the sinner sit in the flames 
 that are never quenched, that burn as no mortal fire burns, 
 for ever and for ever looking across the chasm of the pit to 
 the faithful Elect sitting in the bosom of the Eternal, safe for 
 ever." 
 
 The gentleman, who appeared to have concentrated upon 
 his subject, glanced from time to time at the man in the cor- 
 ner, who several times, especially when the grains of sand 
 began to multiply, nearly broke down, onlv being saved from 
 grace by the crispness of the Bank of England notes which he 
 felt himself compelled to press. They crackled a little in the 
 stillness that followed. 
 
 Mrs. Titterling looked like a tear-stained Madonna as she 
 sat in her little chair and thought of the impending eternal 
 separation from the man whom she loved. For all its mild- 
 ness, there was something of desperation and rebellion in the 
 eye. 
 
 But little Mary was not horror stricken. She listened with 
 all her eyes. Before even the most terrible arithmetic, the 
 
128 GODS 
 
 little mouth set itself and the eyes looked out calmly. In the 
 stillness the little voice came: 
 
 "That means that everybody in the whole world except 
 the Spirit's Elect are going to be damned, doesn't it?" The 
 father looked up with a gleam of hope. He had a curious 
 confidence in his eldest. 
 
 "Yes," said the elder, dourly. 
 
 "That means that if father dies now and Finn here, who 
 is my friend, mother and I would be up there," (she looked 
 vaguely at the ceiling), "with God, and father down there" 
 (she looked at the floor as though she could see into the pit). 
 "And that however much mother and I tried to help father 
 it would be no use. God wouldn't listen. Isn't that so?" 
 
 "Yes," came again. 
 
 "Then I don't believe in Him." 
 
 The tiny voice sounded with dreadful distinctness in the 
 little room, as Finn's own had once sounded that day of Father 
 Lestrange's visit to Ash Villa. One of the elders had risen in 
 horror, his large white hands upraised. Her mother stared 
 at her with parted lips. But the gleam of hope lighted itself 
 more strongly in the father's eye. 
 
 "Oh! Mary! Mary!" said her mother. It was enough. 
 
 "I can't believe in a God, mama, who can never hear 
 prayer whether in this world or the next." She stood up, her 
 little hands clenched behind her back. "I can't. Do you 
 think you or I could be happy to see father screaming in the 
 flames of hell and we safe? I'd rather be with father." 
 
 Finn had no clear recollection of what happened after that. 
 There was a confusion of shocked elder, tearful Mrs. Titter- 
 ling, a rescussitated Mr. Titterling with monocle, and a defiant 
 Mary, sent to bed, but not before she had time to whisper: 
 "What is the Irish God, Finn? Is he the same as the God of 
 the Spirit's Elect?" And when Finn, out of the fulness of 
 his heart and experience, could tell her that the God of the 
 Irish was a merciful God, even to heretics who knew no 
 better, and, on the whole, a just God, she went to bed with a 
 happy smile and to sleep hi happy dreaming. 
 
 The next thing he remembered was finding himself at tea in 
 the kitchen opposite the two elders, who, to Finn's indigna- 
 tion he only managed to secure two and a tail consumed 
 quantities of sardines washed down by buckets of tea sar- 
 
IMPERIAL DOGMA 129 
 
 dines paid for by "gilded mugs" of the racecourse and billiard 
 saloon. 
 
 From where Finn sat with Mr. Titterling hanging over the 
 kitchen fender, he heard the elders making a frightful drone 
 and denunciation before the Lord from the little drawing room. 
 Once, he thought, he heard the name of Aunt Judy, but that 
 might have been imagination. Mr. Titterling, despite the last 
 ten minutes, was still in a shaken condition and trembled as 
 the hymns of a strange bitter-sweetness came along the pas- 
 sage. And even to Finn there was something terrifying in 
 those tunes of the minor with the words that accompanied 
 them. "Damned if I can call my soul my own," said the 
 wretched man, ruefully the man who had just told Finn: "I 
 won a monkey on old Do-be-Quick." 
 
 The full sweet touch of Mrs. Titterling in the contralto that 
 hung under the menace of the bass came to him where he sat, 
 and then the words of the hymn he had heard so often there: 
 
 But oh ! the avenging fires of hell 
 That choke and scorch and writhe, 
 
 Whilst in the midst 
 
 The sinner sits 
 In torment yet alive! 
 
 When he got home he found a letter from Asthar on the 
 shelf of the hatstand inviting him to "The Cloisters" on Fri- 
 day, following his original invitation that day in Thrum's room. 
 "You seem to have interested the great man," he said, in that 
 kindly comforting way of his. "He actually condescended to 
 remember that you were back from Ireland the country I 
 love so much because I have never been in it." 
 
 Finn's heart beat tumultous. For a moment he thought it 
 was because the hair of Deirdre Asthar had brushed itself 
 across the page he was reading then he found it was Thrum. 
 So he was interested in the articles. Ambition, which in Ire- 
 land had seemed so far away, was gripping him here in London. 
 And to-morrow he was to see Thrum. He had written for an 
 appointment. 
 
 On the next day he found Thrum with his back to a roar- 
 ing fire, the usual long black cigar in his white teeth, and 
 that white lock of hair lying dankly across his forehead. 
 
 "Well?" said Thrum. That unsmiling monosyllable had dis- 
 
130 GODS 
 
 composed many mighty ones in its time. It should have anni- 
 hilated the ungainly, nervous-looking boy on the other side of 
 the room, but it did not. It only made him savage and fear- 
 less. 
 
 "I have come, Sir, to ask why you haven't printed my Irish 
 articles?" It was not an enquiry. It was a challenge. 
 
 The man before him seemed to relax a trifle. He was an un- 
 smiling man, was the great newspaper proprietor, but some- 
 thing that might have been the ghost of a twinkle trembled in 
 the eye of hard indifference and flickered out. 
 
 "Because they are not what I want," he said, simply. "You 
 have not been loyal." 
 
 "What do you mean, Sir? I have written as well as I was 
 able. I have written what I believe to be true. I have been 
 loyal to my beliefs." 
 
 "Loyalty to your paper is as necessary as loyalty to your 
 God," went on the big man, as though he had not spoken. He 
 looked steadfastly at the end of the fine grey ash. "And The 
 Earth' doesn't want poetry or fine writing," he added, ab- 
 sently. 
 
 " 'The Earth' is the Englishman's Bible, just as the earth 
 itself is the Englishman's. I have to be as careful what I 
 give to my congregation as the other Holy Father." That 
 twinkle came again, trembled frostily and vanished. "The 
 truth is revealed only to the few. They must be careful how 
 they give it out, for few can bear it. Fleet street has also its 
 index expur gat onus" And now the man before him had ceased 
 to twinkle. He was speaking in dead earnest, as Finn could 
 see, with a jaw that brought back that of Crux. There was 
 something compressed, suppressed, about his utterance as of 
 power held in leash, banking up. "Not a word, not a comma, 
 goes into 'The Earth' that is not considered for a congre- 
 gation that extends throughout the world. Ours is the power. 
 We have the world to consider. That is why we speak to the 
 world by suggestion and by suppression, as the masters of men 
 have always spoken." Father Lestrange had once said some- 
 thing to him like that, that day in the bare white-washed 
 study at the Seminary. 
 
 And so it was that Finn Fontaine found himself in the roar 
 of Fleet street with confused memory of an extraordinary half 
 hour one of those queer uncontrollable bursts of confidence 
 
IMPERIAL DOGMA 131 
 
 for which the newspaper king was noted. Was it true that 
 he had dared to ask that man back there why he did not print 
 the truth? That he had asked him how he applied his faith 
 to the workaday world? Whether there was to be one law 
 for the masters and another for the people? 
 
 And there came to him the solitary lapse into a rare, in- 
 dulgent humour of a man who had never been spoken to like 
 that before, which had shown itself in a veiled explanation, a 
 perfect dovetailing of ideas, the flawless mosaic of his faith in 
 Power, but made as much to himself as to his auditor. At last, 
 his division of the world into the Powerful and the Power- 
 less. And there had come to him again, even up there in his 
 room, that queer contradiction of the words of the grown-ups 
 and their actions. Yet he knew that this man was genuine. 
 His power-faith was as real to him as Father Con's Roman 
 Catholicism or Mrs. Titterling's Spirit's Elect. 
 
 And so he had gone out of the room humbled, but un- 
 subdued. 
 
 For it came to him in a flash of consciousness that he was 
 in eruption against society. He had begun to think of him- 
 self as an artist. He had thought dimly that art was to be 
 a sort of saviour, but, although he did not put it into words, 
 an art informed by passion. And here was Thrum and his 
 "Earth." What was the artist to them? Only something to 
 be used in gathering power, and, after use, thrown into a waste 
 paper basket as a housewife throws refuse into a dustbin. That 
 was it. The appalling indifference not only to the fine writing 
 that Thrum had mentioned, but to any of the fine things of life. 
 The indifference to life itself. And then, the contemptuous 
 waste of human talent and force. 
 
 His father and mother had often spoken of "that great 
 and good Mr. Thrum" and their dominion was not quite 
 shaken. 
 
 And then he recalled, vaguely, incredibly, that he had said 
 something of this indifference, boyish and awkward, to Thrum, 
 and that Thrum had looked at him a moment he would have 
 said something not unadmiring in the look had it not seemed 
 like nonsense and had said: "The day you change your 
 mind, come to me, and I will put you on a high horse . . . for 
 beggars sometimes ride in Fleet Street ... but you come 
 on my terms, not on yours." 
 
132 GODS 
 
 He was roused from his reverie by somebody speaking to him. 
 It was Lanthorn. He took the boy by the coat sleeve and* 
 said to him excitedly, but in quiet triumph in those short jerky 
 sentences which he so often used when interested: "I have 
 had Madame Mironowna, the Russian medium. She has pro- 
 duced the loud-speaking trumpet voices. Another nail in the 
 coffin of materialism. Our Borderland Bureau booming. Over- 
 whelmed with applications from people who have lost rela- 
 tives or friends and who want communication. Extraordinary 
 series of communications. One of them from a tremendous 
 personage. And now comes Sir Raymond Hilary. His attacks 
 in 'The Earth' upon the strongholds of his own science. The 
 materialist faith is in the melting pot. It only needs a great 
 war to complete the work, to bring the newer realisation. God 
 is getting impatient." 
 
 Who was it that had said that before? And then it came 
 to him. Father Con, the day they had walked to the Abbey 
 chapel in Dunhallow. All sorts of people, in themselves so 
 different, were saying the same thing, thinking the same thing, 
 more and more throughout the world. 
 
 As they spoke, a victoria, in which Asthar and his half- 
 sister were seated behind a pair of splendid blacks, swung past. 
 He looked like a Prince of Assyria, with that deep eye groove 
 set behind the straight monumental nose. But Deirdre, who 
 looked fleetingly at Finn, challengingly he might have thought 
 only that he knew she could never concern herself with so un- 
 important a person as himself, passed like a ray of light along 
 the greyness of the Street of Words. The gleam of her dusky 
 hair shining above her green dress, framing her face of Eve, 
 seemed to stream the turgid air with colour. Asthar bowed 
 to him delightedly. 
 
 "You are coming on Friday?" he shouted unconventionally 
 across the traffic. 
 
 Finn blushed. He had been looking at Deirdre. 
 
XIII 
 
 EAST AND WEST 
 
 JOHN L. CRUX had a sect all to himself. He financed it and 
 therefore he owned it. 
 
 The Primitive Christians Free Connexion, known through- 
 out America as the Primitive Christians, was entirely up to 
 date. That is to say, it stood for the new confraternity of 
 Religion and Big Business. It had a church in the Fifth 
 Avenue, New York, of a spiritual and physical simplicity, in- 
 credible. Its pews as its pulpit were of stark oak, but they 
 were fitted in a sumptuous directness. There was no ornamen- 
 tation, but in each pew was a discreet "buzzer" to call its in- 
 habitant to the affairs of this world from the affairs of the 
 next. The private autos of its millionaires were round the 
 corner. 
 
 The scoffers called it the Church of the Almighty Dollar. 
 They did it injustice. It was also the church of faith of a 
 new faith. The faith in success and in its God. "Look how 
 it succeeds," Crux had said. "Any of our Sunday morning con- 
 gregations stand for anything up to three or four hundred 
 millions." 
 
 In this church, the minister of God was the Reverend 
 Elias Z. Slick, author of that highly successful book: "Christ, 
 the Business Man." He was also the minister of John L. 
 Crux. He was a big-framed, commanding man with a shear- 
 ing nose, calculating eyes with swords in them, and a mouth, 
 clean-shaven and powerfully acquisitive, the edge of his per- 
 sonality being softened or hardened, just as you chose to look 
 at it, by the frame of grey beard that ran round his face un- 
 der the chin. 
 
 He had originally owned and run a successful ring of Penny 
 Bazaars in a group of villages up-State in New York, but had 
 had a "call." He had had several "calls," each one, fortunately, 
 
 133 
 
134 GODS 
 
 financially better than the last. But the call to the church 
 on Fifth Avenue was the best of all. 
 
 It was not that the Reverend Elias was not genuine. He 
 was genuine, with a capacity for self-conviction almost amount- 
 ing to sincerity. It was the secret of his influence, and there 
 are very few Machiavellis in the world. The Reverend Elias 
 was not one of them. 
 
 Crux had established a sort of Primitive Christian branch 
 in Limehouse, London, with plenty of loaves and fishes, install- 
 ing it in a barrack building of comfortable red brick. Under 
 the trained guidance of the Reverend Slick, especially loaned 
 from the Fifth Avenue, it had been a success from the be- 
 ginning. It had an excellent cinema theatre attached, a soup 
 kitchen of a superior brand, and every modern convenience, 
 including what one may term a Big Business heaven and a 
 hell reduced to the irreducible minimum. The Limehousers 
 streamed to the hand that fed. A big white hand that gave un- 
 grudging. 
 
 It was his Limehouse experiment that Mr. Crux intended 
 grafting on Black Rock. 
 
 In his dour way, he was delighted with the Black Rock pos- 
 sibilities as outlined by Finn, and to his son Parker he talked 
 about "exploitation" more than ever. With that flashing in- 
 tuitive way of the really great business man, for intuition plays 
 a greater part than calculation in the massing of millions, he 
 rough-sketched his plan, which was simple as the establishment 
 in the Avenue. 
 
 It included a patent church; the Reverend Slick, and a ple- 
 thora of loaves and fishes. "Religion makes 'em easy to man- 
 age," he said, the Rontgen eye looking through his son into the 
 mists of Ireland. "And besides, it's good for 'em." But there 
 were no mists for John L. Crux. He was not misty. 
 
 It was not that Crux was only anxious to make money. 
 Money to the man of millions is meaningless. It is the ad- 
 venture of it that pulls, but with that shrewd conservation 
 of energy that makes the organiser of money what he is, he 
 thought of killing two birds with one stone one for the Lord 
 and one for himself. He was sincerely anxious to convert these 
 "Papists" from complex to Primitive Christianity. He was 
 anxious to give them the benefit of that brand of Christianity 
 
EAST AND WEST 135 
 
 which, in his opinion, had been that held by its Founder 
 with all modern advantages added. 
 
 He knew as the man of power, whether king or priest, has 
 known in all ages, that full revelation was not possible to the 
 mob. That was for the elect such as himself, his son and those 
 captains of industry who helped to form the congregation of 
 the church in Fifth Avenue. Revelation for the workers had 
 to be modified, as carefully as Thrum modified his news for 
 that congregation of his which, as he had told Finn, extended 
 through the world. Not only was Crux a fervent believer in 
 hell-fire, but he subscribed to hell-fire organisations like that of 
 General Bliss because he sincerely believed u the fear of God" 
 necessary to obedience. Had a literal, concrete hell been avail- 
 able, he would have put the anarchist or socialist into its flames 
 with as little compunction and with as entire conviction as his 
 private gunmen had shot down the mob at his Arizona Belle 
 Copper mine, when they had tried to wreck the plant. 
 
 Finn, who had heard something of the new project, was 
 thinking on some of these things, which came to him shadowy 
 enough in his newer realisation of his employer, on his way 
 to "The Cloisters." The genuineness of this man, combined 
 with the strange difference between what he said and what he 
 did, puzzled him as much as the same thing in Thrum and so 
 many others. But out of the cauldron of thought the picture 
 of that ruined chapel of grey stone up there on Carrickmore 
 looking out over the seas always resurrected itself; and then 
 the picture of the Limehouse church, which he had seen, and 
 its pastor. "Upon this rock shall I build my church, and 
 the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." That utterance 
 of Father Con kept recurring like the beat of a hammer. But 
 the Primitive Christians were not the gates of hell. 
 
 These thoughts soon passed into other and more concrete 
 considerations. Or rather, one other. His clothes. He was 
 going to dinner in a morning coat of doubtful cut, into which 
 his father and mother had forced him some six months before, 
 "because tails look respectable." He had no dress clothes. 
 He blushed and sweated alternately. 
 
 Finn Fontaine was not the Finn of even three months be- 
 fore. He was a much less concrete Finn, a Finn whose soul 
 and even whose body was in a state of disintegration, leav- 
 ing him with a feeling of helplessness. Perhaps the comment, 
 
136 GODS 
 
 as he passed the Houses of Parliament, of the megatheric po- 
 liceman on duty at the entrance to the House of Commons ex- 
 pressed him as well as anything else: "A queer looking cus- 
 tomer as ever I did see. Looks as though he had escaped from 
 a caravan and didn't know what to do with himself." 
 
 He was a queer customer, ungainly, huge, with an in- 
 describable look of being too big or was it too craggy, for his 
 environment? The pile of the parliament houses did not over- 
 whelm it threw him into relief as age throws youth. 
 
 The door was opened by Togo, to bring to him the gold 
 and ivory of one of Chopin's nocturnes that whispered from 
 under the closed door on his left like the crepitation of the 
 leaves in a church yard, gusted hither and thither by the 
 autumn wind. The notes passed from a whisper to a ripple, 
 rose into the glug-glug of nightingales to fill the house with 
 melody, and then ceased. A blue-grey ghost fled up the stairs 
 before him like a cloud. It was a great cat. 
 
 As the door closed behind him, Big Ben chimed the three 
 quarters. He was too early. 
 
 But Paris Asthar received him between the high panellings 
 oi oak under the low ceiling as though he had been a prince 
 and Paris another, with that exquisite courtesy, the sincerity 
 cf which lifted it above the shallowness of tact. Finn was 
 the first to arrive. 
 
 As the others began to come, Asthar led him over to a cor- 
 ner where he placed in his hands a copy of Dante's "Inferno," 
 adorned by a series of drawings by Albrecht Dlirer. Finn, 
 grateful for the relief of the book and the corner, found the 
 illustrations so interesting that he almost forgot the others 
 until he heard the high silver voice of Asthar introducing a 
 lank, rank, young curate, of monkish aspect, whom he called 
 "my friend John Durring." 
 
 The young clergyman was very earnest in a jerky way with 
 galvanic movements of the shoulders and clenchings of the big 
 red-grained hands, and very depressed. Before ten minutes 
 had passed, Finn had heard that he was a Socialist High 
 Churchman suffering under the low church unimagining of the 
 Bishop of Whitechapel, the man who had once confirmed Finn 
 in the Forestford Church, who, as the Reverend John Durring, 
 speaking of the revolutionary social reform currents within 
 the church, complained, could not see what the devil these 
 
EAST AND WEST 13? 
 
 things were for. For his part he, with other members of the 
 Church Socialist Union, wished to bring back the communism 
 of the Early Church and abolish the principle of private prop- 
 erty, and generally seemed to picture a world of High Church 
 broadclothed workingmen and corduroyed dukes filling the 
 churches. 
 
 As he spoke the apple in his throat moved up and down 
 like a shuttle. His voice was hoarse from much street speak- 
 ing one of his differences with the Bishop. Jock Mac- 
 Adam, whose agitation for the unemployed had been filling 
 the papers, he seemed to regard as a sort of second Christ. 
 "You know, my dear Fontaine," he had dropped the "Mr." 
 from the first go-off, "the mistake we Christians make is think- 
 ing there is only one saviour of mankind. Saviours are always 
 coming, though, of course, only one was God. MacAdam is 
 one of them. Some day we shall have woman-Christs, Mac- 
 Adam, says, but I don't go so far as that; and Jock is not 
 even a professing Christian." 
 
 He was moistly earnest, being very sweaty and a little in- 
 clined to spit in his more enthusiastic periods, but he could 
 no more resist Paris Asthar than anyone else, and he con- 
 fided in Finn that he had a passion "to save his soul." "He 
 worships the Devil,' he had said to Finn in an earnest and 
 slightly ridiculous way, and went on to say that he knew a man, 
 a clergyman, to whom Asthar had shown a little chapel in 
 "The Cloisters," complete with altar, in which everything, 
 including the chalice, had been stolen from Christian churches. 
 
 He had become almost violently moist as he recounted this 
 story, of which Finn could make neither head nor tail, except 
 that he gathered that Asthar worshipped the Devil because he 
 worshipped power. 
 
 Finally, he had got back to his other hero, MacAdam, 
 and got Finn's promise to take part in a procession of the un- 
 employed from Tower Hill to the West End in January, which 
 he was to help to lead. He had been angry with Asthar, who 
 had complained that he would be compelled to give up his and 
 Deirdre's favourite drive along the Embankment "because 
 those unemployed fellows have started using it for their prome- 
 nades." To anything that his host said or did, he seemed 
 to attach extraordinary importance, and this remark of his 
 seemed to depress him unduly. 
 
138 GODS 
 
 Finn came out of the word storm of the young curate to 
 find a girl who was sitting in a low chair in one corner of the 
 room, under the stem of a high seven-branched candelabra, 
 watching him from under her dark lashes. She was an un- 
 usual looking girl with a high unevenness of shoulder and 
 of a whip-like slenderness, or it might have been some- 
 thing twisted in a graceful perverse way. But what stamped 
 itself upon the retina of his mind were the grey eyes with the 
 tiny pin-points of black iris that stared at him, and the nostrils, 
 proportioned, but hungry and spreading. The tempered light 
 fell upon her masses of hair of a polished copper, done low 
 upon a skin of a whiteness that made his pulses beat, whilst, 
 as he looked, a black shape flashed across the green silk of her 
 dress. It was Beelzebub, the black cat, who from some un- 
 seen coign of vantage, had sprung to the floor. 
 
 On turning his eyes away in confusion, he discovered that 
 the room was full of people who had knotted themselves to- 
 gether in corners, or formed around some nucleus of interest. 
 
 Paris Asthar, with the contrariness that distinguished him, 
 liked bringing together men and women of the most diversified 
 types, which had resulted more than once in something like a 
 free fight. It was his own habit, as he said, "to keep the ball 
 rolling" by passing from group to group, withdrawing himself 
 at intervals to watch the results from some point whence he 
 would smile that queer, haunting smile of which his crony, 
 Spearbohn, the caricaturist, had written that it was "the smile 
 of a damned soul." 
 
 This evening he had collected one or two men of science, in- 
 cluding Professor Dust and Sir Lancaster Hogge, who, as sci- 
 entific enemies, he always brought together whenever possible. 
 They were now at it hammer and tongs at the end of the room 
 near the high sacramental candelabra. The strident laugh of 
 Sir Lancaster, "an infidel laugh," as John Durring had con- 
 fided to Finn, had many times come to the ear of the boy 
 during the evening, raising itself above the riot of words. The 
 white teeth of Ali Baba gleamed in the dark corners and caught 
 the reflection of the irregular groups of wax candles with which 
 the place was lighted. There were some political nonentities, 
 looking highly uncomfortable, who were really quite important 
 personages in their constituencies. And there were some of 
 
EAST AND WEST 139 
 
 the feminine young men and masculine young women from the 
 Esoteric. 
 
 Professor Dust, who had broken himself free from the 
 strident Hogge, was in one corner saying to a group of these 
 last, who viewed him with the slightly raised eyebrows of an 
 amused scepticism, in emphatic shocked solemnity, something 
 about ghosts, repeating the word with slightly staring eyes: 
 "Ghosts, ghosts . . ." and then, fainter, Finn thought he 
 heard something about "trematodes." 
 
 But one figure there stood out from all others, and yet he 
 had not seen the man until his eyes by chance had looked 
 towards Asthar, who stood near him. It was that of a turbaned 
 Indian of a skin that might have been that of a sun-tanned 
 European, and a height that towered over all others there save 
 Paris Asthar himself. He had the face of a child with its 
 firm, rather full, lips and rounded cheeks. The eyes were lan- 
 guorous, not lacking, however, in a certain kind of intellectual 
 vigour. 
 
 The shoulders, veiled by his white robe, were broad but 
 sloping in the way that often conceals in boxers a cat-like ac- 
 tivity combined with great strength, something that seemed to 
 balance the spiritual quality in the man. Not that his figure 
 was muscular. It was round, but in a firm, soft way. His 
 face had the child-like smile of a Buddha that, knowing all, 
 was tolerant of all. 
 
 To Finn these two men, standing there together under the 
 low ceilings of "The Cloisters," looked two monumental figures 
 dwarfing all else. But they were two figures antagonistic. Finn 
 felt that instinctively, just as he felt that despite the same 
 fatherland, Sri Kapila, as he learnt the name of the Indian, and 
 Ali Baba, who through the evening alternately cringed and 
 snarled to the other, had nothing in common save colour. 
 
 Finn was looking at this variegated movement of a new 
 world, when Togo announced dinner. The guests began to 
 move towards the swing doors leading into the adjoining 
 room, which, with the heavy curtain that veiled them, had been 
 thrown back to show a table of exquisite napery and glass and 
 silver adorned only by some dead white roses. The boy, 
 abashed, and wondering whether he ought to offer his arm as 
 he had seen the others, felt a little touch on his sleeve and 
 found himself looking down upon the girl with the shining 
 
140 GODS 
 
 hair whom he had seen looking at him from under the can- 
 delabra. 
 
 "You are Mr. Fontaine, are you not?" she said in her 
 soft, purring way. Finn admitted it. 
 
 "Paris says you are to take me in to dinner. I am Stella 
 Fay." She paused with a little malicious smile as she saw the 
 boy's confusion. "You are not afraid of me, are you?" she 
 said, showing two rows of little white teeth. "I'm not going 
 to bite you." 
 
 Finn was not so sure. Those little white teeth behind the 
 red lips looked as like biting as anything could. He mur- 
 mured something. 
 
 By this time the others had gone in to dinner, leaving them 
 alone in the shadow of the swing door where it was thrown 
 back. 
 
 The girl all at once looked up at Finn, came face to face 
 with him, and said solemnly, her eyes serious: "Little boy, 
 I'm going to spoil you." And as she said it she stood on tip- 
 toe, her hands behind her back and kissed Finn full on the 
 lips. 
 
 Finn, by all his precedents, should have been shocked. He 
 was not. The warm full pressure of those red lips made every 
 drop of blood in his body recede to his heart, which con- 
 tracted as though something at that moment had entered it, 
 but he did not feel shocked. Nor glad. He felt overwhelmed, 
 satiated, curious. For no lips had ever pressed his save the 
 leathery lips of his aunts and mother and the warmer whis- 
 kered lips of his father. 
 
 He turned to find Togo as though he had that moment come 
 up a trap door, his face expressionless, waiting to close the 
 doors behind them. Yet it seemed to Finn that behind the 
 mask there sat a grin. 
 
 He felt the light touch of the fingertips on his arm, was 
 faintly conscious of Asthar's look of quizzing enquiry as they 
 took their places at the table, and then the array of forks and 
 spoons frightened him so much that he forgot the kiss and 
 the girl and everything. 
 
 He came out of his preoccupation to find the dinner and 
 conversation in full blast, with all sorts of people exchanging 
 views unconventionally across the table. It came to him after- 
 wards, that amazing cross-fire of conversation and idea, in 
 
EAST AND WEST 141 
 
 which Asthar, as was often bis way, was silent, listening. The 
 great bulk of the man, in it something of authority, sitting 
 there at the head of the table, one hand smoothly curved 
 about the stem of his wineglass; the prominent heavy eye set 
 behind the sheer of the nose, the curves of the small, rather 
 sick mouth, all impressed themselves upon the boy. So, it 
 seemed to him, must men have sat at feasts in the days when 
 Bel-shazzar was king. 
 
 Following a chance remark of Asthar, this extraordinary con- 
 versation had begun with a eulogy from Finn's partner of the 
 Universalists and Universalism and of their leader, Ellen Mas- 
 ters, who, with her followers, had claimed to pierce the worlds 
 of the astral. She had then passed on in what might have been 
 mere flippancy or might have been deadly earnest to speak of 
 leaving the body in her dreams to swim in astral seas, and 
 declared that even whilst swimming in the physical body, she 
 was able to leave it at will and so, by resting it, to accomplish 
 the extraordinary feats in the water for which she was already 
 famous. (But all this was afterwards much confused in Finn's 
 mind and was only a sidelight upon this amazing dinner party.) 
 
 Stella Fay had then gone on to expatiate upon what she 
 called that "Light from the East," which was one of the corner- 
 stones of the new faith, a faith which seemed to have in its mo- 
 saic a fragment of every religion in the world, but which seemed 
 to derive its main inspiration from India, through it running a 
 medley of Hinduism and Buddhism with other Asiatic religions. 
 
 It was in fact an attempt to unite the religions of the 
 world and to find in all religions from the beginning of time 
 a common nucleus. A new religion in Persia had already begun 
 to do this, with a success that had brought millions of ad- 
 herents throughout the world, but it seemed that, great though 
 it was, it fell far behind Universalism in beauty and truth 
 two words which were constantly on Stella Fay's lips. 
 
 Upon all this she discoursed, enthusiastic and dogmatic, al- 
 though at times in a sort of brilliant flippancy, sometimes 
 flashing into asides that made Sir Lancaster Hogge snort and 
 caused Professor Dust, who sat only a couple of places away, 
 to scratch his scalp in good-natured puzzlement and to peer 
 around his partner to look at the speaker as though she had 
 been mad. All this to her exceeding delight. 
 
 She finished by declaring that matter had no existence and 
 
142 GODS 
 
 that all was maya or illusion, turning eagerly to the white- 
 robed Indian for corroboration. 
 
 But Sri Kapila was elusive. He would not commit himself 
 and suavely turned the conversation to a comparison of the 
 science of the East and West, which he said were each the 
 converse of the other, the West in the realm of the material 
 and the East in that of the spiritual, which, however, were 
 really one and the same thing, a statement that brought a tri- 
 umphant "I told you so" from Stella Fay. There was only 
 one though vital difference in the eastern and western concepts 
 in the East, science and religion were one and the same 
 thing in the West they were antagonistic. 
 
 But he made it very clear in that soft resonant English of 
 his that the East had passed through the stage of materialis- 
 tic science and had in fact antedated many of the modern 
 discoveries not only in biology but in physics. The West was 
 engaged with the infinitely small and the East with the in- 
 finitely great the first investigating the molecule and en- 
 deavouring to split the atom, the latter analysing the spirit of 
 which matter was only the shadow but both small and great 
 were the infinite. And he went on to say that even molecules 
 were made up of atoms and atoms of electrons and electrons 
 of something still smaller, but each of these infinitesimal par- 
 ticles of matter were really systems, paralleling the solar sys- 
 tem, with their own suns and planets; and that what we called 
 our solar system was but an electron in another and greater 
 system, and that in its turn but the infinitesimal part of 
 another. 
 
 And all this, despite the attempted angry incursions from 
 Dust and Hogge, he laid down so quietly and so assuredly 
 that it ceased to be dogma and became merely the demon- 
 stration of a master to a pupil. 
 
 Through all this, Ali Baba's teeth had shone derisively. Finn 
 could not get away from those teeth. They haunted him. It 
 seemed to him that they bared themselves in a sort of snarl. 
 But the snarl of a wild beast that knows its master, for Ali 
 Baba only smiled. He did not criticise. 
 
 Once and only once the atmosphere became charged almost 
 to ignition. It was after Sir Lancaster Hogge had sneered 
 about the Indian caste system, which he said in words not too 
 finely chosen was degrading and prohibitive of all intellectual 
 
EAST AND WEST 143 
 
 advance for the Indian, of whose intellectual capacity and pos- 
 sibilities he obviously had only contempt. 
 
 The turbaned Indian inclined his head in grave courtesy. "I 
 agree with you, Sir Lancaster," he said, "but Indian caste is 
 already beginning to dissolve. Before the twentieth century 
 is out we shall have no caste in India as it is understood to-day. 
 Even now, fraternisation between Mahomedan and Hindu has 
 begun." 
 
 "That's all very fine," sneered Sir Lancaster, whom the In- 
 dian's placidity seemed to enrage, "but you have caste." 
 
 "And have you no caste system?" Sri Kapila rejoined 
 quietly. "Have you none here in Europe? . . . and at 
 Simla?" he added after a moment. "At Simla, where there is 
 the red cord of the vice-regal receptions which only the vice- 
 regal party can pass. And in the Indian army where there are 
 the castes of engineers, of artillery, of cavalry and of infantry, 
 as carefully graded as anything that India has, and in India 
 generally where you separate the wholesale merchant from the 
 retailer?" A silence had followed his words. He added with 
 a soft smile: "And yet there is caste and always will be caste, 
 for we shall always have spiritual aristocracy." 
 
 It was at this point that Paris Asthar, without seeming to 
 do so, and by comparing the artists of India and Europe, 
 turned the conversation to art, which, he said, was the heart 
 of religion. He talked of art as the saviour of the world, 
 when John Burring, the apple in his throat working excitedly, 
 interposed to foreshadow a time when the art of the future 
 would be understood of all men, as some of the Russians were 
 teaching, an assertion which Asthar had combated in brilliant 
 good nature. 
 
 "Art, the finest art, will never be understood by the mob," 
 he had said and had glided into a scintillating disquisition of 
 what art was. "The essence of art," he said, "is that it is 
 artificial. The mob is natural." 
 
 It was here that Finn made his first and last intrusion into 
 the discussion, bursting out uncontrollably: "Art is not art 
 art is life," and had subsided before the eyes that turned on 
 him. As he said it, he felt the silken knee of his partner brush 
 his leg slightly under the table. But that might have been 
 accident. She looked at him, glowing, in embarrassing ap- 
 proval. 
 
144 GODS 
 
 It was after they got back into the drawing room where the 
 ladies had preceded them, his senses still befogged after his 
 experiences, that he heard a voice, a dark, vibrant contralto, 
 coming from the corner of the room. At the sound, his heart 
 stopped beating, and then he saw the singer seated in a dis- 
 tant corner, with a great lute of some polished wood slung 
 across the slender shoulders of her' evening gown, made of some 
 fine stuff of a black bronze, the lute striking fire from 
 the hair above. The eyes that looked out over the strings 
 were softly glowing, the body bending forward in tender 
 graciousness, as her arms, fine and rounded and bare to the 
 shoulders as the arms of young athletes seen in sunlight are 
 bare, moved slowly across the strings under the shaded lights. 
 She was singing what Finn knew afterwards as "The Shadow 
 Song:" 
 
 Come, dear heart, where the shadows play 
 
 Out in the mists of yesterday. 
 Come, dear heart, where the shadows fall 
 
 Over there on the eastern wall. 
 Come, dear heart, where the shadows creep 
 
 To the twilight edge of to-morrow's sleep. 
 Come, dear heart, where the shadows fly 
 
 Over the faint of the western sky. 
 
 Come, dear heart, on the shadows' flight 
 
 As we whisper together the last Good-night . . . 
 
 Finn, looking at the singer, started to find that the eyes, 
 dark and glowing, were gazing full at him out from the veil of 
 her hair, but as he quickly realised, unseeing. 
 
 As the song came to an end in the shadows of a room 
 which, the wax candles dying in their sockets, was lit only by 
 the gleam of the logs in the great fireplace, Finn, the spell 
 broken, turned to find the eyes of the girl with the copper hair 
 looking at Deirdre Asthar, now silent, where she sat over her 
 lute, with something of smiling hate in them, and beyond her, 
 Asthar, looking at them both. And then they had turned 
 to Finn, eager, hungry, but with something of anger in them, 
 and, as he met them, he felt the vague sense of irritation with 
 Deirdre Asthar he had felt that day at the office of "The 
 Earth," and his pulses once more flamed to the kiss which still 
 haunted his lips. 
 
 He went away under the black starry firmament with this 
 
EAST AND WEST 145 
 
 irritation stirring in him like some poison, with, underneath, 
 something still deeper trying to make itself felt. Out of the 
 doorway behind there came Hogge's strident laugh. He saw 
 the Indian standing under the shadow of the Lords looking 
 up into the night skies. He wondered of what he was thinking. 
 And then the night swallowed him up. 
 
 And over all space and the cold stars with something of in- 
 cense, that as he looked, seemed to climb upwards to the 
 depths of black and gold above. 
 
XIV 
 
 THE HUNGER LINE 
 
 It was a ragged-looking nebula that formed and unformed, 
 now turning in upon itself, now scattering sluggishly inside the 
 gates of the Marble Arch this afternoon of high sun, veiled 
 but imminent behind the January haze. There was something 
 about this grey mass, formless, purposeless, which to Finn, 
 standing near the gates, seemed to inhibit organisation of any 
 kind. That this incoherency should become processionally co- 
 herent seemed nonsense. 
 
 A pair of dejected, broken-mouthed men, with a growth 
 upon their leaden faces like a grey fungus and jaws that 
 drooped towards shirtless breasts, looked at the bandoliers 
 that slipped from their thin shoulders and which were to sup- 
 port the staffs of the calico banner with the black lettering: 
 
 WORK NOT CHARITY! 
 
 as though they did not know what to do with them. About 
 them, the ground was moist with their thin expectorations, the 
 last emphasis of their manhood. A few yards away, a man 
 in a broken bowler and a braided frock coat made for an 
 aristocrat of more comfortable habit, his hands deep in his 
 trousers pockets, expectorated nonchalantly upon the frayed 
 trousers of the man before him and looked upon the result, 
 emitting the brown stream once more through the fringes of 
 the ragged moustache at the same target and hitting it with 
 the accuracy born of practice. He regarded his work with a 
 certain sodden satisfaction, whilst a few paces beyond, a little 
 man in the frock coat which in that crowd seemed the very 
 vestment of unemployment, with the face of a rabbit, browsed 
 between the legs of his fellows for cigarette ends. Finn caught 
 the glutinous satisfaction upon the outline of his muzzle as he 
 
 146 
 
THE HUNGER LINE 147 
 
 popped the stump of a cigar into his mouth and began to chew 
 with a nibbling movement. 
 
 But Finn noticed one thing. Unemployment seemed a male 
 property. There was no woman in the crowd. 
 
 Here a man in a sugarloaf hat, with something of resistance 
 to things still remaining, was striking one thin hand into the 
 palm of the other as he declaimed to a fungoid group of down 
 and outs who regarded him in hang-dog doubt. 
 
 "Guts," Finn heard him say with a kind of crack at the 
 end of his sentences, ". . . if ye'd the guts of a worm ye'd 
 do 'em in. Christ! They've got their wines and their wimin, 
 and you what d'ye call yerselves? . . ." He looked up 
 to catch the clean white eye of a policeman and tailed off 
 . . . "wot d'ye call yerselves . . . ?" and then, ineffective, al- 
 most in a whisper "well, wot do ye call yerselves?" Then he 
 was silent. 
 
 A few minutes before and it had looked to Finn as though 
 all the scarecrows there could have been stuck in a cabbage 
 patch. Men had only trickled into the park in twos and 
 threes, and even this trickle had now been stopped by a cor- 
 don of police across the entrance, yet the groups, breaking 
 and forming again, now appeared to take a certain consistency 
 as they fermented together. Each group seemed to ferment 
 around some particular head, which would bob up and go down 
 again like a blob of yeast in a stewpan. It was a frowsy, lousy 
 scum of grey-faced grey-lipped men upon whose skins the 
 slime of hunger traced itself as though snails had crawled there. 
 
 The Reverend John Burring, hoarse, the apple in his throat 
 moving excitedly in profile from where Finn stood, bobbed up 
 and down as he moved from group to group urging them vainly 
 to form up behind the men with the calico banner, who, with 
 a little bunch of leaders, stood forlornly near the gates with 
 the banner in position. 
 
 This little group of leaders was headed by a tall man, swell- 
 ing-chested, who stood there on his long aristocratically thin 
 legs, holding his soft deerstalker in his hand whilst he wiped 
 his forehead with a red bandana handkerchief. His masses of 
 hair, parting themselves with difficulty at the side, fell over 
 his face. After he had put his hat back on his head, he stood 
 with his hands stuck in the pockets of his short jacket, thumbs 
 outside, a silk tartan bow drooping from under his beard as 
 
148 GODS 
 
 he lifted it up with one hand and held it pointing pugnaciously 
 at the sky. His mouth look as though a cutty stuck there 
 but there was no cutty. 
 
 By his side stood a big man with forked red Viking beard, 
 who, as John Durring's efforts to get the mass of men into 
 position failed, all at once sprang into violent motion, running 
 from group to group, shouldering some here and pushing others 
 there. As his efforts proved as vain as those of the young 
 clergyman, his face became purple, his forked beard standing 
 out defiant, whilst he tried to make his voice heard over the 
 rising din, for the crowd had begun to cheer aimlessly whilst 
 all talked together. The big man stood there like a baited bull, 
 the great mouth opening itself in bellowings that went unheard 
 in that silly meaningless commotion where all talked and 
 cheered together. One could only see the maw opening and 
 shutting and the red of the gums. His arms were moving, his 
 face distorted. 
 
 It was John Burring, stopping a moment, who told him that 
 these two men were Jock MacAdam and Broadribb, "Red 
 Borb." 
 
 So that was Broadribb, "Red Borb," as his name had be- 
 come corrupted to that of love or hate Red Borb, the anti- 
 Christ, as his father always called him. Like thousands of 
 other children, he had been brought up to regard this apostle 
 of Karl Marx, the German Socialist, as a sort of red devil who 
 only awaited the right moment to wade knee-deep in the blood 
 of society, with Jock MacAdam as his satellite. He looked 
 lurid enough, anyhow. But MacAdam, somehow he was dif- 
 ferent. People said he believed in Christ, or anyhow in Chris- 
 tianity. 
 
 Now he was standing there on his high clean legs with his 
 hands set deep in his cross pockets, brooding over the mass 
 as a watchful hen over her chickens. The broken circling had 
 now begun to change under the efforts of Red Borb into some- 
 thing like a forward movement towards the gates of the park. 
 As, indolent, the masses took form, here and there at their 
 side one of the big, cleanly shaven policemen showed himself, 
 whilst a man upon a powerful black horse, who seemed to have 
 come out of the earth, a sleek, dark-bearded man, directed 
 operations with a certain official immobility. A polished scab- 
 bard at his side shone against the jet of his knee-boots. As 
 
THE HUNGER LINE 149 
 
 his riding lash dropped from his hand, Finn saw two or three 
 of the broken looking men near him hurry officiously forward 
 to pick it up and return it to the owner, who thanked them 
 by a good-natured indulgent laugh. 
 
 The head of the procession, silent, moved out between the 
 gates, behind it the masses of unemployed shuffled after upon 
 their broken boots. Finn, from his place at the head, by the 
 side of Durring, sweating and enthusiastic, could hear that 
 cretaceous shuffle behind him, as a march of dead men. Not 
 a sound came from the grey line. As they moved out of the 
 gates, three mounted policemen showed themselves at the head. 
 The smooth necks, set upon the broad shoulders, the whole 
 pillared upon the bay horses, the muscles of which came and 
 went under the skins of satin, looked part of some ordered 
 resistless force coherency dominating the inchoate. 
 
 The procession was originally to have marched from Tower 
 Hill to Trafalgar Square, but the head of the London police, 
 who was a Jew, and therefore a man of imagination, had sug- 
 gested the reverse direction, by which he hoped to avoid the 
 adherents of the larger and rougher East-end element. He had 
 been disappointed, for the grey faces had poured out from 
 their hiding places in the West-end, faces of the same breed. 
 The order for the demonstration had been as rigidly laid down 
 as though it were for the passage of an army. Park Lane, 
 Piccadilly, Regent Street, Northumberland Avenue, the Em- 
 bankment ... If Disorder wished to demonstrate it could 
 do so, but only within the channels of Order. With much na- 
 tive humour the young minister who had originally won his 
 reputation by being the best-dressed M. P. in the House, had 
 said in reply to questions asked about the procession: "We 
 don't mind demonstrations, so long as they only demon- 
 strate." A crowded House had laughed and the joke had pro- 
 vided the head lines for one of the dailies the next morning. 
 
 As they turned out of the Marble Arch, Finn was surprised 
 to find the space outside almost impassable. Every thieves' 
 kitchen and casual ward in the West-end seemed to have 
 emptied their contents around the Arch. Mounted policemen 
 were backing their horses good-humouredly upon the toes of the 
 crowd, but finding resistance from people who themselves were 
 wedged immoveable by the masses behind, began to get angry 
 under the eye of the bearded man. The eye had a quality 
 
ISO GODS 
 
 of remoteness, calmly ignorant of the excited expostulations ad- 
 dressed to it by the crowd. "Cawrn't ye see guv'nor? There's 
 millions of 'em," said one excited little man, mouth and nose 
 working. It was the rabbit man of the cigar stump. The Rev- 
 erend John Durring in his excitement had even ventured to lay 
 sacrilegious hand upon the heel of the law, which responded 
 by a detached kick, the head above indifferent and moving un- 
 evenly over the crowd under the application of the spur. Great 
 motorbuses reared their heads like wounded mammoths from 
 over a mob which, swarming them for refuge, hung like clusters 
 of bees. 
 
 The man on the horse began to get excited as a whole hour 
 went by without the crowd moving. His reputation was at 
 stake. A great church procession from St. Paul's to Westmin- 
 ster via the Embankment had been arranged for the same day 
 and had been timed to reach the Abbey a full hour before 
 the unemployed could get to the river. The Police Commis- 
 sioner had been doubtful about permitting the two processions 
 on the same day, but the promise to the unemployed leaders 
 had been given some months before, the trade unions were get- 
 ting unpleasantly touchy about promises, and the church pro- 
 cession being a Procession of Humiliation for the national sins, 
 could only be held upon an appropriate Saint's Day. Even 
 now the procession was so late in starting that it possibly 
 meant meeting that other procession upon the Embankment 
 itself. 
 
 Finn felt something thrill him as though he were a filament 
 of the crowd and then something loosen out beyond him in 
 a pressure that was becoming unbearable. And then that mass, 
 which seemed to have its times and its seasons, obeying its 
 own laws, began to move, and soon they were passing the blank 
 fagades of Park Lane. The homes of millionairdom looked 
 as though they were made of wedding cake, with something 
 about them cheap and sugary. In one of the houses, which had 
 a sort of gallery at the height of the first floor, the gilt mirrors 
 that showed themselves seemed a cheap yellow mockery. 
 
 The crawling, slouching thing behind was silent enough. It 
 dragged itself past the white faces of the houses dumb and 
 unseeing. And then Finn heard a single word: 
 
 "Guts." And then: 
 
 "If ye'd guts . . ." and then a soft booing like the 
 
THE HUNGER LINE 151 
 
 lowing of cattle. The voice was the voice of the man in the 
 sugarloaf hat, in that mass secure of his anonymity. But the 
 booing had something ungenuine, something "made" in it. 
 
 "Dussen't show theirselves," said a dilapidated young man 
 near Finn. "Dussen't," and then, gaining courage, a little 
 higher, "DUSSEN'T." 
 
 An arm had reached into the crowd, had taken the scare- 
 crow by his neck between a pincers of thumb and forefinger, 
 and had run him head downwards out of the procession, shak- 
 ing him as a dog would shake a rat, the man's neck bending 
 in on itself as though it were broken. Nobody protested. 
 
 At the back somebody had begun to sing: "Come where the 
 Booze is cheaper," the song of the moment, in a high cracked 
 voice. For a verse he sang alone, but as he came to the chorus : 
 
 "Beer, beer, glorious beer, 
 Fill yerself right up to 'ere duck-cluck. 
 Up with the sale of it, 
 Down with a pail of it, 
 Glorious, glorious beer! 
 
 the whole procession joined in. "Glorious, glorious beer," 
 made the high facades of Piccadilly ring again, that curious 
 cluck-cluck demonstrative of satisfaction, made by thousands 
 of tongues buried in as many palates and then forcibly with- 
 drawn, being very effective. A man near Finn made a motion 
 of taking up a bucket to his lips and drinking. But it had 
 become mixed and finally tailed off under the sugary sentiment 
 of "When Little Willie Died and Went to Heaven," which was 
 sung with that lachrymose sweetness beloved of the English 
 working class: 
 
 When little Willie died and went to 'eaven, 
 The hangels came a flutterin' rahnd 'is bed. 
 
 O'er the bed they spread their wings, 
 
 As wiv' crowns and 'arps they sings, 
 When little Willie died and went to 'eaven. 
 
 He knew it was trash, but the sound of all those slouchers 
 raising their voices together as in a great lamentation, brought 
 something to his throat, especially when the rhythm checked 
 an instant at the end of the fourth line. It was all meaning- 
 less, but he found his eyes were wet with tears. 
 
152 GODS 
 
 As they marched, each corner gave its quota to the proces- 
 sion. The steam of the dirty bodies came to him in a sickly 
 sweetness of crowded rooms. Somewhere in front of them a red 
 banner with white letters: 
 
 "Christ died on the Cross the rich live on it!" 
 
 had appeared, flouting all the rules for such things by walking 
 backwards. Near him, two men began to argue as to the 
 meaning. 
 
 "Gor lumme! cawrn't ye see it? On the crawss. Get that? 
 Yer know wot livin' on the crawss means." And the other voice 
 serious, expostulatory : "But they don't come any bloomin' 
 jokes over us ... tell yer, mate, it's got a 'idden meanin' 
 that's wot it 'as." 
 
 "This is a great day!" said Burring, grinding his enormous 
 red hands together as he marched. "They must listen. Why, 
 Melrose, last night in the House . . ." 
 
 His remark was lost in a storm of groaning that went up 
 from the men about them. Finn saw that all eyes were turned 
 to the left, eyes that lifted themselves weakly. They were 
 passing the high windows of the Warwick and were looking 
 at the well-dressed comfortable clubmen who had got up from 
 their afternoon cups of tea or whiskies and sodas to look down 
 at the procession as at a spectacle. 
 
 A fist rose in the air and shook weakly against those high 
 entrenchments. Ragged arms were lifted thinly. Two ban- 
 ners, both of them Durring's idea, moved round menacingly to 
 face the windows; one: "I asked for bread and ye gave me a 
 stone," and the other, savagely ironic: "I was an hungered 
 
 . . and ye took me in. 5 ' A storm of booing went through 
 the crowd, but the men in the windows only smiled. Finn 
 could see one man, he was a young, well-fed man, clean-shaven 
 and with ruby cheeks, who, his newspaper in his hand, smiled 
 down. The crowd, always searching for a concrete victim, 
 fastened on this one man. His smile seemed to drive them 
 mad. But to Finn it seemed that the faces about him were 
 aping ferocity rather than feeling it. It was as though they 
 were acting a part. 
 
 "Go in and pull 'im aht from his bloody club!" shouted the 
 man in the sugar-loaf hat with that queer crack at the end 
 of his voice. 
 
THE HUNGER LINE 153 
 
 "That's it. Pull 'im ahtl" But nobody moved from the 
 ranks. 
 
 "Cut the guts aht of 'im! Giv' 'im wot for. Bloody calf." 
 
 But nobody moved. Jock Mac Adam stalked forward un- 
 concernedly upon his long legs, the bow of silk plaid flying 
 from under the iron-grey beard that jutted, pugnacious. Only 
 Burring seemed unduly moved. Finn, feeling his grip on his 
 arm, was astonished to find his face white and shaking. 
 
 "I would go up and do it," he said tremblingly. "Those 
 
 . . . those men who dishonour our common Christianity. 
 
 
 
 But now they had moved past, the groans had died away, 
 and there was only the dragging of the feet over the streets, 
 with something reptilian in it. 
 
 Until they got to the Embankment, the great procession re- 
 mained in its brute silence. The police had cleverly cut off 
 the false head of the procession with its red and white banner, 
 forcing it down a by-street, and leaving Finn once more with 
 a clear view. 
 
 As they passed on to the Embankment under the Charing 
 Cross bridge, where the steamers hooted like lost souls on the 
 slimy tides, Finn was surprised to see another procession ad- 
 vancing to meet them perhaps half a mile away. Seen at 
 that distance, it looked like a lot of women with smocks of 
 white linen drawn over their petticoats, a scatter of gold and 
 crimson waving above. In front, the sun glinted upon some- 
 thing metallic. 
 
 His attention was diverted by a" commotion just behind him. 
 He turned to find a victoria which coming from the direction 
 of Westminster had apparently tried to drive through the 
 crowd. It was a beautifully turned out equipage, drawn by a 
 pair of black horses and driven by a coachman with a foot- 
 man by his side, imperturbable, his arms crossed. 
 
 In response to the voice of some unseen occupant, the coach- 
 man again tried to drive through the crowd, which from silence 
 had risen into a growl of anger. Upon the coachman hesitat- 
 ing a moment, a high trumpet-like voice commanded: "Drive 
 on, Richardson!" Again he attempted to get his horses through. 
 
 In a moment half a dozen of the ragamuffins had sprung 
 at the bridles of the horses, which, rearing, drove the car- 
 riage back a few yards. As they did so, a couple of police- 
 
154 GODS 
 
 men bore down on them. To Finn they looked like so many 
 toothless rats, as they fell back snarling, but powerless. 
 
 As the horses turned away, he saw sitting in the carriage two 
 figures Asthar and his sister. The former smilingly indif- 
 ferent, the latter with a look at once disgusted and contemptu- 
 ous, with something in it of ice and fire. She looked at Finn 
 and then at the unemployed behind him, and the head turned 
 away. 
 
 In that moment he hated the girl with the hair of bronze 
 and it was in that moment he felt that some choice had to 
 be taken. There was something, vague, passionate, driving 
 at him from underneath that seemed to come at him out of 
 the masses around him. 
 
 But now they were in motion again and they could see the 
 whites of the eyes of the men at the head of the other pro- 
 cession. 
 
 It was then that Finn saw that the thing upon which the 
 sun had shone was a great brass cross, carried at the head, be- 
 hind it row upon row of clergymen, all in full canonicals. The 
 cross reared itself under the sullen fires of the January sun. 
 Now, at the head of the unemployed, a red rag reared itself 
 crazily. It was a piece of red flannel hanging from a clothes 
 prop. It flaunted itself against that other symbol, nodding at 
 it drunkenly. But the cross moved on, majestic, assured. 
 
 As they neared one another, shepherded by the police to one 
 side and the other, the black and white procession broke into 
 a hymn, led by a brass band in uniform of sober black. The 
 voices raised themselves there upon the grey embankment in 
 full-throated assurance: 
 
 Oh God! our help in ages past, 
 
 Our hope in years to come. 
 Our shelter from the stormy blast, 
 
 And our eternal home. 
 
 with an unconsciousness that yet had something of immortality 
 in it. 
 
 The streams were passing now. The serious, well-paunched 
 dignitaries at the head, in mortarboards and cowls of black 
 and crimson, behind them the leaner, younger men, all march- 
 ing in a step that had in it the spirit of order, the assured- 
 ness that comes from the traditions of centuries. Slouching by 
 
THE HUNGER LINE 155 
 
 them, the thin grey line of the workless, the red flag jerking 
 drunkenly at the head. 
 
 A voice had started "The Red Flag." It was a high-strained, 
 jerky voice with something of hysteria in it. The masses be- 
 hind had joined in and were droning it with the same sentimen- 
 tality with which they had sung "When Little Willie Died and 
 Went to Heaven." Only now there was something of chal- 
 lenge in it. To Finn, it, too, sounded like a hymn. Looking 
 up at the line: "The banner bright, the symbol plain," he 
 caught sight of the red rag borne aloft and it seemed to him 
 that that, too, was a symbol. But of what? 
 
 His dreams were broken by a raucous bass close under his 
 ear which had broken the following silence, singing alone: 
 
 What is this, the sound and rumour? 
 
 What is this that all men hear? 
 
 Like the wind in hollow valleys when the storm is drawing near, 
 Like the rolling on of ocean in the eventide of fear, 
 Tis the people marching on. 
 
 There was a moment's stillness, and then in low thunder like 
 the breaking of surf upon distant beaches, came the response 
 from the ragged host behind, first from one or two and then 
 from the mass, which droned the tune where it did not know 
 the words: 
 
 Hark ! the rolling of the thunder ! 
 Lo, the sun, and lo, thereunder 
 Riseth wrath and hope and wonder 
 And the host comes marching on. 
 
 And then the thing came to him as though in that moment 
 somebody had asked him the question out there from the 
 sullen mists through which the sun, now low in the sky, showed 
 itself, a fiery red ball. Where was Christ here or there? 
 
 Here, with this Disorder of workless, sodden wretches, of 
 wolfish eyes and mouths or over there, behind Order? 
 
 Behind the Cross or the Red Flag? 
 
 Where was he? Where? 
 
 The thin grey line dragged itself on like a wounded snake 
 on its belly, but intent, deadly, untiring, into the eye of the 
 sullen sun as though some distant goal were there behind the 
 lowering mist. 
 
XV 
 
 THE HOUSE OF DREAMS 
 
 When Finn had stood one day upon an iron ledge of rock 
 that jutted into green depths at the foot of Carrickmore, he 
 had seen deep below him something white and silvery, that, 
 caught in the undertows which haunted those troubled waters, 
 moved aimless. Then a dark shape had swum athwart this 
 thing of vague whiteness, which at once became instinct with 
 life, and this shape had been followed by others, causing it to 
 rush from side to side and gradually to get smaller until it had 
 disappeared. 
 
 To-day he felt like that piece of bait in deep waters. It 
 seemed to him that he was the prey of unseen forces, or if 
 seen, then not understandable. His father and mother; Father 
 Lestrange; the ash-covered books; Thrum; the grey stone 
 chapel on the top of Carrickmore; Paris Asthar . . . and 
 those other two forces, sinister, unfathomable the girl with 
 the copper hair and Deirdre Asthar. Behind all this had 
 come that march of the unemployed together with the vague 
 shadow of something the world was calling Democracy, which 
 seemed to hide all the good and evil of the world. These 
 shadowy things were rushing at him, dragging him from side 
 to side, and would, perhaps, finally engulf him. 
 
 He would not be engulfed. 
 
 He believed in a sort of mad conviction that he, nervous, 
 diffident, was the equal of any of those others about him. Deep 
 down, especially in those moments of exaltation which seemed 
 to spring at him out of nothing, he believed himself their su- 
 perior. 
 
 Nor did he mean equality in the vulgar sense. Equality 
 was not a question of degree equality was a principle that 
 ran through life holding together the texture of its stuff. But 
 although he did not admit that he was inferior to these people 
 about him, he knew that men were not equal. Since he had 
 
 156 
 
THE HOUSE OF DREAMS 157 
 
 met Deirdre Asthar, he had begun to hate aristocracy and all 
 for which the word stood. But there was such a thing as 
 spiritual aristocracy and always would be. That was how he 
 measured himself with those others. 
 
 Thrum might be the master of men's lives, but his kingdom 
 was of this world. However vague, undefined, he began to 
 feel that his kingdom was another kingdom, a kingdom that 
 underlay this world as the worlds to come the kingdom of 
 the spirit. His poor clothes might send the hot blood fleeting 
 to his cheecks when he had to see Crux, as he now sometimes 
 did, but Crux, even though he feared him, had no more ulti- 
 mate significance than a dummy. Parker Crux might be heir 
 to millions, but he knew that only a hair-line sometimes pre- 
 vented him from active assault in the middle of that long white 
 face. Father Lestrange ... he faltered. He was dif- 
 ferent. He was of himself. It was unexplainable, but he knew 
 it. 
 
 Stella Fay ... he was not sure of her. There was 
 that kiss. He did not resent it, and resentment at this time 
 seemed to him the essential of superiority. There had also 
 been other meetings, the memories of which, even though they 
 had been kissless, made him flush uncomfortably. 
 
 It was not that he had made love to Stella Fay. Finn was 
 incapable of "making" love. Nor was it that this girl with 
 her limp and grey iris-pointed eyes, had made love to him, but 
 when he was in a room with her, despite the company of others, 
 he was acutely, painfully conscious of her physical presence. 
 Her soft low laugh would come to him over all others. A turn 
 of her high shoulder and he would know it. The scent of her 
 body would seep to him through all other scents. 
 
 He had the feeling that she also was conscious of him, that 
 she was always watching him. She had said that first eve- 
 ning at "The Cloisters" as she kissed him, that she was going 
 to spoil him. And she was spoiling him in a silent sort of way. 
 Not actively, physically and yet it was physical but emo- 
 tionally. That was why he was unsure of his position to Stella 
 Fay. 
 
 And Deirdre ... He somehow always thought of these 
 two girls together. 
 
 He^had no doubt about her. He hated her and her class 
 and everything for which she stood. He had been taught the 
 
158 GODS 
 
 shame of a man striking a woman, but that day on the Em- 
 bankment, he would have struck her cold, prideful face with- 
 out remorse. But where did Asthar stand in all this? 
 
 He didn't. Paris Asthar defied placement. He was out- 
 side. Well, it didn't matter about him, and he liked him. 
 
 But he, Finn Fontaine, was his own master, although he 
 might not be master of his fate. He had read somewhere a line 
 about a man being master of his fate. That was nonsense. 
 No man was master of his fate, for no man's fate could be 
 separated from that of any other. For good or evil, all men 
 and women were bound up together. But that thought was 
 intolerable. It meant being tied up with all those others as 
 a boy, baiting for eels, passes a needle of wool through a hand- 
 ful of worms. 
 
 This was the circle which Finn Fontaine always complete^. 
 There was nothing clear. He was in his twentieth year. He 
 felt old. He had no philosophy of life. Life was a succession 
 of unrelated incidents and people a stringing together of peo- 
 ple and of incoherencies. He did not understand people or 
 things. And then he would be driven, irrevocably, logically, 
 into the terrifying conclusion that he was the only sane being 
 in a world of madness. But the Jesuit had once said to him 
 that all logic was madness. He had tried to write what he felt. 
 
 There had been that sketch he had written about that day on 
 the Embankment. He had set it down whilst he was still hot 
 from the experience. He had sent it the round of papers. Their 
 rejection did not make him wonder, until "The Churchman" 
 refused it. That was incomprehensible. He had tried to ex- 
 press something of the things that had stirred him when 
 the processions passed each other and which he assumed were 
 stirring the Church itself. The organ of orthodoxy did not care 
 a damn for his stirrings. 
 
 It was always like that with his writing, and he wrote per- 
 sistently. Rejection was as meaningless as that rare accept- 
 ance. It was battering his head against a wall, invisible but 
 stony. 
 
 For a moment he faltered in his stride. There were times 
 when he had impellent longing to be the average. He saw 
 the clerks about him cheered by a drink of whisky; happily 
 boastful of a new pipe, or having "backed a winner," luxuriat- 
 ing in a superior cunning men with little hopes and little 
 
THE HOUSE OF DREAMS 159 
 
 fears, unstirred by great emotions. He longed to be like them. 
 He tried to make friends with them as one makes friends with 
 curious beasts behind bars. 
 
 And then something would happen to send him into the ex- 
 treme of intolerance. Rather than surrender to their little 
 caged lives he would take a red flag in his hand and go out 
 with those others in frank rebellion . . . But were the 
 lives of those others not drab? Were they also not ambition- 
 less? Were their hopes and fears not as mean as those with 
 whom he worked? And so the circle from which he could not 
 escape. It was as though he could not escape from existence 
 Itself a thought which for a fleeting moment had been in- 
 supportable as though he were being swung, controlless, in 
 sickening orbit inside the film of life without the power to 
 break into the infinity of non-existence and rest that lay be- 
 yond. Only once had that come to him, for he knew he was 
 immortal. His immortality was the only thing that held him 
 to life. But he had feared it that once. 
 
 Crux had sent for him and had opened with: "Now, then, 
 Fontaine, no more lukewarmedness you've got to make good." 
 He resolved to do so. He had not shown that keenness which 
 Crux demanded from all who served him. Ireland had been 
 doing her work on him. But once more he resolved. 
 
 He was to go with an engineer to Dunhallow in April for 
 the planning of a breakwater and factory at Black Rock. The 
 men were to fish. The women were to pack. The boxes of 
 dried fish were to be sent by boat to Dunhallow at the head 
 of the bay, and there was talk of a light railway from Black 
 Rock to Dunhallow. There was to be the Reverend Slick, 
 there was to be a Sunday School, plus the loaves and fishes, 
 and there was to be a sort of school for instruction in Big Busi- 
 ness and Efficiency. It was all simple. 
 
 Finn arrived at Dunhallow one April evening in a soft south- 
 west wind and rain that seemed to be the original compost for 
 growing life. Ireland was one great forcing house. Green 
 and mossy. He felt himself expanding under the sun and rain 
 like a flower. 
 
 Father Con met him at the train, with Johnny the Saint 
 skirmishing and delighted behind. When the big priest took 
 his hand into his and complimented him upon "growin' like 
 a young fir tree since I saw ye last;" when he looked into 
 
160 GODS 
 
 those steady eyes and saw the straight nose and firm jaw; he 
 felt an almost luxurious sense of security as though he had 
 been a child throwing himself into his father's arms. Johnny's 
 hands were several shades darker than on his first visit, al- 
 though he demonstratively wiped them first upon the tails of 
 his coat, but Finn would as soon have spat in his face as 
 blenched at the handclasp. A sort of holy dirt surrounded 
 him as with a halo. 
 
 His reception at the hands of Miss O'Halloran was analy- 
 tically warm. After Johnny in excessive zeal had flung his 
 Gladstone down upon one of her "specials," as she called the 
 protuberances upon her feet, and after the old Kitty had 
 leaped out in one scorching breath to wither Johnny where 
 he stood, she had measured Finn from her height about his 
 waist-line, had given a little suspicious "H'm!" and had 
 said: "Well, you're bigger anyhow I hope you're better. 
 There's a nice cup of tea on the hob this minute, for I've just 
 been dhrenching me insides." 
 
 Finn could have kissed her and did make what Johnny in 
 the background called "an offer," but for his pains received 
 a slap on the face from virginal acidity. "Oh, 'tis kissing the 
 girls y'are, is it?" the little peering eyes had said. "G'long 
 wid ye wid yer bold bad London ways. And settin' an example 
 to Johnny there that's positively frightful." But satisfaction 
 gleamed deep in the eye-cavity. 
 
 Finn was to stay the night in Dunhallow and was to walk 
 out to Black Rock the next afternoon to a Mrs. O'Hara of 
 whom he had heard through Paris Asthar, who lived in a val- 
 ley near Carrickmore headland and with whom he was to stay. 
 It seemed that Paris knew her through his half-sister, for he 
 had never been in Ireland. Mrs. O'Hara was a widow-woman 
 who lived alone with a little boy, the child of her dead 
 daughter, Annie, and she was a great friend of Deirdre Asthar, 
 whom she had known as a child. 
 
 From the moment when the soft pulsation of the tides under 
 the old bridge had sent him to sleep, to the next morning's 
 sun trying vainly to creep through the April mists, seemed but 
 a moment. He woke up exhilarated, feeling the concretions 
 of London dissolving under the mists of Ireland. That scheme 
 of Crux fell away from him as all such concrete things of 
 the life-struggle seemed to fall away in the solvent of Ire- 
 
THE HOUSE OF DREAMS 161 
 
 land. But he remembered that he had to make his arrange- 
 ments with Mrs. O'Hara and meet the engineer who had pre- 
 ceded him to Black Rock, where he was staying with the 
 gombeen man. 
 
 The sun had given up the struggle and was now engulfed, 
 remote, as Finn set out in the afternoon on his seven mile 
 tramp. The scent of his waterproof blended with that tang of 
 peat which the warm moist airs seemed to have concentrated. 
 Croagh Cromlech's head was wrapped in clouds, and even the 
 waters of the bay seemed to blend with the sky. As he 
 walked along the mountain road, gradually rising from the sea 
 level, the clouds, sagging, seemed to shut down upon him, 
 blending with a sea-fog which had risen to meet them, until 
 he was as much alone as though he were walking in a case of 
 glass. No sound came to him in the moving transparency. 
 He seemed to be moving up there above a world of shadows. 
 
 As with the knotted blackthorn in his hand, a present from 
 Father Con, he walked there remote on the roof of the world, 
 the sound of footsteps came to him out of the woolly con- 
 sistency. He quickened his pace to catch a moving shadow 
 before him, a woman wrapped in a long hooded cloak, with 
 the hood over her head. He believed her to be some peasant 
 girl on her way to Black Rock. 
 
 As he came almost abreast and murmured a polite "Fine 
 morning," the Irish salutation for all such weather, the head 
 in the cloak turned to show a pair of eyes which, in that mist, 
 shone like emeralds. The body of the girl showed itself slen- 
 derly under the folds of the fine grey cloak which enwrapped 
 her and his eye, travelling down, saw the finely modelled feet, 
 not too small, shod in a pair of strong but well-fitting porpoise 
 hide boots. All at once, he felt a great shyness. 
 
 When he looked up again, his cheeks burning, the face had 
 turned away, and as he was about to quicken his pace to pass 
 on, two gloved hands came up to the hood to throw it back 
 and to set free a tumblement of bronzed hair and a little smile, 
 inscrutable. 
 
 It was Deirdre Asthar. 
 
 Finn faltered. The last time he had seen this girl, that day 
 on the Embankment, he had hated her. But here, in the 
 soft south-west rain of Ireland, of which she seemed a part ; 
 that too dissolved. He felt to her more like a friend. 
 
1 62 GODS 
 
 "How do you do, Mr. Fontaine?" she said, still with that 
 little smile ghosting the firm lips. "Don't you know me?" 
 And she put out her little suede-gloved hand. 
 
 Finn took it in his great paw, and remembered as he did 
 so that this was the first time he had ever touched her. He 
 felt miserably shy the sweat sprang to his forehead under 
 the hard bowler hat and he could feel it trickling down his 
 nose and back. He who at times could talk tempestuously 
 enough, felt, not merely tongue-tied he felt ridiculous be- 
 fore the eyes that gleamed at him. 
 
 "What have you done with your unemployed friends?" the 
 girl asked with a sort of demure mischief at the existence of 
 which Finn had never guessed. In that place, Deirdre Asthar 
 seemed another being than the one he had known in London. 
 
 She should not have said it. In that moment, he found 
 conviction and he found tongue. 
 
 Deirdre Asthar stared at him, her lips a little parted over 
 the even white teeth, the colour in her fair young cheeks 
 deeper, as she viewed the tornado she had unleashed. Finn 
 believed in democracy. He would rather have been with the 
 rabble down in the gutter that day on the Embankment than 
 sit with her raised above them in her victoria. He talked 
 some wild nonsense about a day coming when these unem- 
 ployed would be raised from the dust and their masters flung 
 down. He even talked wildly of Internationalism, a word he 
 had caught from Durring and the meaning of which he, 
 frankly, knew little or nothing. As to millions of others, it 
 was to him not much more than a word. He said things 
 which he could not justify by any known method of reasoning, 
 and he knew it, but he hurried on to prevent retort and 
 criticism. 
 
 "I thought you were the young man without a tongue," 
 she said after a few moments. "Oh, Mr. Fontaine, how could 
 you deceive a poor girl in that way?" she went on mockingly, 
 in those deep low tones that had something of the chuckle 
 of the blackbird in them. 
 
 The soft brogue came from between her lips like a flow 
 of buttermilk. It was another voice than the one the listener 
 had heard that day at Thrum's. But in her mockery there was 
 uneasiness, although Finn could not see it And then in a 
 moment she had become serious and had said to him a 
 
THE HOUSE OF DREAMS 163 
 
 strange thing of which he often thought in the days that 
 followed: "'Internationalism,'" she had said .... 
 "the world .... Ireland is more to me than the whole 
 world!" 
 
 For a moment they walked together in silence. "You'll be 
 going out to Mrs. O'Hara's," she said," to the place I call 
 'The House of Dreams,' or Tig-na-hAislinge as we have it 
 in the Irish, where I spent many happy hours the first ten 
 years of my life here in Ireland. Paris told me all about 
 it. I am sorry, but you will have to put up with my presence 
 there. I shall not be troubling you." In the little voice there 
 was that hardening of distant pride. The face had looked 
 out from the veil of the hair and hidden itself again, and 
 now she had replaced the hood. 
 
 For a mile they walked silently, Finn uncomfortable and 
 still angry, wishing the mist would swallow her up. The little 
 feet trod assuredly by his side in long, sure steps, the 
 girl apparently quite at her ease. As they reached the grey 
 stone by the side of the road which marked the descent to 
 Black Rock, the mist lifted with the suddenness of Ireland, 
 the sun came out and revealed to him the girl, now uncowled, 
 her hair flying, striding at his side like some wild thing of air 
 that had come to earth. 
 
 Before them on the road, a woman, bent, was walking, 
 carrying something strapped loosely on her back. As they 
 came behind her, they noticed the fine coil of dark-brown hair 
 that lay dank upon her neck and then she turned her face 
 to show them a pair of grey-blue eyes under finely arched 
 eyebrows, with a mouth big and full of humour. 
 
 "God bless ye! Miss," she said, looking at Deirdre. "It 
 is Paudeen himself I have on me back." 
 
 "Thank you, Norah. You promised to let me see him, 
 didn't you? Come over here under the hedge and I will 
 look at him." 
 
 The woman gave her a sidelong grateful look and went 
 over to the ditch on the edge of the road carefully swinging 
 her burden to the front to lay it down upon the big grey 
 stone, moisture covered and glistening in the lifting sun. From 
 somewhere below, a lark sprang into the upper air filling it 
 with melody. On their left, a wall of broken stone, a little 
 latchet gate in it, fringed the edge of the blue sea which 
 
164 GODS 
 
 stretched itself across to where the glass of the lighthouse 
 gleamed solitary as the sun struck it, on the opposite head- 
 land. The waters below were deserted and the black line 
 of the submerged rocks menaced even under that sun. 
 
 The woman opened the shawl to disclose a little child. He 
 might have been three or he might have been ten years. The 
 child looked only at his mother, the eyes moving heavily and 
 without control, the poor head hanging broken on its neck 
 as a flower lies broken on its stalk. 
 
 The mother took the poor wrappings from about its lower 
 limbs to show them, shrivelled. The skeleton body lay on the 
 rock like a sacrifice. 
 
 "I've prayed to the Holy saints and to St. Bride, Miss. 
 Sure haven't I said my prayers day and night up there in 
 the grey chapel for little Paudeen. But he always lies like 
 that. It is neither tongue nor legs that he has. God has put 
 the heavy hand on him. Some do be tellin' me that 'tis 'the 
 good people' that have changed him, Miss. . . ." 
 
 She looked at the girl, who had knelt down -by the child, 
 pulling off her gloves and throwing her cloak away from her 
 to show a dress of green frieze. The sun sprayed down 
 upon the masses of her hair which fell forward to hide her 
 face, the sunbeams playing hide and seek in the strands. The 
 fine brows, straight-drawn now, with something of anger in 
 them, bent down in puzzlement. She had taken the little roll- 
 ing head between the two fine white hands and then she had 
 done a beautiful thing. She had stooped and kissed the help- 
 less child upon the pale slobbering lips. 
 
 In that moment, Finn standing behind, watching the smooth 
 whiteness of the neck where the bronze meshes had parted 
 themselves, felt something go through him like a pain. It 
 was something that made him catch his breath. He bent a 
 little over the girl. She looked up, caught the glance in his 
 eyes, and then her own had lighted and fallen. 
 
 As, silent, they walked away under the sunlight, the girl 
 had flung her cloak back from her shoulders as though she 
 had some difficulty in breathing. As he stole a glance at her, 
 the hardness in the eyes and brows astonished him. It was 
 another girl than that of the moment before. There was 
 something of tense defiance about the figure. And so they 
 passed downwards in long slants to the valley by the sea. 
 
THE HOUSE OF DREAMS 165 
 
 They happened on it where it ran in backward slant through 
 a break in the wall of the cliff on the right. A deep and 
 narrow cleft it was, with a little stream, fringed by the red 
 foxglove, murmuring along its base, to fall here, in miniature 
 cascades, there, to spread out in what Deirdre called "dotey" 
 pools in which the speckled brown trout swam. 
 
 It was a green, almost treeless, valley in which the shamrock, 
 amongst the rocks that hung over the stream, grew in places 
 unsuspected, the sides of which were marked by grey boulders 
 beneath which yellow toadstools nestled, whilst under the 
 September mists the white mushroom was wont to peep out 
 in the fairy rings. High upon the right crest, an old rath or 
 fort, or, as it was called by the peasants, the place of the "good 
 people," showed its green mounds. Some said that under 
 the full moon one could hear the fairy music or even see the 
 little people disporting themselves if one had "the sight," but 
 others said that it was but the tinkle of the streamlet below. 
 
 They had passed in silence through the valley by the sea 
 by way of the narrow footpath that ran along the stream and 
 had come out into the wooded, bird-haunted country beyond, 
 remote from the presence of man as are the places of God. 
 
 Now they were in a boreen that wound secretly between 
 its bramble-hung walls, against the lichened stones of which 
 the red veinery of the stems clustered in the softness of the 
 April afternoon. The nut trees filtered a tracery of sun- 
 light upon the grass-grown furrows of evening, across which 
 sleuthed a weasel-shape of thin wickedness that seemed to 
 pass into the heap of stones where the wall had crumbled in 
 upon itself, whilst from the hawthorn, now breaking in the 
 buds of spring, a blackbird flew, shrieking. 
 
 The boreen twisted itself a little and Finn found himself 
 looking through the high gates of rusted iron that swung loose- 
 ly from the stark pillars of limewashed stone which sentinelled 
 the cobbles of the ancient courtyard, about three sides of 
 which the long low building nestled. 
 
 They stood on the hither side of the gate, 'prisoned by 
 the shadows of the towering elms that leant themselves over 
 the stables which formed the left and back of the house, to 
 quarter the westering sun into golden blotches upon the mossy 
 cobbles. The windless shadows lay heavy on the stones. In 
 one corner, an elderberry hung its grey stems in lonely friend- 
 
1 66 GODS 
 
 liness. The greenhearted panes of the glass verandah which 
 to the right ran the full length of the dwelling itself, glowed 
 dully with red fire. 
 
 The gate sang its lullaby as they passed through and crossed 
 the yard. The empty stables on the left, their yellow walls 
 stained by time, showed doorless square black sepulchres of 
 emptiness from which came no low of cattle or whinny of 
 horse. The jagged shaft of a wheelless cart pointed brokenly 
 upwards. 
 
 As they came to the door in the centre of the verandah, 
 over which the broken bell-pull swung desolately, the girl 
 had held up her hand with a little warning gesture, in it 
 something of solemnity, and so Finn had peered through the 
 glass of the verandah and the open door inside into the room 
 beyond. 
 
 It was then he saw the old lady kneeling over her beads to 
 face the sun now setting behind the lonely stems of the ash 
 grove which showed themselves through the long window on the 
 other side of the house. Behind her, where a fire of peats 
 burned low under the glow of the April sun, a little boy leant 
 his head in the corner of the open chimney-place, as though 
 it were too heavy. As he looked, a wrinkled hand went up to 
 the bowed head and made the sign of the cross. The old 
 woman, a figure of a lofty fineness, stood up, seemed to feel 
 their presence, and turned to them with a gracious beckoning 
 gesture. 
 
 "Ah, 'tis you, is it alannah?" she said to Deirdre as she 
 came towards her, the lips compressed as with pain, the grey 
 eyes with the loving hopeless look that printed itself upon 
 Finn's memory for ever. 
 
 She had turned to him, in her gracious way. 
 
 "And you'll be Mr. Fontaine," she said. "Welcome to the 
 House of Dreams, Mr. Fontaine!" 
 
 She smiled a little to him. 
 
XVI 
 
 For something over a year, Finn travelled backwards and 
 forwards between London and Dunhallow in connection with 
 the Black Rock scheme, which, however, had been consider- 
 ably delayed by Crux's enforced absence in the United States, 
 where he was arranging one of his financial combinations and 
 also getting support for an ultimate Anglo-American company 
 for the exploitation of Irish industries, of which Black Rock 
 was to be the first. 
 
 During that year, the gaunt spreading boy had been knit- 
 ting together both in mind and body. He no longer looked 
 as though he were growing out of his clothes, and the lines 
 of the face were more assured, whilst, with the tumult be- 
 hind beginning to find its outlet through more ordered chan- 
 nels, the physical features seemed to be settling into relation 
 one with the other. 
 
 And yet there was trouble in the face the trouble that 
 had come to adolescence in the presence of a beautiful woman 
 whose distant watchfulness was fast changing into something 
 closer, more intimate. For the girl who had kissed him was 
 no longer immobile. She had begun the spoiling. 
 
 Deirdre Asthar he had seen fleetingly during his stays in 
 the House of Dreams, and once in London, a day when he had 
 visited her brother at his house and when she had passed 
 him in the hall with a nod of indifference. It had given him 
 one of those little chills to which he was now accustomed, for 
 from that moment of the sick child by the roadside she had 
 held herself towards him in haughty aloofness, and he, sensi- 
 tively proud, had been hurt into anger. But to Mrs. O'Hara 
 and Patsey, and always to Paris, with that strange close bond 
 that united them, she could be warmly loving, though always 
 wilful, whilst to the people of Black Rock, who had known 
 her from childhood and who had taught her the Irish, she 
 
 167 
 
1 68 GODS 
 
 was a sort of earthly vicaress to the Blessed Mother herself. 
 
 On one of his visits he had heard of her in a strange con- 
 nection. It was said that she had begun to gather the boys and 
 girls of Black Rock around her in an old disused school- 
 house where she would tell them the story of Ireland and 
 sing to them the songs of Ireland. And he thought of what 
 she had said to him that day about Internationalism and of 
 how Ireland was more to her than the whole world. Mrs. 
 O'Hara herself had told him that as a child Deirdre had had 
 many childish quarrels with her father about Ireland and that 
 the people used to call her "the little patriot." But when she 
 had gone to London, all this seemed to have been submerged 
 by her new associations. 
 
 Everything about Deirdre Asthar had the property of affect- 
 ing Finn strongly and this thing was no exception. It im- 
 pressed him disagreeably. Things, slight in themselves, could, 
 when touched by this girl, assume an irritating and ridiculous 
 significance. In bed at night, his mind would seize upon some 
 trifle in connection with her, upon which, his imagination 
 working, he would find himself in a fever. 
 
 In London he had been haunting all sorts of meetings at 
 which the rising faith of Internationalism was being preached. 
 To him, Internationalism and Nationality were of necessity 
 two opposites. The path to this nebulous Internationalism lay 
 over the corpse of Nationality. It began to come to him that 
 Nationality and Internationalism were two world-faiths, the 
 older and the newer, each with its priests and devotees, their 
 tenets, not argued, but preached. They were not politics, 
 but religion. 
 
 It flashed upon him, as something incredible, that perhaps 
 everything was religion and passed again. 
 
 Yet he would sometimes find Ireland calling to him as to a 
 long-lost child and in those moments Internationalism seemed 
 very far away. And all this, in some way not clear, was 
 bound up with Deirdre Asthar. 
 
 Finn could not fathom this girl of contrariness and at times 
 could hate her very sincerely. Mrs. O'Hara would sometimes 
 look from one to the other, the lips compressed, a light of 
 humour and pain in the tender hopeless eyes, and that also 
 irritated Finn. 
 
 During his first stay with Mrs. O'Hara, she had flitted in 
 
"AND THE GATES OF HELL ..." 169 
 
 and out of the house like a shadow and sometimes he would 
 hear the sound of her lute and the full dark notes coming 
 from her room or from the ashgrove outside, where, amongst 
 the grey stems, she loved to sit and play. And once he 
 had been witness of a queer little scene after she had sung 
 Yeats' "Hosting of the Sidhe:" 
 
 The host is riding from Knocknarea, 
 And over the grave of Clooth-na-bare; 
 
 Caolte tossing his burning hair, 
 
 And Niamh calling "Away, come away!" 
 Empty your heart of its mortal dream. 
 The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round, 
 Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound, 
 Our breasts are heaving, our eyes are a-gleam, 
 Our arms are waving, our lips are apart. . . . 
 
 The host is rushing 'twixt night and day; 
 And where is there hope or deed as fair? 
 
 Caolte tossing his burning hair, 
 
 And Niamh calling, "Away, come away!" 
 
 As she sat there in the April night, she seemed herself a 
 creature of the gloaming. Beneath the stuff of her dress 
 that had the texture of a grey wrinkled leaf, the little rounded 
 breasts heaved, the eyes gleamed, and when she had finished 
 with lips parted, the eyes, with something of the night in 
 them looked out through the ashen stems into the glow where 
 the sun slept. 
 
 Little Patsey, his head heavy with dreams, had been listen- 
 ing to the song in the shadow of the house, his arm around 
 the neck of his white calf, into the ears of which he whispered 
 like some necromancer, his grey eyes opening out to watch 
 the singer. Then had come that breaking of the spell. Her 
 lips had shut, her eyes had dropped back into the world from 
 the faraway, and she had turned to the boy who was look- 
 ing at her with parted eyes and lips: "But you know, Patsey 
 boy, there are no fairies. It's only a song." 
 
 The boy had looked on her with wondering reproach as 
 he pressed the white neck of the calf more closely: "Oh, 
 Miss Deirdre, 'tis joking that ye are. Sure the whole world 
 knows that 'the good people' are as real as ourselves. Didn't 
 I see a cluricaune once down there by the stream, mending 
 
 / 
 
170 GODS 
 
 his brogues under the shadow of a foxglove? No fairies 1" 
 He gave one of his little weird laughs. 
 
 And the evening before he left for London. He remembered 
 that. For the grey-eyed woman that seemed to mother all 
 things about her, whether they went on two feet or four, had 
 also mothered the strange boy who had come under her roof. 
 A bond had grown between them that might have been that 
 of mother and son if there had not also been in it a strange- 
 ness of romance for sometimes when he would be looking 
 into the steadfast eyes under their serene brows it would seem 
 to him for a moment that he was looking into the eyes of a 
 beautiful young girl whom he had known in some far off 
 place and time. 
 
 Mrs. O'Hara that June evening had been seated before the 
 turf fire in the kitchen turning the wooden wheel of the blower 
 in the fire-shadows. Patsey sat in the corner, listening to the 
 cluckety-cluck of the wheel and drowsing at the fire as it 
 blew up in little fountains of sparks, for summer or winter 
 he loved to sit there. The old kitchen with the naked rafters 
 and the little wooden ladder leading to the "loft" was full 
 of strange shadows that danced under the gleam of the flames. 
 It was then that Mrs. O'Hara seated on the little three-cor- 
 nered stool told Finn and Patsey, under the pulsing of the 
 wheel, about the shadows. 
 
 "Sure, aren't they my friends?" she had said. "Aren't they 
 company for me in the long nights of winter and in the sum- 
 mer twilights? And don't they bring things in with them to 
 sit there forninst me I that have lost my childer and my 
 man and that have only Patsey left? .... and Deirdre, 
 of course," she had said after a moment, "... and 
 Finn," she added after another little moment, bending her 
 head to look tenderly on the boy. Even as she had spoken, 
 there came the sound of the lute from the outside of the 
 house and the voice of the singer: 
 
 .... Come, dear heart, where the shadows creep 
 To the twilight edge of to-morrow's sleep. 
 
 Come, dear heart, where the shadows fly 
 Over the faint of the western sky. 
 
 Come, dear heart, on the shadows' flight 
 As we whisper together the last good-night. . . " 
 
"AND THE GATES OF HELL ..." 171 
 
 It came back to him that evening at "The Cloisters," and 
 the slim fine shoulders of the singer under the shaded lights. 
 
 These were the things that were passing through his mind 
 as he sat over his breakfast in Ash Villa one morning of early 
 September. He had been reading "The Earth," which had 
 now sent out a trumpet call for Thrum's new Imperial Cru- 
 sade. Not a single call, but rather a series of blasts which 
 had been headed "Wake up England!" and which looked 
 like deafening even Thrum's public, now used to megaphonic 
 announcements. 
 
 The new crusade was being preached as fanatically as 
 ever Peter the Hermit had preached the original. Its ob- 
 ject, as it avowed with simple directness, was "to paint the 
 map red." According to "The Earth," nobody knew or ap- 
 parently cared how the Empire had grown. Now, every child 
 in the school was to be taught that as a matter of religion; 
 and, after that, taught to shoot. In the new Crusade, as in 
 the old, slaughter and religion appeared in some way to be 
 interchangeable terms. There was but one cure for the 
 troubles of the world: a dose of Empire plus a dose of grape. 
 
 And it was a Crusade. It was all very well for the oppos- 
 ing and usually unsuccessful papers to talk about Thrum as 
 "the mad Imperialist." Thrum at least spoke with conviction 
 and with passion imperial passion. 
 
 The call to empire had drowned everything, including a 
 new battle between Sir Lancaster Hogge and Sir Raymond 
 Hilary, which had broken out in spite of every effort by the 
 editor of "The Earth" to stop it, and which, dislodged at 
 last from its columns, they had continued from paper to 
 paper in a series of skirmishes into which Professor Dust, as 
 usual, had butted with a perfect trail of trematodes wriggling 
 in his wake, whilst the Bishop of Whitechapel, at first timor- 
 ous on the brink, had finally been drawn into this terrible 
 circle as a boat is drawn into a whirlpool. The public at 
 that moment being more nearly concerned for their stomachs, 
 which were empty, than for their souls, of which they were 
 scarcely conscious, had quickly lost interest in the battle, 
 which, owing to the eminence of the contestants, no editor 
 had the courage to stop. 
 
 The whole thing might have dragged on indefinitely had it 
 not been for one editor, more knowing than the rest, inviting 
 
1 72 GODS 
 
 Professor Dust to contribute his views upon the latest refuta- 
 tion of the Darwinian theory upon environment, which in- 
 stantly had drawn Professor Hogge and so sidetracked the 
 main discussion. 
 
 On the heels of this rout Lanthorn had hung, snapping, 
 now here, now there, choosing his bites with shrewd judg- 
 ment. The other combatants fought shy as far as possible of 
 a man who seemed to be conducting a sort of ghostly post- 
 office and doing it so practically and effectively that it 
 seemed difficult to disprove his assertions. But, as Sir Lan- 
 caster Hogge said: "a Borderland Bureau was a bit too thick." 
 Sir Lancaster was showing a steady tendency to offensiveness 
 as he got older and he had been having a bad time lately with 
 Dust upon "variation." 
 
 As a sort of tin whistle after all this pother, came a tootle, 
 obviously heavily pruned from what had originally been the 
 blast of a trombone, from Uncle Bobs upon rice as an Im- 
 perial Food. (The capitals were his.) There were some in- 
 volved statistics showing Japan's climb to power on rice, and 
 in the gaps Finn could read "nuts, onions, and water." As 
 it was, his uncle had managed to get in "Nature, Sir, Nature!" 
 three times. Bobs was a terrible imperialist. 
 
 Finn, reading these things, felt that sense of unreality 
 which had crept upon him during the preceding year. In 
 some obscure way, Ireland made all these things seem futile. 
 Not only had they no power to beat their way through that 
 invisible barrier which seemed to envelop the island and hold 
 it virginal to the great world, but the island itself seemingly 
 had the power to invest those who visited it with a sort of 
 unresponsiveness to these assaults of the great world outside. 
 Father Con had once said to him: "All the world lies out- 
 side Ireland and Ireland outside the world." 
 
 To all this unreality came Crux with the next link in his 
 scheme the proselytisation of Black Rock, which Finn was 
 now again about to visit. 
 
 The Reverend Slick, "the Yankee patent priest" as he had 
 been invidiously called by some disgruntled and probably un- 
 successful clergyman of orthodoxy, had been holding ex- 
 pensive Primitive Christian seances (the word used by the dis- 
 gruntled one) in the Great Rotunda in Kensington each 
 Sunday, being especially strong on Revelation and the coming 
 
"AND THE GATES OF HELL ..." 173 
 
 of a world-war. His arguments were punctuated by horned 
 beasts and colour-splashed by the Scarlet Woman, whose gar- 
 ments of sin fluttered themselves through his more excited 
 periods. With considerable dexterity he had managed to fasten 
 the more doubtful qualities both of the animals and the lady 
 upon his opponents. There was no doubt about his success. 
 Thousands had to be turned away at what the disgruntled 
 critic had called "each performance," and he was already 
 being hailed by men and women throughout the metropolis 
 as a Prince of Revelation. The clean-shaven upper lip and 
 fringe of beard began to appear in the Sunday newspapers, 
 and very nice things had been said about their owner in 
 exalted quarters. 
 
 He had made what he himself called in his page advertise- 
 ments now filling "The Earth" and other newspapers, "a 
 special line," by dealing with modern commerce, more par- 
 ticularly upon its gargantuan sides, calling it "the new Revela- 
 tion of our times." "Render unto Caesar the things that 
 are Caesar's ..." was one of his favourite texts, and Crux 
 himself had initiated what was becoming quite a fashionable 
 habit with employers, who sent their clerks to the preat Ro- 
 tunda where seats were reserved for them. All seats were 
 free and it was reported that Crux held the purse-strings. 
 
 But one thing had come to Finn to puzzle him the fact 
 that even the Reverend Elias Z. Slick had begun to preach 
 upon wars and rumours of wars. This was to him one of 
 those strange linkings of opposites. Father Con had spoken 
 of God getting mad if Europe persisted in her materialism 
 and of his sending a great war to wipe it out. He had heard 
 Paris Asthar making some such reference also. Father 
 Lestrange had frequently spoken of it and even his father, 
 who seemed to derive much comfort from it, in that dim re- 
 ligious way of his, had talked vaguely of "a great war to de- 
 stroy the ungodly." And now, a man utterly unlike all these, 
 Slick himself, was talking on the same lines. 
 
 When he reached Black Rock in the September evening, the 
 dying sun was sending its dull tawn across the gently heaving 
 tides, which seemed to breathe under the orange moon loom- 
 ing in the sky as on that evening when he had first come 
 to Dunhallow. Out on the edge of the horizon hung a soli- 
 tary fishing boat as though it slid on the edge of the world. 
 
174 GODS 
 
 Above him, the ruined walls of the old chapel looked out over 
 the seas. It might have stood there from the days when 
 mortality had not yet separated from the immortality that was 
 its mother and when mortals and immortals still communed to- 
 gether. 
 
 And then, inconsequent, the Reverend Slick's broad-brimmed 
 hat, hard calculating mouth and square-cut frock-coat came 
 sailing into all this. 
 
 Finn wondered what Black Rock would do with this incursion 
 from the twentieth century. Would it throw him over Carrick- 
 more or take him out there into the illimitable and leave 
 him in it, or would it simply ignore him? 
 
 Black Rock was civil to patent theology as it would have 
 been civil to the Devil himself had he chosen to walk up its 
 only street with sufficient discretion to leave his horns and 
 hoofs at home or at least to clothe his nether extremities in 
 trousers and his horns in the silk hat of respectability. Black 
 Rock was simple and pastoral, but Black Rock it was one 
 of Finn's shocks in spite of its contempt for the things of 
 this world had no contempt for money. It would take a man's 
 money and thank him but it was incorruptible. Money could 
 not buy the heart of the Black Rock Turks. Father Con 
 had said to him: "Ah, 'tis Father Hennessey or something 
 that has spoiled them. Sure they'd sell anything they had 
 for money except their souls or their honour." 
 
 And so, when the Reverend Slick, shrewd-eyed and hard 
 but not close-fisted, asked Black Rock to build the tabernacle 
 of the new theology which was to challenge and finally over- 
 come that of the old, standing up there on Carrickmore Black 
 Rock responded with secret gladness. And when the red 
 bricks were dumped by special ship at the foot of Carrick- 
 more, all the labourers and masons of that part of the coun- 
 try came forward to unload them and to put them in place. 
 And when the reverend gentleman, challenging the primeval 
 with the primitive, chose the site for the new church upon a 
 rocky point a few hundred yards away from and a few hun- 
 dred feet below the steepness of the old rock, Black Rock 
 never quibbled but set to work with a will and whiskied and 
 feasted for many days thereafter. 
 
 The Reverend Slick rubbed his hands in secret. Where he 
 had expected opposition there was no opposition only will- 
 
"AND THE GATES OF HELL ..." 175 
 
 ing work. Money, under God of course, ruled the world. And 
 so the reverend gentleman gloated. He had never had a 
 failure either with the things of this world or with those of 
 the world to come. 
 
 And with these things of the next world were going the 
 things of this. Already, below, the new pier was forming it- 
 self out of the uneasy seas, whilst a space had been cleared 
 by the water's edge and on it was being built the first of the 
 fish-curing stations. Black Rock, miserably poor, had never 
 seen so much money before, except on those odd occasions when 
 one of its sons or daughters returning from America in the 
 plumes and broadcloth of civilisation, had given it an infre- 
 quent taste of the root of all evil. What with the necessity 
 of housing new workmen, and the new wages, Mr. Higgins 
 looked like becoming in the fulness of time the gombeen king 
 of Ireland. He could be seen at all hours of the day and night, 
 the nose hooking itself out beak-like from between the little 
 stinging eyes, exhorting: "Come now, Mickey, quick there 
 with the car for his honour!" or "Kitty for God's sake don't 
 burn Mr. Busby's bacon, or I'll lambast you!" The publics 
 house was filled to the doors and there had been some very 
 free fights and much drunkenness. Old Biddy Moriarty, who 
 ought to have known better, had even appeared one Sunday 
 morning outside the chapel with a bottle of whiskey in the 
 hanging pocket under her red flannel petticoat, which she 
 raised both conspicuously and frequently. 
 
 Father Hennessey was blooming. On Sundays he held forth 
 upon the dangers of strong drink, but as he always finished 
 up with the duties of hospitality from the standpoint of 
 faith and morals, of which he was always talking, in connec- 
 tion with the stranger within the gate, it rather weakened his 
 exhortation. 
 
 Black Rock, in fact, began to get quite a name in the sur- 
 rounding country. From a place which at one time had 
 scarcely been visited or spoken of, it had come to be re- 
 garded as a rather uproarious little hell where "dhrink, divil- 
 ment and divarsion" was the order of the day and night. 
 Parties of young bloods from Dunhallow were in the habit of 
 riding out on their bicycles in the evenings to share in the 
 general festivities and Mr. Higgins' whiskey, but the Black- 
 rockers, with strong local sense, soon stopped that by beating 
 
176 GODS 
 
 half a dozen of them into unconsciousness and depositing 
 them outside the village bounds. The Reverend Slick was 
 their meat. 
 
 What the Reverend Elias Z. Slick thought of all this, he 
 did not say. Possibly he viewed it with an indulgent eye as 
 proof positive of the need of the new church and as per- 
 haps a necessary preparation, for, as he often said: "the ways 
 of God are past finding out." 
 
 It was on this high note of feasting and revelry that the 
 opening of the new church was announced exactly thirteen 
 months from that September evening when Finn, now in his 
 twenty-second year, had arrived in Black Rock, unwilling 
 herald of Primitive Christianity and proselytisation. It was to 
 take place in the evening. There was to be a service of the 
 lightest possible nature with the new patent imported organist 
 to play upon the patent American organ which had also been 
 imported. And after the service there were to be the loaves and 
 fishes which had worked such wonders in Limehouse. 
 
 Finn made his way upon this tempestuous evening of late 
 autumn from the House of Dreams up to the red brick taber- 
 nacle. The rain blew down in soughing gusts from the sides 
 of Croagh Cromlech under the winnow of the south-west wind. 
 The boreen was running ankle-deep in water, the stones shin- 
 ing under the moisture. Something cried and flew across the 
 boreen, almost brushing his face, upon which he could feel 
 the beat of wings some nightbird which had been driven by 
 weather stress into the lower branches of the hawthorn the 
 ghost of that bird of nearly two years ago. Above his head, he 
 could hear the groaning of the elms as they ground together. 
 
 A foxglove here and there hung melancholy over the stream 
 as he walked along it, and so he came out of the valley to make 
 his way slowly up to the tabernacle gleaming bright and new 
 in flaring contrast to the old ruined chapel upon the brow of 
 the headland above. 
 
 The road and the new gravel way up to the building showed 
 no signs of life, and as he entered the church, well-warmed and 
 garnished, and in the porch saw, displayed upon tables, the 
 loaves and fishes, he wondered. He passed into the building to 
 find there Busby, the engineer, and four or five of the English 
 workmen who had not yet gone back to England. 
 
 For all its varnish and garnish the place had the desolation 
 
"AND THE GATES OF HELL ..." 177 
 
 of new buildings. He took his seat in the silence, which was 
 broken by the organ grinding out one of the most successful 
 of the Reverend Slick's hymns, with that touch of the music- 
 hall which, hovering on the edge of cheerfulness, stopped short 
 at ribaldry. In it was something brazen in it something 
 of those great steam-driven motor organs of the rounda- 
 bouts. 
 
 He played and stopped. And again he played. It was past 
 the hour of opening. The church doors gaped emptily towards 
 the village. 
 
 The Reverend Slick, his brows black as the skies outside, ap- 
 peared and gave his address. He spoke, challengingly, from 
 the text: "And upon this rock will I build my church. . . ." 
 He told the handful of the faithful that this was only the be- 
 ginning. The church had been built upon this rock in this 
 pagan country and there it would stay. He repeated: "And 
 upon this rock will I build my church . . . . " pausing 
 as though waiting for someone to take up his challenge. It 
 came. 
 
 A ribald laugh from Lanty, the village idiot, who had stolen 
 in unobserved and who now ran out into the grey emptiness. 
 They could hear the laugh irrepressible break out again and 
 again in the distance as he ran down the hill to tell the vil- 
 lage about "that quare ould fellow up there and his funny 
 God." 
 
 After the service, the Reverend Slick, old warhorse of a 
 hundred fights, a terrible figure of a man, determined to go 
 through with what he had begun, waiting there implacable 
 by the side of the groaning tables. He looked down through 
 the doors into the village, in the purple shadows of which the 
 lights began to shine. 
 
 As Finn passed the shrine of the old faith crouching up 
 there under evening skies from which all storm had passed, 
 its ruined walls stark against the fainted starshine of the pur- 
 ple night, its windows, throwing back the sun sinking be- 
 neath the rim of the ocean, seemed to burst into flame. It 
 crouched there, looking out into the centuries, empty out as- 
 sured. " . . . . and the gates of hell shall not prevail 
 against it." 
 
 He walked down the hill into the gathering night. 
 
XVII 
 
 GHOST-HUNTING 
 
 Dunhallow was discursive. In its eleven centuries of exist- 
 ence it had not been so moved, not even when Sigurd the 
 Dane, a thousand years before, had sailed past Carrickmore, 
 skirted the hidden menace of the Irons, and stood into the 
 middle circle of the triple callipers to harry and finally to 
 marry the maidenhood of Dunhallow. 
 
 For Paris Asthar had come to Dunhallow, accompanied by a 
 beautiful young woman with hair like beaten copper, and 
 attended by a gnome in yellow ivory of some inferior world 
 who was supposed to answer to the name of Togo but who 
 did not, because, so far as Dunhallow knew, he was speech- 
 less. Dunhallow, with its passion for baptism, christened 
 him "The Master of the Toilet." 
 
 So far as Dunhallow could see, Paris Asthar lived for his 
 toilet. He did not abate one hair of his Piccadilly present- 
 ment but strolled round the little town magnificent in shining 
 silk hat, frock-coat, and malacca, followed by crowds of beg- 
 gars headed by Johnny the Saint, who seemed to sprout from 
 the earth at his passage, and distributing largesse like a 
 prince of the blood. The children, who adored him, executed 
 various feints and devices to draw him into Miss Bluett's 
 the confectioner's, whence he would issue with Togo at his 
 heels carrying two large tissue paper bags of Miss Bluett's 
 bullseyes, weather-stained, very strong, very yellow, and very 
 satisfying. 
 
 Old Asthar of the grey stone house at the top of the square, 
 Dunhallow of course knew well, as his eccentricities and 
 grudging munificence. But Paris was a new and better edition. 
 
 It was true that, unlike his half-sister, who was the only 
 child of old Asthar by his second marriage, and beloved of 
 Dunhallow, he had never before been to Ireland, hugging 
 London and the continental cities, and it was also true that 
 
GHOST-HUNTING 179 
 
 his appearance was nearly as foreign as that of his attendant. 
 But he had the irresistible Irish blood in him Dunhallow 
 could see that a touch of the brogue that was beginning 
 to haunt the high, trumpet-like tones like the call of memory, 
 and when, finally, heretic though Dunhallow believed him to 
 be, for in Ireland if a man is not a Catholic he must of 
 necessity be a Protestant, he made his way to the Big Chapel 
 at the top of the street of William and Mary, popularly known 
 as "The Street of the Gallows," and said his prayers there, 
 Dunhallow capitulated. As Paris himself said: "My God 
 can be worshipped anywhere." 
 
 Finn, who was at this time more or less permanently in 
 Dunhallow watching Crux's interests at Black Rock at a 
 wage that was a trifle less than one of Crux's masons, met 
 Asthar on his arrival one wet evening of October and brought 
 him to his friend, Father Con, to whom Asthar gravely 
 confessed that he had come to Dunhallow ghost-hunting, 
 addressing the reverend gentleman, apparently in virtue of 
 his position, as "the-ghost-finder-in-chief." To "Kitty the 
 Divil," he instantly made love. The little thing was per- 
 plexed, flattered, and not a little frightened, for, as she said 
 in apology for her sex's weakness "he is a beautiful divil." 
 However, he conducted his wooing with such an air of 
 propriety that even Father Con could only pretend to be 
 shocked. For the Father had also capitulated. 
 
 Dunhallow's only difficulty was Stella Fay. It had also 
 been that of Father Con and his housekeeper. Dunhallow 
 had developed such a moral sensitiveness, resulting from a 
 national concentration through the centuries, that the spec- 
 tacle of a beautiful young woman with hair of copper travelling 
 with what Dunhallow called "a beautiful man" and staying 
 with him under the same roof, invited consideration. Miss 
 O'Shaughnessy at "The Shamrock of Ireland," a very proper 
 virgin in the fifties, had been in two minds about taking them 
 in (the big house in the square was at present uninhabitable), 
 but within the space of two sentences had surrendered bag 
 and baggage, that is to say "faith and morals," to the dis- 
 tinguished stranger, whose father had been one of her best 
 friends and who now was her landlord. And besides, hadn't 
 Father Con opposite made them free of the hearth of holiness? 
 
i8o GODS 
 
 And who should she be to be questioning the judgment of 
 the parish priest? 
 
 "Maybe the young lady is a cousin or something, yer 
 honour?" she had said, wheedling-like. She was despairingly 
 anxious to make it easy for him and for her conscience. 
 
 "No, no, my dear madam," replied her guest, "Miss Fay 
 is only a comrade." Dunhallow had never heard the word 
 and took it to express a sort of relation, and Paris and Stella 
 on trust a trust which was not betrayed, for even Dun- 
 hallow could see in a little while that the friendship of these 
 two had nothing more of sex in it than the friendship of 
 Father Con and his housekeeper. 
 
 One of those afternoons of late autumn when the gracious 
 lady that is Ireland had strewed the green of her robes with 
 brown and gold, Finn was walking down the boreen near 
 the valley, when just where the narrow lane turned under the 
 reddened hawthorn, he saw a figure coming towards him 
 through the golden shadows. It was a curious whip-like figure 
 clad in a tawny brown which blended with the leaves around, 
 and in its hand it swung a green leather cap, leaving the cop- 
 per hair above to glow softly under the last rays of the 
 sun as though it were on fire. With that limping swiftness, 
 it was on him like a shadow before he could collect himself. 
 
 It sidled over to the boy and looked up slyly as it stood 
 under the lee of one of his great shoulders. Then it laughed, 
 a little full throaty laugh. 
 
 And then Stella Fay had slipped one little warm hand along 
 his arm, leaving it to rest in the crook of his elbow, con- 
 fidingly. 
 
 "I have come to see you .... Finn," she added after 
 a little pause, using his Christian name for the first time. 
 She stole a look upwards at him, the boy standing there con- 
 fused and bareheaded, for he had got into the way of going 
 hatless. 
 
 "You know I thought you were a loup-garou, with that 
 great mop of hair standing back against the evening sky. 
 "Now I am done for," I said. She laughed a little delicious 
 laugh. "He will eat me up alive, this great monster of the 
 twilight. . . . Will you eat me?" She looked at him pro- 
 vokingly and pressed his arm ever so little. 
 
 He felt ridiculous. The girl with the copper hair had always 
 
GHOST-HUNTING 181 
 
 made him feel a little ridiculous but yet satisfied. Not like 
 Deirdre Asthar, who never made him ridiculous only con- 
 temptible. For the life of him he could not speak, but stood 
 there with the sweat starting out where the thicket of his 
 hair met his forehead. The perfume of the girl's body, evan- 
 escent, seemed to pass through him. He had, as always, a 
 consciousness of the warmth of her body with its penetration. 
 The chill of the autumn air only seemed to quicken this 
 almost painful consciousness of her physical presence. 
 
 "Don't be afraid," she went on. "I'm not going to eat 
 you .... or to kiss you. Next time, it is you who 
 shall kiss me .... if I will. . . . Perhaps I won't." 
 She laughed again. 
 
 They had met a few yards from where the boreen twisted 
 sharply. Finn, looking over the beautiful head, saw another 
 figure in the deepening shadows at the turning. He sprang 
 away from the girl, who started, and then there came that 
 little characteristic frown between the eyes which Finn knew 
 so well as she saw Deirdre Asthar coming towards them. 
 
 Had she seen them? He had nothing of which to be 
 ashamed, but in Stella Fay's company he always had an ap- 
 prehension of guilt, of uneasiness. But the evening was dark 
 and the great hawthorn had shadowed them. Only he 
 flushed heavily as he saw the starry eyes of the girl look first 
 at him and then at Stella Fay. 
 
 "How are you, Deirdre?" the girl asked with a little smooth 
 laugh. "You see I've come over with Paris as we promised. 
 We're ghost-hunting and are coming to stay at your House 
 of Dreams." 
 
 Deirdre was as always self-possessed. It was one of the 
 things that irritated Finn. She shook hands with the other 
 girl, but to Finn it came as the salute of two rapier players 
 before they engage. She made some indifferent reply and 
 the three walked up to the house, Deirdre leaving them as 
 they entered the swinging gates. 
 
 Mrs. O'Hara stood in the door to receive them. She 
 looked in that shrewd searching way at Stella Fay, the eyes 
 hardened a trifle and then lit up in the way which Finn knew. 
 For at the same moment the girl had gone up to her in that 
 frank boyish way she so often showed to women and had 
 
182 GODS 
 
 put up one slender arm to draw to her the white head which 
 she kissed. 
 
 "I know all about you, Mrs. O'Hara, from Mr. Fontaine, 
 who has been deafening us with your praises over there " 
 she swept a free arm out behind her. "You know, my mother 
 died when I was born she was partly French and partly 
 Irish," she whispered half in pleading half in apology for 
 her caress as she snuggled her well-formed compact head 
 against the shoulder of the woman before her. 
 
 The soft firm arm stole up behind her and caressed the 
 hair, once, twice, and pressed the head to her breast. And 
 then she had taken them into the house. 
 
 Paris came during the evening, driving magnificently upon 
 a side-car up a boreen where no such thing had ever before 
 rolled and expanding upon the beauties of the sunset to 
 Johnny the Saint, whose coat-tail as usual was hanging over 
 the wheel at the rear. He was followed by a pack animal, 
 one of the donkeys which shared Black Rock with its humans, 
 piled high with trunks and bags under which it nearly dis- 
 appeared though urged on from the rear by Lanty, the idiot 
 boy. Togo perched before Johnny and, wrapped to the nose 
 in a shawl like a little yellow ape, showed to a strange world 
 two carraway seeds of eyes which saw everything and nothing. 
 
 Togo performing his usual magic, they were installed by 
 ten o'clock, a great fire burning in Asthar's bedroom as in 
 that of Stella Fay, the trunks and bags unpacked, and Togo 
 himself stowed away in the loft in a biscuit crate in which, 
 when little Patsey for purposes of his own went to look at 
 him in the dawn of the next morning, he looked like a doll in 
 a coffin. 
 
 To Finn's surprise, things had gone smoothly. He did not 
 know why he had expected trouble, but, although he had 
 never seen them quarrel, it had always seemed to him that 
 there was something of secret antagonism between Deirdre 
 and Stella. It seemed to him, innocent though he was, that 
 Deirdre in some hidden way was always watching the other 
 girl. He would sometimes catch that strange veiled glance 
 that puzzled him. But what was there to watch? 
 
 Deirdre, in these days when Paris and Stella went what 
 they called "ghost-hunting" in the hills and raths where their 
 shadows were always frightening belated countrymen, was 
 
GHOST-HUNTING 183 
 
 terribly wilful. Even to Mrs. O'Hara she was at times irri- 
 table, though afterwards she would always go up to her 
 and kiss her warmly, secretly. And sometimes she would sit 
 on the floor and rest the bronzed tangle of her hair in the 
 lap of the white-haired woman as she sat turning the blower 
 softly on the little three-legged stool in the kitchen, where they 
 all liked to come in the evenings. 
 
 To Finn it was as though Stella also watched the other, 
 although he had never once caught a glance from her. She 
 had a habit of curling that snaky body of hers into dark 
 corners from where they would see the glowing tip of her 
 cigarette as it came and went, and though Finn could not see 
 the eyes, he could feel them those grey black-centred eyes, 
 and the swelling nostrils, and the red lips with the slender 
 scented cigarette hanging between them. Mrs. O'Hara, who 
 seemed to understand all things, did not protest at the cig- 
 arettes, although Black Rock, which had surrendered to "The 
 Girl with the Burning Hair," as it called her in the Irish, 
 until her advent had no doubts upon the immorality of fem- 
 inine smoking, except in the form of a black cutty as the solace 
 of age. For Black Rock, which knew men and women by some 
 quality rather than by name had baptised Stella Fay after 
 their beloved Caolte, the chief of the fairies, whose hair seemed 
 to flame on his head as he rode across the hedges and ditches 
 in the dusk of the crescent moon. 
 
 And then, one evening when Paris, now in a soft wide-awake 
 in which he looked inexpressibly bizarre, like some Assyrian 
 bandit who had fallen into the twentieth century, had re- 
 turned from the old fort on the hill with Stella, the storm 
 broke. 
 
 Stella had the way of speaking about her ghosts and creepi- 
 nesses as though they were real creatures of flesh and blood 
 which all the world acknowledged. This evening, after she 
 had bathed and dressed for summer and winter she swam 
 in green waters whenever she got the chance, astonishing by 
 her feats a people who, fearless on the water, would no more 
 have thought of bathing in it than of bathing in fire she 
 lay full length before the lighted turf upon a rug made of the 
 skins of seals which once had gambolled in the cove below. 
 In a dress of some shining green stuff, she looked like some 
 
1 84 GODS 
 
 sinuous creature, half mortal, half mermaid, who had come 
 up from the depths to lie on the hearths of men. 
 
 "Ellen Masters," she said irrelevantly. "She told us to come 
 to Ireland for our ghost-hunting she said that Ireland was 
 a spirit-haunted land. She is an Irishwoman herself. She 
 knows every spirit 'twixt here and India. She was 
 telling us one day how she first became a Universalist. She 
 had been a terrible unbeliever and had been writing for 
 those dreadful Rationalist Thinkers . . . . ' and so 
 Stella Fay had wandered into the story of the famous Uni- 
 versalist leader's conversion. 
 
 Paris Asthar listened with that large indulgence which was 
 his own. Mrs. O'Hara turned the wheel softly. Little Patsey 
 dreamed of God knows what in the corner. But Deirdre on 
 the other side of the fire, tautened. 
 
 "Universalism," she said. "That is nonsense." There was 
 a finality about the utterance that was irritating perhaps 
 meant to be so. 
 
 The girl on the sealskins flashed a glance at her. Finn 
 caught it as it passed like a weaver's shuttle. 
 
 "You know," she continued, "no intelligent man or woman 
 could really believe in those silly stories of saints and devils 
 and angels. There are no such things. Or, if there are," she 
 went on, a trifle illogical, "the people who pretend to wor- 
 ship them have made them ridiculous. That sort of thing 
 is a cult the Ellen Masters cult. A cult of short-haired wom- 
 en and long-haired men. . . ." 
 
 "I thought you had short hair, dear," said the girl on 
 the sealskins, lazily. 
 
 Deirdre ignored her. "All these things are cults with labels. 
 They even try to label the Almighty and put him up in bot- 
 tles. These people are merely ridiculous. They know nothing 
 of life. They know nothing of reality. Warm flesh and red 
 blood and star-dust those are the real things of living." 
 
 "Do you know much about life?" asked the other girl. 
 "I thought you prided yourself upon not knowing anything 
 about reality." 
 
 Paris chuckled. "Got you there, Deirdre," he said, with 
 splendid male detachment. 
 
 "Such things," said Deirdre, losing her temper a little, "are 
 
GHOST-HUNTING 185 
 
 no more real than, than .... than Patsey's fairies 
 . . . . " and she smiled a little to the boy. 
 
 To Finn it seemed on a par with all those other contradic- 
 tions inherent in existence. Deirdre, he should have ex- 
 pected to be the Universalist, and the poisonous sneering girl 
 on the rug, the sceptic. To him, Deirdre Asthar always sneered 
 at everything religious whilst Stella Fay was ardent, almost 
 excessive, in her expression of religious feelings. He felt 
 himself with Stella Fay, for Ireland had been doing her work 
 on him, driving him away from his materialism or, rather, 
 dissolving it. And yet Deirdre, in some queer, elusive way, 
 seemed to have the heart of things. There were things in 
 life he could not reconcile. 
 
 There was for example that patriotism of Deirdre's which 
 seemed to burn with a lambent flame that made it a faith, 
 whilst Stella Fay sneered at all love of country. She said 
 her country was the men and women throughout the world 
 who cared for the things that she cared for, and once Paris 
 Asthar had interfered to say that life was tending more and 
 more to divide itself, not by race, not by religion, but by 
 class. That was indeed what the Reverend John Durring 
 and Jock MacAdam had also said, but Asthar hated Social- 
 ism, at which he laughed good-humouredly. 
 
 More and more it seemed to Finn that people were always 
 saying the same thing in different words as though some spirit 
 of synthesis were at work in the world to reconcile the irre- 
 concileable. 
 
 But Asthar, lolling luxuriously upon an old settle over which 
 Togo, flitting in and out, had thrown a splendid bearskin 
 rug, looking on half-cynical and half-amused at a struggle in 
 which two invisible antagonists seemed to be grappling, glanced 
 across at little Patsey. 
 
 "Do you hear that, Patsey?" he asked challengingly. 
 
 "Hear what, Mr. Asthar?" asked the boy. 
 
 "Why, here's Miss Deirdre telling Miss Fay that her spirits 
 have no more existence than your fairies." 
 
 The boy looked wonderingly at the big man. 
 
 "Sure there are good spirits and bad spirits," he said. 
 "Doesn't everyone know that? I don't know Miss Stella's 
 spirits. Maybe they're the bad. . . ." He looked so pen- 
 
i86 GODS 
 
 etratingly at the girl that Paris gave vent to a shout of 
 laughter. 
 
 "And what are mine," he asked patronisingly. 
 
 The little boy gazed at him with that far away look. 
 "Faith I wouldn't be surprised if they were queer hairy scaly 
 divils with horns and a tail," he said, solemnly. "There are 
 two kinds the smooth wans and the scaly wans." 
 
 "And what are 'the good people,' Patsey?" asked Stella. 
 
 "They're betwixt and between. Sure they're good and bad 
 they're very like us," he said wistfully. "Sure wan time they 
 were human beings that thought they knew as much as spirits, 
 till the wrath of God wouldn't let them live above the earth 
 any longer but by nights they do be rushin' out again like 
 them Niamh and Caolte that Miss Deirdre do be singin' of. 
 'Twas the pride of the head they had they thought they 
 knew everything by understanding it, until in the long last 
 they didn't even believe in God and that was why God 
 punished them." 
 
 "But, Patsey, are there no others?" asked Stella. 
 
 "Indeed and there are. There are the angels of light 
 that do be hatin' and fightin' with the bad wans. They're my 
 spirits," he added proudly. 
 
 "No, Patsey, they're not the best," said Paris Asthar with 
 a strange little note of earnestness and hostility stealing into 
 his voice. "The fairies are the best. Wouldn't you rather 
 ride down the wind with Niamh calling 'Come- away!' and 
 with Caolte of the Burning Hair over the hills and valleys, 
 peeping into the hearts of men and perhaps stealing away their 
 souls, than be up there flying about doing nothing except 
 playing on harps?" He lifted himself a trifle to look at the 
 boy. 
 
 "Indeed and I wouldn't," said Patsey. "I love 'the good 
 people,' only . . ." he paused a little doubtful, "only 
 they'll only live a thousand years they do be sayin' but 
 . . . . but. . . . Maybe they also can get to heaven." 
 He turned his eyes wistful towards Mrs. O'Hara. "Don't you 
 think so, Granny? . . . . I do be sorry for them and 
 I do be sayin' prayers for them." 
 
 "That's true for the child," interposed Mrs. O'Hara. "He 
 has always the queer fancies and has always said his prayers 
 for { the good people' since he was so high." She held her 
 
GHOST-HUNTING 187 
 
 hand out to measure. "Annie couldn't break him of it nor 
 could Father Hennessey himself." 
 
 "Ah, Father Hennessey doesn't know anything about it," 
 said the boy in an old-world voice that made them all laugh. 
 "It is Father Con over there in Dunhallow that has the under- 
 standing. Fairies have souls." They saw him cross himself 
 in the glow of the fire. 
 
 "Patsey," said Asthar lightly, "you ought to know my gods. 
 They are fine fellows. They give money and power over men. 
 They can give you a kingdom. . . ." 
 
 "Yes, maybe like the Divil showed our Blessed Lord when 
 he took him up in the high mountain," said the child like 
 a very old and cunning man. "And what would they be 
 wantin' me to swop with them? Tell me that." 
 
 "They want nothing except yourself, Patsey," said Asthar, 
 lifting himself still more. "They only ask whole-souled de- 
 votion you give them your little self they give you the 
 big world." And now Asthar was curiously earnest, with 
 Mrs. O'Hara looking hard at him. 
 
 "You can kape them, Mr. Asthar," said the boy, "for me. 
 I'm in the hands of God." 
 
 "But God is over all," said Paris Asthar who now seemed 
 to be joining issue with the little child before him, grappling 
 with him. And to Finn, it seemed that up there the great 
 shadows flickering on walls and ceiling were also grappling 
 together. "God is the God of Power," he said. 
 
 "No, he isn't,' said the child. "It is the God of Love that 
 he is. . . ." 
 
 "That's a lie, Patsey," said the big man, who for the first 
 time in Finn's knowledge seemed to show a vein of temper. 
 It astonished him, as did the heavy folds which had seemed 
 to come up under the fire-shadows on the smooth of the face 
 as though the stuff behind were crumbling. But Stella was 
 watching Asthar closely with that wild, slant-eyed look which 
 gave to her something un-human. 
 
 "Ah, Mr. Asthar, 'tis ashamed of yourself you ought to be, 
 tryin' to seduce the poor child," said Mrs. O'Hara half in 
 fun and half in anger. " 'Tis a way wid you ye have, but 
 ye shan't get hold of Annie's Patsey." 
 
 "Oh, Mrs. O'Hara, don't be angry with me, please." The 
 man lifted himself a little like a great cat and made a bow 
 
i88 GODS 
 
 to the old lady where she sat by the wheel. "Isn't it only a 
 little bout of words we're havin' now." He put on the brogue 
 in the way that he knew so well how to do, until it came 
 mellifluous from his lips. She smiled up at him. 
 
 "What are your fairies like?" Paris asked. 
 
 But the boy would not answer him. He looked at him with 
 wide-eyed, frightened suspicion. And in spite of all Paris 
 Asthar's blandishments, he could not get him again to speak. 
 
 Deirdre through all this had sat silent in the old oak chair 
 that was her favourite, her feet tucked up under her. Finn 
 had been watching her. And it was torment to him. For 
 every day that went he knew that this girl had got into his 
 veins like a fire. It was since that day with little Paudeen 
 on the roadside. It was not when she had looked at him, 
 but when the hair on her neck had parted to show the fair 
 white skin beneath as she stooped over Paudeen. He would 
 have liked to think that it had come from her look but it 
 really came from that other thing. 
 
 It was not that he thought of her thinking of him. His 
 feeling for her was such that even to tell her or to think 
 of return made it nothing. If it were love and it seemed 
 to him sometimes to be hate or to hold hate in its heart it 
 was he told himself, only the love of a boy with something 
 of the stars in it. 
 
 For in a way, even, it had nothing to do with her, for he 
 felt her remote as the stars themselves. But there was some- 
 thing about this girl that made him deeply, painfully conscious 
 of himself ashamed of his poverty, of the meanness of his 
 clothes. Stella Fay never made him feel like that. 
 
 Looking at Stella, as she lay on the rug, she seemed to 
 come between him and the girl in the chair like a shimmer- 
 ing veil that changed and dazzled. It made Deirdre Asthar 
 remote almost non-existent. To him, the girl on the rug, 
 as he had discovered, was desire itself, with something un- 
 earthly, wild-eyed, but altogether desirably human as when 
 spirits love mortals. Between her and that other girl there was 
 a gulf intangible, something that could never be bridged. 
 
 His head filled with the fancies of hot passion as he looked, 
 and then his eye lifted to catch a fleeting glance from Deirdre 
 and for a great shame to come to him. 
 
 Finn, looking a trifle wide, caught something that flitted 
 
GHOST-HUNTING 189 
 
 across the shadows thrown from the flames. The little ivory 
 face had seemed to catch a sudden blazing of the turf and at 
 the same moment there flashed upon the boy's brain as though 
 it had been photographed there, the grain carved on the 
 ivory. 
 
 It was Togo going up to his coffin-bed in the loft above. 
 
XVIII 
 
 PAUDEEN 
 
 Through all this time Finn tried to write, but between the 
 glowing cloud of his inspiration and the written page there 
 waved fleetingly a strand of Stella's burnished hair, through the 
 meshes of which Deirdre's green eyes, serene, assured, would 
 sometimes search for him. More than ever was he like that 
 bait in the deeps under Carrickmore torn hither and thither 
 by desire and its opposite. But what was its opposite? 
 
 The process of consolidation which had been shaping the 
 mind and body of Finn Fontaine seemed to have reached a 
 period. He might go forward, but he might once more be 
 flung into the melting pot of doubt as he had so often been 
 before. Development, like all other things, had its method. 
 Rearrangement seemed to be its law. Retrogression seemed to 
 be an intrinsic of progress. 
 
 Not that he realised this consciously. The very condition 
 of his evolution was partial unconsciousness. But down 
 there in the unconscious deeps he was fighting upwards 
 towards consciousness as drowning men fight upwards to the 
 light as he had been fighting since that June day at reading 
 and prayer in the little room at Forestford when he had asked 
 himself: "God? Who was God? Was He?" 
 
 Better an eternity of painful consciousness than the bestial 
 sleep of dreamless extinction. He had heard there were people 
 who desired such extinction as the end of life he did not 
 believe it it seemed incredible, meaningless. 
 
 Unconscious though he was, he now knew, in some blind 
 way, that consciousness was the thing for which he had to 
 fight that it was perhaps the whole end of life, that it was 
 perhaps the supreme attribute of divinity. For the more he 
 thought of it, the more life as it was lived about him came as 
 a nightmare of unconsciousness and incoherency, without cor- 
 relation or ultimate. The incoherency of Crux as of the people 
 
 190 
 
PAUDEEN 191 
 
 at home of the parish church parson as of the Bishop of 
 Whitechapel of the little molluscous middle-class of the 
 Forestford suburb, which ebbed to and fro morning and evening 
 to and from the city, with as much direction and conscious- 
 ness of their environment and reason for existence as that 
 shoal of jelly-fish he had once seen stream past the Black 
 Rock pier all this seemed to him the outstanding fact of 
 life. But it never actively came to him that just because he 
 himself was becoming conscious this was so. 
 
 At first he had believed as a matter of course that all these 
 people about him were as much concerned about this thing 
 as he and that somewhere or somehow they all had a secret 
 philosophy of life, which to him was as much an essential 
 of existence as heart or brain, though he did not call it 
 "philosophy," he called it "a reason for life." Then he had 
 tried to believe they had it, suppressing his own intuitions 
 to the contrary. Finally, wavering between this belief and 
 attempt to believe, he had reached the desolating conclusion 
 that the great mass about him, even sometimes his dearest 
 and best, were as blindly unconscious of any meaning under- 
 lying life and of their relation to it and to one another as the 
 bats that hung in the belfry of the old chapel, for which 
 the twilight was necessary to vision because they could not 
 bear the light. And all this made him miserable for it seemed 
 to cut him off from his fellows. 
 
 This lack of continuity, of realisation, of logic for it came 
 to him as all three appalled and irritated. It was always 
 thrusting itself upon him and in a thousand ways. It was 
 not only that his father left his religion behind him each day 
 when he went upon his pilgrimages with the coals, about 
 which he told, and conscientiously, any lie necessary to their 
 sale nor that Crux, despite the Church in the Fifth Avenue, 
 trafficked just as conscientiously (he had to admit it) in flesh 
 and blood in order to keep up his profits. It was in the sneer 
 of a noble girl like Deirdre Asthar at the grey-faced army of 
 hunger that day upon the Embankment as it lay in the con- 
 trast of the humanity of a Father Con and his indifference 
 to the poverty about him. It showed itself in the great- 
 hearted fishermen of Black Rock who, so tender to children, 
 would put cruel loads upon their small donkeys and beat them 
 unmercifully when they faltered, or on St. Stephen's Day when 
 
192 GODS 
 
 they would kill a little wren for the pleasure of hanging it 
 in a gaily-streamered bush. 
 
 Men, with that intense locality of the human being, pigeon- 
 holed their consciences as their deeds, divorcing religion from 
 action, politics from faith, business from belief, and, above all, 
 the individual from the mass. Each seemed to be fighting 
 blindly for himself. Crux fought for his profits. His father 
 for his little house. The Bishop of Whitechapel for his 
 Church. None of them fought for the world or realised them- 
 selves as citizens of that world. The world stood for them 
 as an extra-ordinary phenomenon in which they had no share, 
 into which they had been chance-flung. 
 
 It was not that he himself was always or altogether clear 
 as to what this consciousness meant. But he knew it when 
 he met it and the people who had it. His father and mother 
 and aunts, as those little middle-class people in the houses of 
 Forestford, as the Titterlings all these belonged to the great 
 army of the blind or unconscious. But Paris Asthar and 
 Father Lestrange had consciousness, as had Thrum and Lan- 
 thorn each in his particular way. They had not all the same 
 quality of consciousness, but they were "conscious." 
 
 But Deirdre Asthar, for all her serenity and a certain dis- 
 tinctiveness which he thought of as nobility, was uncon- 
 scious Stella Fay, conscious. Some of the finest souls he 
 had met, like Mrs. O'Hara and Patsey and Father Con 
 all these were of the unconscious. And all this again threw 
 him into despair. Life apparently had no rules, although it 
 had laws. Life was illogical. It was the worst thing he could 
 say of it. 
 
 This consciousness might be circumscribed or it might be 
 broad, but it always had the same distinguishing quality 
 the quality, not of assuredness every Catholic in Black Rock 
 was assured which was a quality of faith, but of realisation 
 and logic. The Jesuit, like Asthar, knew exactly his relation 
 to the phenomena which surrounded him, though the realisa- 
 tion of each differed vitally from that of the other. But 
 neither of these men were bait in deep waters, flashing blind, 
 unconscious, from side to side under the urge of active de- 
 terminative powers. They were themselves of these directing 
 powers. Yet Crux directed, and yet he was as much a slave 
 
PAUDEEN 193 
 
 to the machine of business and as unconscious of its meaning 
 or end as any of the pound a week cogs in his offices. 
 
 Perhaps consciousness was the magic skein in the forest 
 of life. A tiny, almost invisible, red cord which one might 
 miss through a hundred existences and stumble upon blindly 
 in one. But a cord that correlated everything, that showed 
 the way and the meaning of the maze. Sometimes he had 
 thought he had found it, had begun about it to construct his 
 cosmos which had then once more fallen to pieces under the 
 impact of uncontrollable and unreasonable forces hurtling out 
 of the unknown. 
 
 One thing alone kept him from ultimate despair those 
 strange exaltations which passed through him from some cen- 
 tral universal power, filling him with an ecstasy to life as 
 though some centre of dynamic-power were feeding him with 
 vitality. He could almost say when he was in pulsing com- 
 munication with this source of energy and when the communi- 
 cation was broken. 
 
 Not that Finn Fontaine was mystic or dreamer only. He 
 could be very physical, with strong tastes in food and drink 
 and exercise. And these exaltations could come to him at 
 the most untoward moments, sometimes at the most ordi- 
 nary moments after a full meal as easily as when looking at 
 the sunsets of calm seas under Carrickmore under the in- 
 cense of Stella Fay's physical presence as at the sight of the 
 blue flame that sometimes burned in the eye of the girl who 
 was her opposite. 
 
 And now these forces were at work upon his newly fledged 
 logic. That day when the sunlight flashing through the mists 
 upon the neck of the girl bending over little Paudeen had 
 seemed to make all things plain had brought Deirdre Asthar 
 remotely near in one warm passionate moment of conscious- 
 ness and had left all things outside her unreal and non- 
 existent. Then had come the day in the boreen when Stella 
 Fay's hand laid upon his arm had seemed to burn itself into 
 his veins . . . and that evening before the fire when Deirdre 
 had surprised him in a moment when flesh and blood seemed 
 the only real and the girl with the serene eyes remote as a 
 solitary light upon lofty dusk-enshrouded battlements. 
 
 For these two girls stood for him dimly as the symbols 
 for two opposite sets of forces, as they themselves were oppo- 
 
194 GODS 
 
 site. Their opposition showed itself in a hundred ways, not 
 only in such intangibilities as speech as in the more concrete 
 things of aversion and expression. About Stella Fay there was 
 something elemental, as in her love for losing herself in the 
 green waters under Carrickmore about Deirdre Asthar some- 
 thing adorably earthly and human as in her dread for those 
 same waters which from childhood she had always feared. 
 And yet it was that elemental girl who touched his senses, 
 and that other who was so far away. 
 
 Then had come the scoffing of Deirdre at those things of 
 the Beyond that were coming closer to him in the mists of 
 Ireland and with it their revealing by that other being of 
 warm flesh and blood who yet seemed to live in other worlds. 
 The breach that had first definitely shown itself that day of the 
 Embankment when Deirdre had looked in cold contempt 
 upon that mob of pinched grey faces the look that had made 
 him hate her was now widening every day, although he had 
 to confess that it was a breach which existed only in his 
 imagination, for he had never been near Deirdre Asthar. 
 But there would be moments when a glance from those 
 starry eyes would set him aflame and make all else, including 
 Stella, of no account. 
 
 For indeed, however ridiculous and helpless it seemed, he 
 was deeply in love with Paris Asthar's sister, even though he 
 sometimes hated her. And he was as deeply conscious of his 
 inconstancy and shame. 
 
 It was here that little Paudeen had stepped in once more 
 to resolve his doubts and to put the last touches to the de- 
 struction of the world he had begun to build about himself 
 that day by the roadside. 
 
 He had been down at the curing sheds one day of Decem- 
 ber when the men and boats were all out at sea and the sun 
 shone down on the icy waters of the bay. It had come to 
 him as from a great distance the voice from the sea. And 
 so he had run to the end of the pier to find standing there 
 Deirdre Asthar, a new Deirdre, her hands clasped in agony, 
 looking down helpless and frightened into the water in which 
 something struggled sluggishly. By her side the woman they 
 had met that day by the roadside, motionless, stared into 
 the waters. 
 
 Then he saw the little face turn upwards in the tides which 
 
PAUDEEN 195 
 
 swirled furiously past the nose of the pier, bare even of a 
 rope, sporting wanton with their prey before dragging it under. 
 
 The boy who, for all that splendid frame, could not swim, 
 standing there angry, helpless, with the consciousness of 
 futility, had called to the girl who, for all her dread of 
 deep waters, could swim, to save him, and had heard the re- 
 ply given with a new humility in the proud eyes. "I am 
 afraid!" 
 
 In the cold sunlight something had run past them and 
 plunged, a living stream of green, into the purple-grey of the 
 waters. Through the swirl of the angry tides, she threaded 
 her way with writhing double-handed stroke, the copper of 
 her hair loosing out behind her under the pull of the currents, 
 the emerald of her dress clinging to her limbs until she 
 looked like some mermaid playing in the waters. But as 
 Stella Fay reached the child, the undertow had dragged him 
 down. For a moment, the girl had half risen in the waters, 
 shaking the hair out of her eyes, and then had plunged under 
 the surface. 
 
 For seconds they had stood there looking at the blank sur- 
 face which showed no signs of life. Finn had hated the girl 
 beside him. She who, although she could swim, had let the 
 child drown it was that other, who in the last minute had 
 come so strangely close to him, that had ventured into the heart 
 of the angry tides. And now she was gone. 
 
 But even as they looked, there was a flash of ruddy copper 
 in the green waters as something beat itself towards the light 
 with something clutched. 
 
 And it was then that Finn clambering down one of the 
 stanchions that supported the pier, clinging, desperate, with 
 leg and hand to the slippery surface, had reached down to take 
 up the little broken child and hand him up into the arms of 
 his mother. And so, finding foothold where the cement had 
 fallen away, he had taken the girl up beside him, feeling the 
 soft pressure of her foot upon his shoulder as she climbed 
 lightly above him, and so she had reached down her hand 
 to help him back into safety out of the whimper of the waters 
 which lunged past. 
 
 But Deirdre Asthar had hurried away, the little proud 
 head bowed, the slender shoulders moving convulsively. 
 
 "Thanks Finn/' the girl had said as she stood there, her 
 
196 GODS 
 
 garments clinging to her. She had reached out her hand to 
 him, the other carelessly swinging her hair behind her head 
 in one great dank horse-coil. 
 
 "Now you can kiss me." 
 
 She had pressed her body against him and held up the wet 
 of her bright red lips to his. 
 
 He stooped and kissed her, once, twice, as a thirsty man 
 drinks a glass of water that is lifted to his lips. 
 
XIX 
 
 HYSSOP AND VINEGAR 
 
 WHEN Finn Fontaine's world fell to pieces on the impact of 
 two kisses from a pair of red lips when all that structure 
 he had so laboriously evolved in the previous four years crashed 
 about him, it left him dazed as though he had been physically 
 hurt. And now, under the roar of the express which was 
 bearing him to Euston, it seemed to him that he heard voices 
 that whispered to him from under the tumult of the wheels. 
 
 These voices were many. Some urged him to lose himself 
 in a coil of copper hair and a pair of red lips others spoke 
 to him of ambition and urged the slaying of self for the 
 glorification of self, urged him to make his surrender to Thrum 
 so that, becoming financially free, he might one day realise 
 his art. And there was another, a strange little voice this, 
 which seemed to him the voice of the island he was leaving 
 and which told him as a mother might tell a child that neither 
 desire nor ambition was the goal of life but love. 
 
 Sometimes this last voice would come to him speaking 
 through human lips, whilst, above, two eyes gazed steadfastly 
 at him from under their serene assured brows. And then 
 Deirdre Asthar would be speaking to him, not as in life, not 
 as the frightened girl of that day by the sea, but as another 
 Deirdre a Deirdre that lay hidden beneath that other the 
 Deirdre that had revealed herself to him under her humiliation. 
 
 And her he called the spirit of Ireland, and it was of that 
 spirit he had been trying to write in his first attempt at a 
 book, and failing. Ireland, like Deirdre Asthar, refused analy- 
 sis. One had feelings about her one could not write about 
 her. 
 
 So it was that Finn returned to London. His was no ela- 
 tion at the conquering of a beautiful woman he felt himself 
 rather the conquered. That day by the waters upon the moist 
 compression of those lips he had felt strange exultation 
 
 197 
 
198 GODS 
 
 and afterwards that something "had touched the hem of his 
 garment." Then the depression. 
 
 Now he understood why those monks up there in that mon- 
 astery of Melleray on the side of the Knockmealdown moun- 
 tains, many of them young men, strong men, gifted men, had 
 walked out of life into the living death of the Trappist. He 
 knew why some of them had taken the vows of perpetual 
 silence and shut themselves into the tomb of their thoughts 
 and the door upon dead memories. Now he knew why the 
 Spirit's Elect had the comfort as well as the terrible courage of 
 their convictions. Sorrow opened all doors, made plain the 
 secret things of life. He had also his black draught his also 
 the hyssop and the vinegar. 
 
 He no more thought of marriage with Stella Fay than with 
 the girl with whom he was finished for ever Deirdre Asthar. 
 Women like Stella Fay did not marry. They were the ele- 
 mental things of life, going through the world to set the 
 hearts of men afire and finally passing out themselves in strong 
 blinding flame. To think of marriage with spirits like Deirdre 
 Asthar was to think of the un-human and impossible. Love 
 for such beings subsisted only upon the things of the spirit. 
 It died upon fleshly approach. One did not love them as crea- 
 tures of flesh and blood but loved rather something that stood 
 behind them. And yet, though unapproachable, Deirdre 
 Asthar was human even adorable. Only now he had put 
 the thought of her from him for ever her coldness and con- 
 tempt, as that physical cowardice which in man or woman 
 seemed to him the unforgivable. 
 
 But why did he always see those starry eyes that veiled a 
 secret from him? 
 
 Not that Stella Fay had taunted Deirdre with her cowar- 
 dice. She had if anything been nicer to her only the girl 
 had drawn into herself, had avoided those others, except her 
 half-brother and Mrs. O'Hara. And even in his most strenu- 
 ous contempt, Finn remembered something that Father 
 Lestrange had once said about such things: "Cowardice, Finn, 
 is a matter of temperament the really brave man is the 
 natural coward who masters his fear. And we must distin- 
 guish between cowardice and terror. I knew a general once, 
 in the British army, who could not enter a house where there 
 was a cat." 
 
HYSSOP AND VINEGAR 199 
 
 And Deirdre Asthar had always had that strange, unreason- 
 ing terror of deep waters, never, despite her being able to 
 swim, venturing out of her depth. He had heard her say that, 
 as a child, she would have this terror when entering her bath 
 a terror of something that lurked there to drag her down. 
 And Mrs. O'Hara had told him the story of an English 
 nurse who had frightened her by taking her into the deep 
 waters under Carrickmore, and that since then she had feared. 
 Yet Finn still thought she should have conquered herself. 
 But, after all, what was it to him? She had never been any- 
 thing to him nor ever could have been anything. To Deirdre 
 Asthar he was nothing. 
 
 The atmosphere of Ash Villa was not however conducive 
 to these thoughts. From the moment when the door was 
 opened by a savage from Limehouse, whom Mrs. Fontaine had 
 winkled out of a home for Protestant Foundlings, where she 
 had been brought up on dogma and skilly, and who stood 
 something over four feet in her heelless shoes, a wisp of cap 
 set askew upon some aspish hair of a nondescript ginger and 
 a corner of red flannel below the abbreviated skirts that was 
 like a falling from grace Finn was conscious of a new atmos- 
 phere in the home. 
 
 Ginger, as she had originally informed Mrs. Fontaine her 
 name was, she not knowing any other, although her official 
 name at the Protestant Foundlings was "G. Tinker," there 
 always having been some doubt about her Christian name, 
 met her new master with a friendly grin upon a generous mouth 
 which displayed a vast sense of her importance in the scheme 
 of things entire. She had never seen him before, but ob- 
 viously wished him to feel at home from the start. 
 
 "Oh, sir and we 'ave been a-hexpectin' of you for the 
 larst parst two hours. We'd quite given you up for lorst. 
 We 'ad indeed. Missus will be pleased so will marster." 
 
 In the hall, a plate of blue china containing some carefully 
 scattered visiting cards perched perilously upon the umbrella 
 stand. The plate was chipped and had been substituted for 
 its predecessor, which was whole, by Mrs. Fontaine, "because 
 it might fall." On the stairs, some real carpet had replaced 
 the imitation cork linoleum of some months before. In the 
 little drawing-room, the blinds were carefully drawn to shut 
 out any possible rays of the January sun from the new lace 
 
200 GODS 
 
 curtains which Mr. Fontaine had purchased in one of his 
 journeys from a nice young man with a broad nose a trifle 
 hooky and a Lancashire accent who had told him "it being his 
 birthday he was givin' 'em away." He had also confided to 
 the believing Jemmy an aphorism which had caused him 
 to ruminate over many days. He had said: "In this world, 
 guv'nor, if ye've got nothing but your skin, the others will 
 take away your skin too; but the more you have the more 
 people want to give you." 
 
 In the little dark room, it was a case of high cockleorum 
 and thank God from whom all blessings flow! His mother, 
 arrayed more like a bride than a mother, in clothes of the 
 lightest possible shade, with a cross of imitation diamonds 
 pendant from her neck and a generally scintillating effect, re- 
 ceived him with a new dignity; his father, not so shrunken, 
 his hands in his pockets, viewing the effect from a remote cor- 
 ner. His aunt Bella who, as her sister became whiter and whiter, 
 seemed to become blacker and blacker, looking indeed a perfect 
 raven, appeared to be suffering from a certain access of ac- 
 erbity and uric acid. She was sniffy distinctly sniffy. And 
 there was a smell of onions in the room. Upon the floor lay 
 an ill-considered ornament in smithereens, Uncle Bobs, as he 
 was informed, having just blown in and blown out again. 
 Nobody troubled. 
 
 "I'll buy you a dozen of these," said Jemmy, touching one of 
 the broken pieces with the toe of a contemptuous boot. 
 
 In the corner, reading happily a tract entitled "The Sinner 
 in Hell," as he noticed when he threw his arms about her 
 to kiss her, was his dear little grandmother. 
 
 On the wall hung an enlarged picture of the giver of all 
 good things, Mr. Buldger Spellbind, whose beetling forehead 
 and deep rather close-set eyes stared philanthropically at that 
 other enlargement the lady of Beauty Soap, now relegated 
 finally to the position of a distant relation. For Mr. Fon- 
 taine had, in his new found prosperity, given up selling 
 "Beauty" and had, metaphorically, told the terrible MacGlusky 
 to go to the devil with his coals. That is to say, in point of 
 actual fact, he had gone more or less hat in hand and with a 
 certain proud humility asked permission to resign in view of 
 "having come into some money." For "The Happy Homes of 
 England, Limited" were rushing upwards and James Fontaine 
 
HYSSOP AND VINEGAR 201 
 
 and his wife had sold out at hundreds per cent, and were 
 thinking of retiring. 
 
 The only blot upon all this was Aunt Bella, who, it ap- 
 peared, had had a slight "seizure." (Mrs. Fontaine said it 
 with a certain distant dignity that conjured visions of credit- 
 able apoplectic seizures of the rich with side-whiskered medi- 
 cal practitioners.) When she got up to walk to the door, 
 Finn noticed that she tottered a little, whilst the scar on her 
 face, which had taken a whiter hue, twitched. ^ But what 
 she lost in physical power she made up in a religious venom 
 that would have done credit to a converted Russell's viper. 
 She at least had no doubts that the present affluence was 
 a trick of Satan to seduce the souls of her sister and brother- 
 in-law, and she said so, what time the eye of Aunt Maria, 
 who was trying to hide herself behind the door, rolled itself 
 piously around. 
 
 "Of course you could not expect us to take in lodgers," 
 said Mrs. Fontaine distantly and apropos of nothing in par- 
 ticular. "Not even paying guests. It is so demeaning. We 
 are about to give that person Strom upstairs notice he and 
 his vibrations indeed and his sculpture. His ridiculous statues! 
 Not a bit like life." Mrs. Fontaine sniffed a trifle. 
 
 It looked doubtful for the Swedish lodger, who, in order, as 
 he said, "to refine his vibrations," had recently developed ex- 
 cessive tendencies to purification of the body, internal and 
 external, which, taking the form of purges and sunbaths, had 
 caused further complications in the road. 
 
 "Genevieve," said Mrs. Fontaine to Ginger, "serve the 
 tea." 
 
 "They called her 'Ginger'," she explained loftily as the little 
 servant with a "Yes 'm" went out of the room. "We could 
 not have that, of course, so we have baptised" (she said the 
 word again, thought she really meant "christened") "her 
 Genevieve. Really, when she first came she was quite a 
 savage. Quite. Had the most heretical notions about Chris- 
 tianity and used the oddest expressions the oddest. . . ." 
 Mrs. Fontaine opened her eyes slightly at Finn, who was 
 sitting with one long arm about his little grandmother who 
 was patting the bony hand as she used to do when Finn was 
 a tiny baby. 
 
 "Of course you know we Cutheys have a crest," said Mrs. 
 
202 GODS 
 
 Fontaine largely and assuredly. "Perhaps you would like to 
 see it." She went over to what she called her "escritoire," 
 and, taking out a sheet of greyey-blue paper, pushed it over 
 to Finn, who saw upon the top an apoplectic black goose with 
 a silver spoon in its beak. "A silver spoon," said Mr. Fon- 
 taine making one of his rare jokes. 
 
 But Mrs. Fontaine said it was a swan and appeared much 
 disgusted at what she called Finn's plebeian imagination, for 
 Finn in his innocence had referred to it as the inferior bird. 
 Aunt Judy, with her capacity for putting her foot in it, had 
 also mistaken the bird for a goose, and Aunt Bella had 
 turned the iron in the wound by remarking in airy malignancy: 
 ". . . but all Fanny's geese are swans." 
 
 His father, in his corner, seemed to have something on his 
 mind. He made several what his grandmother called "offers" 
 to speak, coming half way out of his corner to do so, but was 
 prevented by the majestic attitude of his wife, who obviously 
 was determined to steer the ship of prosperous state. At 
 last it came out. 
 
 He had had a personal interview with Mr. Spellbind, who 
 had advised him to "double his capital and go the whole hog" 
 (Mr. Spellbind for so serious a pillar of the church had curious 
 lapses at times) by buying back some of the shares he had 
 sold in The Happy Homes of England, which he said were 
 worth double their present market price. "For his part, he 
 did not mind doing a fellow-Christian a good turn and in re- 
 gard to getting the shares cheap he knew a man. . . ." He 
 had even given Mr. Fontaine his signed photo which now hung 
 over the mantelpiece. 
 
 "A sweet man," said Jemmy. 
 
 "A noble soul," responded his wife. 
 
 "Cent, per cent.," said Mr. Fontaine with a business acer- 
 bity unusual. 
 
 Finn felt strangely uneasy in all this affluence. Through 
 his association with Crux, he knew a little of Buldger Spell- 
 bind and his "reconstructions," in which he specialised. Out- 
 side the "the city" he was regarded as a public benefactor and 
 philanthropist inside, in admiring praise, as "that downy 
 bird Spellbind." In fact, it had lately become quite the 
 fashion for religion and finance to get mixed together, just as 
 the church and stage had been mixing in the previous decade, 
 
HYSSOP AND VINEGAR 203 
 
 with a fine tolerance on the part of the former and as fine and 
 good-humoured a contempt on the part of the latter. At the 
 last masked ball held at the Conventual Garden, the first and 
 second prizes had been won by two men got up respectively as 
 "Church and Stage" and "Religion and Finance." The first 
 had made up half of his face and body as a clergyman with 
 shovel hat, choker and black coat, and the other half as a 
 rouged and painted lady of the ballet from her coiffure to her 
 abbreviated frills and well-proportioned silk-tighted calf. The 
 other had made up one half of his body as a Jew money lender, 
 holding in his hand the sign of the three golden balls, his nose 
 was pendulous, his eye cupreous, and the other half as a sort 
 of Reverend Stiggins, with broken black cotton gloves, gamp 
 and dirty white socks. 
 
 When he looked at the shrunken respectability of his pro- 
 genitor, the moist, grey, believing eye and the last pair of bul- 
 bous boots and then up at the little close-eyed man with the 
 bulging forehead which he had always associated with poison- 
 ers, his heart misgave him. He felt, as he always felt in that 
 atmosphere, a sense of overwhelming depression and, as al- 
 ways, finding it unbearable, he went out into the hall, took 
 up his hat and made his way over to the Titterlings. Mrs. 
 Titterling and Mary were the only two beings he could find 
 tolerable after Ireland. 
 
 Mrs. Titterling, as ever, greeted him serenely, with a quiet 
 welcome that seemed to be always expectant. But there came 
 to him as he looked at her a feeling of something changed. The 
 apparent calmness of gaze had something deep, eroding, in the 
 heart of it as one sees red suns in the blackness of mountain 
 lakes. There was a wildness, for all its outward calm, in the 
 grey eye, and it seemed to him that something was tearing at 
 the heart of this woman. 
 
 Mr. Titterling he found luxuriating in the little back draw- 
 ing room, no longer scrabbling for cigarette ends under the 
 fireplace, but smoking from a case of green crocodile, with 
 an excessive gold "T. T." on the outside, long gold-tipped fel- 
 lows which he drew down into his lungs one after the other to 
 his exceeding satisfaction. (It was the first time Finn had 
 ever seen him with a whole cigarette.) The monocle glittered 
 at an aggressive angle. In the tie a horseshoe diamond pin 
 made play with the flames of the fire, and, in fact, as Mr. 
 
204 GODS 
 
 Titterling made himself announced between two spasms of 
 Master Seymour who, being at the moment a Bedouin chief, 
 kept plunging in and out of the room at intervals, mostly un- 
 expected, from the desert of the passage followed by Larkin 
 and Plantagenet, he was "flush." Little Elizabeth, showing 
 rather more red drawer than usual, pillowed her tossed head 
 on Bluggins the bulldog, who licked his chops in friendly but 
 inconsequent greeting to Finn. 
 
 Yet to Finn there came something of that same uneasiness 
 which he had felt when he had looked at Mrs. Titterling. The 
 two horns of hair curled with their unsure parting over the 
 high nose and humorous eyes and mouth of Mr. Titterling, who 
 to Finn looked like a gay dog. but a sad dog after a night of it. 
 
 "Listen to 'em," he said, as he motioned with his head 
 through the wall from which came the sound of one of those 
 bitter-sweet hymns chaunted by Elder Parkinson and Mrs. Tit- 
 terling. "They give me the creeps." 
 
 "Finn," he said all at once. "Do you believe in hell?" The 
 monocle had dropped to reveal an anxious eye. "Damned if I 
 don't," he added enigmatically without waiting for an answer. 
 
 Finn, without knowing exactly why, liked this sad bad dog 
 of a Titterling. There was something so genuine and so friendly 
 about him that he always liked to speak with him. There was 
 something so understanding and tolerant that was it tol- 
 erant, something so nearly loveable, that he always felt at 
 home and unstrained with this man. 
 
 "You know, Finn, when I was a little chap going to the 
 Baptist chapel, I thought hell was all my eye. Now I'm not so 
 sure. I never believed in it until I kicked over the traces. 
 You know what it was with me well, I'll tell you, though 
 you're young for that sort of thing it was the women. Gawd's 
 truth, but I never knew whether they were angels or devils. 
 The worst of them could have made me a saint and the best of 
 them a sinner. Jiggered if I know the difference. The sin- 
 ner makes the best saint. Tell you the honest to God, some 
 of the Piccadilly ladies have filled me as a boy with more fine 
 thoughts and yearnings for the unattainable than my own 
 wife, whom I worship as I have never worshipped my God. 
 Why is it, Finn, that the good woman never fills one with 
 beautiful fancies? Why is it always the Strange Woman?" 
 
 He looked at the boy in humourous bewilderment and hit a 
 
HYSSOP AND VINEGAR 205 
 
 lump of coal on the head with the poker as though he would 
 see what was inside. 
 
 "Finn," he said, breaking off suddenly as though it had just 
 occurred to him: "What is love?" 
 
 Finn blushed hotly. Some of these things he had been 
 hearing were the things he himself had been feeling. 
 
 "Needn't flush, old man," said Mr. Titterling in his friendly 
 fashion. "We've all been through it." He drew a deep breath 
 of cigarette smoke and expelled it thinly through a corner of 
 his mouth looking at it like a connoisseur through the mono- 
 cled eye. He had become serious. 
 
 "Tell you what. The old -girl guesses something. She's 
 tumbled to something. You thought I didn't see you that day 
 at Liverpool Street Station when that girl was saying good-bye 
 to me. Ah, but I did." He looked knowingly at the boy. 
 
 "It's all about her. Left one of her letters about damned 
 awkward and damned careless and I believe the missus found 
 it. P'rhaps not. But she has a funny look in her eye the 
 last few days and she has been praying at me through that 
 wall." He gestured through the wall with a cigarette held 
 like a pencil between finger and thumb. 
 
 "Ever been prayed at? It's awful, Finn, awful . . ." 
 
 "Push off, you young devil," he broke off to adjure young 
 Seymour who had just made another raid, looking more than 
 ever like locusts and wild honey. 
 
 "She's been praying at me now for four days and nights. She 
 threatens me with hell and I'm afraid. That's Gawd's truth, 
 I'm afraid. Not only afraid of her hell, but of something 
 else. There's something calculating and suppressed in her that 
 frightens me. I know Popples" (it was his pet name for his 
 wife), "and she'd stick at nothing. I know her. She'd damn 
 you to save your soul that's the only way I can put it like 
 Torquemada and that little lot. 
 
 "Well, so long. I'm going to hoof it. Can't stand that thing 
 there. Not a word to the wife . . ." He had slipped out. 
 
 Finn sat there wondering at the complexity and yet simi- 
 larity of life. Much that Titterling had said to him was his 
 own story with Deirdre Asthar and Stella, the battle between 
 body and spirit. He put his head down between his long legs 
 and bony knees. The world was too much for him. 
 
 He was awakened by a gentle pressure on his shoulder, 
 
206 GODS 
 
 looked up to find little Mary Titterling, strangely bigger and 
 older, looking at him with her serious eyes, her black hair 
 falling about her. And then she had thrown herself into his 
 arms and her own lorjg slender arms about his neck and had 
 pressed her face to his. 
 
 "Oh, Finn, Finn," was all she could say. And then . , , 
 "Oh, I'm so glad you're back I'm in such trouble." 
 
 She had taken herself away with a little gesture of grave 
 dignity and stood looking at him, her hands clasped behind 
 her back. "It's mother and father . . . and . . . 
 everything." And then she had broken into a torrent of weep- 
 ing as though her world also were too much for her, whilst 
 Bluggins and little Elizabeth looked on astonished. 
 
 "I can't believe, Finn. I can't believe. I don't believe in 
 mother's hell and in the Spirit's Elect. I can't . . ." She 
 said it piteously. "I believe God is love. I believe love can do 
 all things can save father and all of us. I want love to be 
 loved. I want to love the whole world." 
 
 She stood there. "I cannot bear to live without love," she 
 said. "They don't love. They hate." She nodded through 
 the wall as her father had done. 
 
 And then, impetuous, she had thrown herself into his arms 
 once more and had placed her arms about his neck and had 
 told him shyly: "I love you, Finn, I love you." 
 
 And he had kissed her and comforted her and so it was 
 that, coming in from the prayer-meeting on the other side 
 of the wall, her nose very much on one side from her 
 naturally good heart trying to encompass the terrifying belief 
 in the damnation of the whole race outside the Elect, a trifle 
 heartbroken, and now in the sceptical sneery stage through 
 which she always passed in her religious experiments, Aunt 
 Judy had found them. 
 
 Finn returned to Ash Villa to find a big square rough* 
 papered envelope, faintly scented, awaiting him from Stella 
 Fay, with a letter asking him to go to the reception by the 
 London Universalists to Ellen Masters at Charing Cross, who 
 now was on her way from India. "It is a new revelation," she 
 had written in her strong upright hand with the printed capi- 
 tals. "And she is bringing Chandra Pal, 'the Light from the 
 East.' It is his thirty-sixth reincarnation. Won't you come 
 . . ." and then she had written after a little space, in 
 inverted commas: "Finn, dear?" 
 
XX 
 
 ELLEN MASTERS 
 
 One at least had marked Finn's new hesitancy. The Jesuit, 
 with that instinct of his order which has trained reason into 
 intuition, saw that his time had come, and made a great 
 effort to do what he had all along had in mind to win the 
 boy for the church, for one of those active orders where those 
 gifts of speech and energy which Finn was now revealing to 
 the interested eye of the priest could be used to the best ad- 
 vantage. 
 
 This tall man, with the dark rolling eye, had guessed more 
 than Finn ever could have thought possible. Paris Asthar and 
 his half sister he knew, as Finn had discovered, and then there 
 was Father Con in Dunhallow, so that it did not need extra- 
 ordinary exercise of the imagination for Father Lestrange to 
 piece together that disordered mosaic of Finn Fontaine's later 
 years. 
 
 He had invited him to the Catholic Cathedral at Westmin- 
 ter, where the sermon had been preached by a prince of the 
 Church, a famous cardinal, an Irishman, whose tall ascetic 
 figure and boyish face with its close-cut white hair standing 
 out from under the scarlet biretta, which he had removed in the 
 pulpit, and scarlet robe peeping from under his surplice, had 
 deeply impressed the boy. He had preached upon "False Gods," 
 choosing for his text: "Thou shalt have none other gods but 
 Me." 
 
 This scarlet-frocked priest had spoken of the false gods 
 now being "created" (a curious word), throughout the world, 
 and their symbols. The false gods of Democracy with their 
 symbol of blood, the Red Flag, reared in defiance of the sym- 
 bol of Religion, the Cross, and, as he spoke, Finn had thought 
 of how General Bliss and Paris Asthar had once said much 
 the same thing about symbols but in other words, although the 
 latter had said that the symbols of Christianity and Democracy 
 
 207 
 
208 GODS 
 
 were both symbols of blood the Crucifixion and the Red Flag. 
 
 Of Ireland and the voice, until then harsh, dominating, 
 softened strangely as he said it he spoke with a rare affection, 
 saying that in the years to come the Island of the Faith would 
 once more become to Europe and the world "the Isle of Saints" 
 as it had in the centuries that were gone. It also had its 
 symbol the Green Flag and for a moment the Churchman 
 had become the politician, for the eyes had flashed under their 
 dark curving brows. But through it all, the Church of Rome 
 moved assured, triumphant, up to that last day when, as the 
 speaker said, "the final battle, the battle between the dogmas 
 of this world and of the world to come the dogmas of So- 
 cialism and Catholicism would usher in the Armageddon 
 from which the Church of Christ would emerge triumphant 
 for all time." 
 
 But before then, he said, the world was to have another Ar- 
 mageddon a great war which should have only one object, 
 whatever the apparent reason might be: "the tearing down 
 of the veils between this world and the next and with it the 
 destruction of that materialism which had gradually during 
 the preceding half century been covering the spirit of Europe 
 like a poisonous accretion." 
 
 It was on this note the sermon had finished a note of omni- 
 potent faith. It was what Finn had once heard Paris Asthar 
 say that evening at "The Cloisters" to the professors, and he 
 had seen Paris Asthar himself standing in one of the side aisles 
 watching the Mass as though it had been a show and smiling 
 secretly to himself. The face seemed to have sunk still more 
 into its folds, crumbling away behind them, as he had first 
 noticed it that night of Asthar's struggle with Patsey in the 
 House of Dreams. 
 
 There ran to his mind, irrelevant, a favourite gibe of As- 
 thar's: "To every bishop his crook." He was always gibing 
 at Christianity and calling himself "a Pagan." 
 
 The Jesuit had taken him after the gorgeous paganism of 
 the Byzantine mass to the high tower from where London 
 stretched itself out into a grey infinity around them, and from 
 there he had shown him, if not all the kingdoms of the world 
 and the glory of them, other kingdoms. Finn had been 
 deeply moved by the Mass and had felt that same almost pain- 
 ful desire which he had felt that day in the Strand Tabernacle, 
 
ELLEN MASTERS 209 
 
 to throw himself upon the bosom of infinity and let himself be 
 carried out on the wings of the spirit. The tinkle of tam- 
 bourine, the bray of trumpet, and the smash of drum the 
 shouts of the faithful as the exhortation of the speaker had 
 been replaced by the deep sourdine of the invisible organ, the 
 voices of men and boys chanting and the grandeur of the mass 
 with its embroidered traditions of the centuries . . . but 
 the feeling was the same. Finn knew that both were the same 
 thing. 
 
 And, not knowing that, the Jesuit knew nothing. He had 
 marked Finn's emotion and he believed as such clever spirits 
 believe that his time had come whereas it had passed. 
 
 He found the boy strangely unresponsive to the story in 
 which he contrasted the evanescence of the present with the 
 eternal permanence of the future. And then he had been silent, 
 to say after a moment: 
 
 "I think there is something else at the bottom of this, Finn, 
 my boy." He had placed a lean white hand upon the boy's 
 shoulder as they looked at the sun sinking dully down through 
 the frosty mists of a February day. He broke off ... 
 "I knew a man, once, Finn . . . He was, I think, a strong 
 man, and he meant to be a good one ... he was a man 
 much as you will one day be. He had more than his share of 
 good looks don't blush, Finn, for you are becoming rather a 
 splendid-looking fellow, you know," he said smilingly, "and 
 he had a good deal more than his fair share of brains at least, 
 so his teachers said, and it seemed to him on the threshold of 
 life that only one thing existed there a pair of woman's eyes 
 . . ." He was again silent for a moment, the ball of red 
 flame as it sunk showing itself in smouldering fires in the 
 depths of the eyes, the face illumined as it looked through the 
 haze of blue silver. "And in those eyes he lost himself soul 
 and body. 
 
 "I knew the man, I say that is why I speak so surely of 
 him ... he told me his story. He was a Catholic and 
 she a Protestant. But it was not that. He had pledged him- 
 self when quite a child to other eyes, to those of Mary the 
 Mother of God. But once I ..." he corrected himself 
 quickly, "he thought the sun, moon and stars turned round 
 his divinity, but there came the moment when he had to decide 
 between his love and the Church, his love for God or for the 
 
210 GODS 
 
 world. He chose God, and he has never regretted it . . ." 
 
 He said it strongly enough, but his voice faltered a little as 
 he said it. Finn, looking at the tall figure where it stood near 
 the lofty coping, seemed to see a light of neither earth nor 
 heaven shining upon the dark face as he had seen it stand in 
 that dream of long ago before the flickering fires of the open 
 pit. 
 
 From the high tower where he had seen the sun sink in blue 
 fire behind the bricks and mortar, Finn went to his afternoon 
 engagement with Stella Fay, whom he was to meet at the Uni- 
 versalist headquarters in Piccadilly. The Jesuit might have 
 shaken him, had it not been that the desire to love which filled 
 him was not founded upon any particular faith, but upon 
 Faith. This desire was to him the same thing as that exalta- 
 tion which came to him sometimes out of nothing it was the 
 thing of which he got the reflection as faces that men see in 
 dark wells or the thing caught in the web of memories from the 
 days of the twilight when men and spirits had loved and played 
 together, something conjured by Patsey's fairies or by a fang 
 of grey ruin sentinelling lonely seas or the thing that seemed 
 to lie behind all work and play and prayer as it lay behind 
 the face of a young girl or the voice of a boy. The wish to 
 love. 
 
 Sometimes the passion of this thing seemed to lie in the 
 touch of Stella Fay, who, in a carnate way, made flesh and 
 spirit one and invisible. 
 
 And again, sometimes, it seemed to him that this same thing, 
 this desire, this driving force, lay in ambition. He longed for 
 power, for recognition, but this faith of his was also part of 
 that longing. He wished to have power over the souls of men 
 and then it would come to him that it was not domination he 
 wanted but love that his wish for power was but a sort of 
 hunger for souls. He wished to love and to be loved. 
 
 Mary Titterling was right. Patsey was right. Love was the 
 heart of all things. Love could not be placed behind the bars 
 of any tabernacle or any church. Love and faith were one 
 thing. It was the thing that was the universal solvent, not 
 only of the barriers between men, but of those between the 
 worlds of matter and spirit. And sometimes the grey hunger- 
 line of the Embankment would drift across his consciousness 
 like a wreath of smoke. 
 
ELLEN MASTERS 211 
 
 But these thoughts quickly passed as he came to the Uni- 
 versalist headquarters with the mystic snake, its tail in its 
 mouth, symbol of eternity, over the door of the bookshop which 
 formed the ground floor of the place. The shop was closed, it 
 being a Sunday, but he ran his eye over the books in the 
 window. 
 
 Here also that synthesis of love and faith seemed to be at 
 work. A book upon modern ghost stories lay side by side with 
 a book upon Indian Yoga, and another upon "Fluidic Vital- 
 ism," whatever that might mean. The Bhagavad Gita nestled 
 close to a morocco bound copy of the New Testament, whilst 
 a gilt statue of the Buddha smiled sleepily across the expanse 
 of shelf at a plaster figure of the Christ. Here, a book on 
 "Love and Death," a book of beauty as Finn knew, lay side 
 by side with a little pretentious pamphlet called "On the Thres- 
 hold," with the superscription by "An Indweller" in a sort of 
 arrogant humility. That queer book of Paris Asthar upon 
 "How the Gods Are Born," which had been banned as blas- 
 phemous from the public libraries, stared insolent from its yel- 
 low binding at a treatise upon the Persian religions, whilst 
 Thomas a Kempis's "Imitation of Christ" lay by the side of 
 "The Delphic Oracle," and a book upon "The Secret of the 
 Pyramids" opened at a passage which said that they had never 
 been used for tombs, but only as chambers for the prepara- 
 tion of the neophyte for the secrets of the priesthood and urg- 
 ing that they should be restored to their former use. 
 
 With all this he had a sort of cuneiform vision of books 
 covered with the hieroglyphics of Babylon and Egypt and 
 others with the lettering of Sanscrit, whilst modem faiths 
 were represented by a treatise upon the newly introduced to 
 Europe universal religion of Bahaism. 
 
 Of course Universalism itself, which professed to be the syn- 
 thesis of all religions, ancient and modern, lay inextricably 
 around and through all this as a sort of matrix. 
 
 Surely here was that synthesis of life which Finn had seemed 
 to be realising, but, instead, it left him bewildered, impressed 
 and doubtful. This was rather patchwork than synthesis. Yet 
 the book on Universalism which Stella had lent him had, with 
 its recognition of one central point common to all religions, 
 struck fire from his imagination. 
 
 In the passage at the side of the shop, where a riot of per- 
 
212 GODS 
 
 fumes struggled together, he found a gilded cage aflutter with 
 strange birds he could even see some feathers waving in the 
 half light one of the birds, which finally showed itself as a 
 small brass-bound boy, struggling to open the highly gilded 
 gate of the lift, which he had just shut on the others. 
 
 In one corner, after he had entered, Finn found a sort of 
 bull-man, whose frock coat clothed him sleekly, his absurdly di- 
 minutive hand holding a big curly-brimmed silk hat. From 
 above the high and glossy collar he beamed ecstatically upon 
 Finn to his extreme confusion, which was deepened by finding 
 close to him a sort of ancient Babylonian dancing girl, her 
 withered chins enlaced by strings of Persian turquoises, like the 
 crop of some old fowl, who looked at him in quick bird-like 
 fashion from under the nodding cock plumes which crested for- 
 ward from her high round hat. She was so decollete that she 
 made him ashamed, and her perilous skirts rustled as she 
 moved. It was the rustle of riches as Finn had come to know 
 it and it made him angry in a resentful way. 
 
 On the other side of him in the lift was an old lady with 
 a heavily furrowed face of strong intelligence that he found 
 beautiful in its ugliness. Her eyes reminded him of Mrs. 
 O'Hara's. In another corner, a young white-haired man on 
 crutches rested himself against the side and surveyed the whole 
 with a sort of humourous indulgence. 
 
 The contents of the cage were as mixed as the books in 
 the shop below. 
 
 And so they were shot out upon a sort of platform before a 
 draped door, inside which he was received by Stella Fay, 
 who introduced him in a whisper (everybody spoke in whis- 
 pers), to the secretary, a tall, languid-looking young woman, 
 with tired, sceptical eyes. Scattered about the floor, distinctly 
 superior people stood in graceful attitudes with a tendency 
 to a sidelong projection of hip and an undefined trend to the 
 ecstatic. 
 
 He glanced curiously around the spacious room, which smelt 
 like a Catholic church. There was a semi-Orientalism about 
 the place which brought to the mind the inner chamber of a 
 palmist or certain sides of the Earl's Court Exhibition. The 
 room, like the people who filled it, seemed to have attempted 
 something and failed. It was as though a ballet girl had tried 
 to become a nun. 
 
ELLEN MASTERS 213 
 
 Stella, her hand guiding his elbow, was watching him closely. 
 It seemed to him there was something mocking in her look. As 
 so often, she seemed to be laughing at herself as well as at every- 
 thing. 
 
 He looked up, troubled from her glance, to find a face star- 
 ing at him out of a picture that hung above a draped portal, 
 over the heavy velvet curtains of which "The Temple" was 
 written in gold lettering. The pin-point irises fixed him with 
 an expression of concentrated power that was nearly terrifying. 
 It was the face of one who had pierced matter to reach the 
 thing that lay behind it, had pierced into mind, if not spirit, 
 and had sacrificed everything to knowledge and to the power 
 that was knowledge. Stella Fay told him that it was Madame, 
 Spiridanovitch, the founder of Universalism, usually known as 
 "the Spiridanovitch." 
 
 There was no question about the quality of that painting, 
 but it faced a banal sugary figure of Christ, whilst towering 
 behind him he found the glassy eyes of a plaster figure of a 
 woman of an excessive maternity suckling a lumpy baby, and 
 called "The Mother." On another wall, the painting of a 
 young woman staring into nothingness with an expression 
 meant to be soulful hung side by side with a faceless figure with 
 a lamp, standing outside a low wicket set in an old wall and 
 very beautiful. It was all part of the confusion of the place 
 and of the people in it. 
 
 Stella, who seemed to take a perverse delight in introducing 
 him to different people and watching the effect, brought him 
 over to the decollete lady of the lift, who was holding forth 
 to a little circle near by. 
 
 He was surprised at the variety of type. 
 
 About him raged a sort of allegorical conversation out of 
 which he caught strange words. Mahatmas, Gurus, Upani- 
 shads, Bhagavad Gitas, Gnuanis, threaded one another, whilst 
 the lady towards whom he had been led was fast becoming 
 fourth-dimensional, using a word that sounded like "Guhurt- 
 namatana" with frequency. Two other words "Maya" and 
 "Karma" would every now and then pop up and duck down 
 again. 
 
 Stella Fay told him the story of this lady, who was, or had 
 been, for he gathered in some cloudy way that she had divorced 
 several husbands, a Mrs. Leghorn. She it was who had led 
 
214 GODS 
 
 the secession from the ranks of the Dawn Thoughters, at that 
 time headed by a Mrs. Kronkhorse, a lady with a cosmic dash 
 in her like an inherited taint, who had hailed from the U. S. A. 
 Mrs. Kronkhorse, it seemed, had been a little corpulent bulg- 
 ing-eyed woman, possessed of considerable gifts of oratory and 
 organisation, but Mrs. Leghorn had been too much for her. 
 
 Mrs. Leghorn had been in many similar sects which, with a 
 positive genius for splitting, seemed always to be in a state 
 of disintegration, much to the advantage of the Universalists, 
 who thrived accordingly. She was now trying to form a 
 sort of inner circle in the Universalists to be called "The Sons 
 and Daughters of the Morning Star," but, as Stella Fay said, 
 "in spite of all her spiritual hindleggedness, she was going to 
 have a pretty bad time when Ellen Masters came back." Ellen 
 Masters, like her predecessor, "the Spiridanovitch," stood no 
 nonsense. She ruled by a sort of divine right, but even Stella 
 Fay had to admit that she was a most beloved woman of sin- 
 gular power and sweetness, who never abused her authority. 
 
 The only spot on Mrs. Leghorn's sun was the wife of an 
 African bishop, a Mrs. Largo, who despised her husband's re- 
 ligion as only the wife of an African bishop could, and who 
 was now challenging Mrs. Leghorn's supremacy in the new 
 circle. She was a large woman with a commanding air, who 
 now stood a little outside the group, regarding her rival with 
 a certain voluminous contempt. 
 
 All this time, the big bullish man who had been in the lift, 
 standing head and shoulders above that crowd, and looking 
 like a man who had rushed at the cosmos head down, was 
 declaiming to all that cared to listen that he had given up 
 smoking and drinking and meat and that he was "Cured!" this 
 last in a stentorian bellow. His arms waved. His voice 
 boomed. Finn recognised the Penitent Form, but of a superior 
 kind. 
 
 Speaking afterward to an elder Daughter of the Morning in 
 Paradise silk and to her daughter, "a neophyte," as she told 
 Finn, who was attired in a slender robe of some white woollen 
 stuff with a rope around the waist, he learned that the gen- 
 tlemanly bull, who now looked pale and interesting from his 
 last fall from grace, was apt to have what his informants called 
 "lapses." It was this gentleman who, running upon him after 
 an introduction by Stella Fay, informed him: "We have been 
 
ELLEN MASTERS 215 
 
 together, my dear boy, in the court of Rameses in Lower Egypt 
 . . . .and don't you remember me, my dear old chap? 
 Knew you the moment I looked at you." Mr. Buck Cronstairs, 
 the well-known "blood" and man-about-town, reminded him 
 more than once of Uncle Bobs. 
 
 It was a most astonishing place. The lady in the Paradise 
 silk discovered to him that he had been a priest in the time 
 of Ra-Ra some four thousand years before, putting it to him 
 as a business proposition and in a commonsense way as to 
 whether he did not remember dancing the Sacred Dance with 
 her before the Quenchless Fire, which so staggered him that he 
 did gurgle something in his throat which might be taken as 
 acquiescence or denial. 
 
 There was a real discoloured Indian there, who was sus- 
 pected of being a sacred prince and who had a habit of seeing 
 things. He, Finn, was informed, was the two hundred and 
 thirty-third reincarnation of one of the Gurus of Hindustan, 
 but ancient though he was, he was but a mere youth by the 
 side of an old gentleman who assured Finn quite coolly that he 
 had lived in Atlanta. 
 
 Through all this, Stella Fay moved with that queer mock- 
 ing smile, watching Finn. 
 
 It was the same chaos that was over the bookshop below a 
 newer Twentieth Century Tower of Babel. Everything was la- 
 belled and put away in a nicely docketted bottle. They even 
 labelled and bottled the Godhead. They were very like some 
 of the scientists, he thought. What they did not understand, 
 they simply labelled and left it. 
 
 And yet Finn could not fail to see many earnest faces 
 amongst those about him. There was a white-haired young 
 woman, with startlingly black brows and eyes, who confided to 
 him that between Universalism and Universalists there was a 
 great gulf fixed. "We started with a fervent desire to abolish 
 all dogma and now have made that a dogma. It is mankind's 
 tendency to crystallisation." 
 
 Whilst he was speaking to this young woman he was aston- 
 ished to find standing inside the door as though he had been 
 blown in by the wind, Strom, his mother's lodger. He stood 
 there, a queer figure of a man, with black curling hair that 
 sprouted from crown and nostril and face, falling over a pair 
 of goat-like faithful eyes which brought back Aunt Judy. He 
 
2i6 GODS 
 
 was dressed in a frock with certain strange braidings upon 
 the sleeves and a pair of boots that looked like sandals. 
 
 Under his arms he carried a pair of hooded statues, "those 
 ridiculous statues" of Mrs. Fontaine, holding them as though 
 they had been a pair of babies. 
 
 The languid secretary approached him, Finn hearing him 
 say that he had brought two of his statues for Ellen Masters 
 as a present, he being obviously nonplussed when that young 
 woman held out her hands for them as though they had been 
 a bunch of flowers. But Strom would not. He had come to 
 place them within the Temple itself within that Holy of 
 Holies of Universalism. 
 
 There was something devoted in the face of the Swede, who 
 he knew had been working upon a series of symbolic caryatic 
 figures, for a temple upon an island set in the sapphire seas 
 of Sweden which he wanted Ellen Masters to build. He had 
 lived meanly, poorly, for the sake of his life-dream, as Finn 
 also knew, for his mother had sometimes had to complain about 
 the rent, and here was this languid girl taking his gold and 
 frankincense and myrrh as though it were of no account. 
 
 "But but," he heard him say with a sort of puzzled rever- 
 ence, "I cannot allow another to place my statues. That is 
 for the artist. There is a ... an art in placing." He 
 said it with a proud humility, but the young woman was tired 
 and yawned behind a manicured hand. 
 
 "You see to him," she said to Mrs. Leghorn as she hurried 
 away., "I've got to get ready for the chief." 
 
 "If you want to enter the Temple you must take off your 
 boots and put on those," said the lady of the turquoises point- 
 ing to a pair of oriental slippers. "No profane feet must en- 
 ter the temple. It is the Holy of Holies. Go on. You've got 
 to do it," she said, becoming religiously skittish. 
 
 The sculptor looked at her reproachfully with wide-open 
 child-like eyes, and gathering his statues still closer to him he 
 went away in silent dignity. The dust seemed to be shaken 
 from the broad soles of the sandalled feet and the frock coat 
 had become a gabardine. 
 
 There was a rush towards the doors as a high voice said: 
 "The Master comes in half an hour." Stella Fay, who through- 
 out had been holding herself remarkably well in hand, pressed 
 Finn in that close proprietorial way which had now become so 
 
ELLEN MASTERS 217 
 
 common with her, laying her silken sleeve upon his arm and 
 moving with him towards the door. 
 
 When they entered the station they found most of the peo- 
 ple they had left drawn up in ranks of reception, forming with 
 others who had joined them a gathering of both sexes and all 
 ages, on the outskirts of which, in dishevelled curiosity, hung 
 a human derelict who had drifted into the station. Here was 
 every type. Earnest young faces. Old haggard women, still 
 striving after the elixir of youth, who had passed from con- 
 gregation to congregation and from cult to cult. One or two 
 fine-looking old women of the type of the woman Finn had 
 seen in the lift the woman with the wrinkled face. But few 
 old men. And the young bull-man dancing from one foot to 
 the other, alternately lunging back and forward. Later Finn 
 learned to know it as the reception atmosphere. 
 
 There was a rumbling, a whistle, a turning of heads and 
 eyes, and then a saloon coach had run up opposite the chalked 
 inclosure in which stood the sheep of the elect. Looking 
 through the windows of the private carriage Finn saw an old 
 silvery haired lady with something leonine in eye and mouth, 
 the symbol of the serpent upon her breast, seated opposite a 
 young and very dark Indian boy, dressed with a painful cor- 
 rectness in European dress, over whose Eton collar the long 
 lank hair fell to the shoulders. There was a reverential strain- 
 ing of eyeball as a low murmur went up from those assembled. 
 
 Finn noticed in particular a weak-looking monastic young 
 man of abnormal stature whose small burning eyes and hooked 
 nose might have stepped out of a mediaeval cell, who, with Mr. 
 Buck Cronstairs had stationed himself opposite the door, and 
 as the old lady, clad in some white hooded woollen stuff that 
 gave to her something of the priestess, came to descend, he 
 was amazed to see the two men each take a corner of her 
 white full skirts and lift them a few inches from the ground, 
 so that holiness might not be stained by the mud of London, 
 displaying as they did so a pair of elastic side boots and white 
 cotton stockings that made Finn love her. Ellen Masters 
 passed with a series of dignified bows to the victoria upon the 
 box of which sat the bareheaded coachman, waiting. 
 
 As he looked, the wretch he had seen hanging on th-? edges 
 of the crowd, lousy, brutalised, his hair hanging over the collar 
 of his greasy coat, pushed his way through some of the 
 
218 GODS 
 
 swarming acolytes, who repulsed him with horrified gestures 
 as he tried to beg. With a motion of the grey-veined hand, un- 
 adorned save for a great sapphire upon the forefinger, the 
 woman had made room for him to come to her. She had taken 
 his filthy hand in hers, had looked with that look that might 
 have come from a Christ into the sodden eyes of the aston- 
 ished man, and had placed her purse in his hand, the heavy 
 leonine eyes bent upon him in loving friendliness. To the ad- 
 miring murmurs of her devotees she turned a cold indifferent 
 eye, looking upon them sadly and heavily. And then she had 
 swept to her carriage and had driven away like a Queen of 
 Heaven, the gold of the serpent upon her breast glittering un- 
 der a last ray of light which had found its way under the 
 arch of the station. 
 
 Here was another symbol, the serpent-symbol of Universal- 
 ism, as the Cross was that of the Jesuit, the Red Flag of Democ- 
 racy and the Green Flag of Ireland. All these things touched 
 Finn. Was it that they stood for one thing the thing behind 
 existence? 
 
XXI 
 
 FAITH AND FINANCE 
 
 Jemmy Fontaine was in the middle of an elaborate toilet, as- 
 sisted by his wife and a skirmishing and ecstatic Ginger. Mrs. 
 Fontaine had taken from the olive oil flask in the wicker-work 
 cover the anointing reserved for the more sacred occasions of 
 life and had liberally doused Jemmy's disappearing hair until 
 the scalp beneath shone again. 
 
 There had been rather a pointed argument about the third- 
 best tie, which Jemmy said didn't matter as he wore a beard 
 and nobody ever saw it, but Ginger had diplomatically in- 
 serted the second-best and as Mrs. Fontaine, sententious, said: 
 "That was that." The white socks had also been a source 
 of trouble, falling shamelessly over the tops of Jemmy's high 
 uppers, with the two top holes unlaced, and revealing some 
 inches of hairy calf when he sat down. For Jemmy never 
 wore drawers which, following his mother, he regarded as un- 
 healthy, and neither threat nor persuasion on the part of his 
 wife had been able to move this article of belief. 
 
 At last he was made ready this December morning ten 
 months after that reception to Ellen Masters. The top hat of 
 his prosperity still shone, though wanly. Under his arm he car- 
 ried a formidable umbrella, without ferrule, as Jemmy wore 
 them down and never renewed them. A pair of new white 
 wool gloves were on his hands with the right ready to draw 
 off at a moment's notice in the event of Mr. Buldger Spell- 
 bind being seized with an overwhelming desire to take him by 
 the hand something from which he frequently suffered where 
 the shareholders in the Happy Homes of England, Limited, 
 were concerned. 
 
 For the Happy Homes were the occasion of these solemn 
 preparations. The meeting ("special general" was the tech- 
 nical and impressive description) had been advertised with 
 
 219 
 
220 GODS 
 
 broad tolerance not only in the hectic press, but in "The 
 Low Churchman," as in the newspapers of the Nonconformist 
 Conscience, and was to be held in the large hall of the Metro- 
 politan Mission Centre at-, the other end of the Tottenham 
 Court Road, which was indifferently given over to faith and 
 finance, where Mr. Spellbind usually held his meetings. 
 
 There had been a second reconstruction of the Homes and, 
 if Mr. Spellbind had his way, there was going to be a third. 
 "Doing it on them" was the comment of the vulgar and irre- 
 sponsible Plugg, who owned and edited that organ of public 
 opinion with the million circulation "The Plain Englishman." 
 But Plugg was irreligious and kept racehorses. So it didn't 
 matter about Plugg. 
 
 Within the previous months, Mr. and Mrs. Fontaine had 
 been cast from the heights of affluence into a condition that can 
 best be described as mercurial. Jemmy, under the advice of 
 Spellbind, had been buying back large quantities of the Happy 
 Homes shares which he had sold at such a big profit, and these 
 shares were now, in the words of a reverend shareholder who 
 had written toJ'The Earth" about it, "in a parlous condition." 
 The shares, wnTch were not quoted in the Stock Exchange list, 
 had been transferred to Jemmy upon various and several occa- 
 sions by gentlemen of the names of Wiginbottom, Buckle and 
 an obviously honest man of the name of Smith. But Plugg, 
 in that alliterative way of "The Plain Englishman," had said 
 in his columns under the title: "Faith or Fake?" that Wiggin- 
 bottom was Spellbind, and Spellbind, instead of taking a libel 
 action and recovering thousands as he said he might easily 
 have done, had, instead, prayed for his enemy, and that pub- 
 licly. This had impressed even nasty shareholders, who had 
 been wavering. 
 
 And here was Jemmy wedged in the midst of a couple of 
 thousand other Jemmies before the platform of the Metropoli- 
 tan Mission, hypnotised by the close-set eyes and philanthropic 
 forehead of Mr. Spellbind, who had opened the meeting with 
 a hymn, which Tiad taken the starch out of a score of blood- 
 thirsty clergymen who, in the words of "The Plain English- 
 man," were "out for blood." (Buldger Spellbind was well 
 aware of the ferociousness of the lamb of Christ when deprived 
 of dividends and took his precautions accordingly.) One of 
 these bloodthirsty shareholders, an old dog at the game, upon 
 
FAITH AND FINANCE 221 
 
 the giving out of the hymn, had raised a weak and unchristian 
 protest against mixing the sacred with the profane, but had 
 been quickly blanketed into silence by a shocked "Hush!" 
 largely led by Jemmy, who, with some hundreds of others, 
 looked upon Mr. Spellbind as not a little lower than the angels. 
 
 As for Mr. Spellbind, he was careful to confine himself to 
 generalities, speaking vaguely but soothingly about the Christ- 
 lessness and the Socialism of the age, as evidenced by the 
 marchings to and fro of the unemployed, as he said, poeti- 
 cally, "seeking whom they might devour." It seemed that the 
 costs of administration of the Homes had been very high owing 
 to the rabid demands of irreligious workmen, largely incited 
 thereto by haters of religion like Mac Adam and Red Borb, and 
 they had also been subjected to a most un-Christian strike 
 against rent by "wretches who didn't know a good house when 
 they saw one." 
 
 Also, and here the chairman fixed his audience effectively^ 
 the shares had been the subject of gambling. That was a 
 hit. The little shrunken middle-class investors, convicted of 
 sin, crept closer together. "Buldger," as Jemmy's neighbour, 
 a little oilman from the borough, said, "was indeed in his best 
 form. Most impressive." 
 
 He was consideration itself. From under this mildly re- 
 proachful accusation of the little man with the small overhung 
 eyes, there gradually emerged the unpleasant fact that the 
 Happy Homes were under the necessity of finding fresh capital 
 or going "Phut!" This last sound Mr. Spellbind realistically 
 produced by exploding his cheeks. He paused a moment, look- 
 ing over the rows of faces before him, and, apparently, re- 
 assured, gradually revealed the golden reward which would 
 come to those who had the money and the faith to find the 
 fresh capital, this time inflating his cheeks confidently into 
 the smoothness of realisation and without subsequent deflation. 
 
 A little dismayed silence had followed the "Phut," but this 
 now gave way to a gratified murmur as the golden future of 
 the Homes was painted in by the hand of the artist on the 
 platform. It was indeed with a feeling of pained disgust that 
 the audience listened impatiently to an old clergyman, who 
 very earnestly raised the question of the rumour which had 
 appeared in that man Plugg's paper to the effect that a large 
 portion of the Happy Homes were inhabited by fallen women, 
 
222 GODS 
 
 who paid the rents from the wages of shame. The result was 
 indescribably painful. 
 
 A low murmur of indignation lifted itself "at the intrusion 
 of such shocking matters into an ordinary business meeting." 
 Mr. Spellbind looked at the aged sinner more in sorrow than 
 in anger, and said, quietly, that even if such a shocking alle- 
 gation were true, which Heaven forfend, were our erring sis- 
 ters not to be given a bed to lie on? Was that the meaning 
 of Christianity? 
 
 It was conclusive. The old man sat down, his dim blue 
 eye showing apologetic doubt. And curiously enough it was 
 this last incursion which definitely turned the tide in Mr. 
 Spellbind's favour, the resolution to reconstruct being carried 
 with only one dissentient, and those present clustering round 
 the platform after the meeting to shake hands with the little 
 man in the frock-coat who bent down with podgy fist to 
 take hand after hand, his little eyes beaming. Jemmy, who 
 had pulled off his right glove for the occasion, had managed 
 to force his way to the front, being rewarded by a special: 
 "You are a sensible man, Mr. Fontaine. You're putting your 
 shirt on the Homes!" which sent him home in a state of exal- 
 tation such as one of Napoleon's young officers might have felt 
 upon being made Field Marshal. 
 
 A council of war had gathered at Ash Villa to hear the re- 
 sult. There was Mrs. Fontaine and Aunts Bella and Maria, 
 with Ginger skirmishing in and out of the room upon errands 
 of the imagination, holding what might be called a sort of 
 "watching brief" for herself. Finn had been admitted more 
 or less on sufferance for, as the only person there with any first- 
 hand knowledge of finance, his people despised his opinion as 
 only the taker of quack medicine can despise the regular prac- 
 titioner. 
 
 Jemmy's hand still tingled from the Spellbind recognition. 
 His grey eyes shone as he spoke of that gentleman's eloquence, 
 and indeed, it was not until Finn had asked the unpleasantly 
 definite question: "Does that mean you have to find more 
 money?" that the family, after first falling upon him as though 
 he had spoken blasphemy, and then tacitly admitting the ques- 
 tion, as is the way of families, sank into the colder depths of 
 fact. Ginger, in the momentary silence which had followed 
 Finn's question, had enunciated throatily but with a terrible 
 
FAITH AND FINANCE 223 
 
 clearness: r 'Blarst that Buldger!" and had prompty been 
 sent out of the room to adjust both her language and certain 
 articles of attire, made of red flannel, which, as usual, hung in 
 distress below her skirts. She retired with the sniff and hitch 
 to which they were accustomed. 
 
 After this the conversation showed a tendency to wander 
 from the point, recriminations, irrelevant and bitter, so absorb- 
 ing the belligerents that Aunt Judy was able to insert herself 
 through the door unnoticed and lay her nose between the 
 strings of Mrs. Fontaine's little harp chair, sitting sideways 
 upon which she looked at them as from behind bars. Jemmy 
 now deeply depressed, his eyes glassy, remained silent under 
 the double-handed attack of his wife and sister-in-law, the scar 
 upon the latter's face twitching with a malevolent independence 
 as she attacked him for his lack of enterprise and money. Aunt 
 Maria, by gradually backing her chair into a corner, tried un- 
 availingly to dematerialize. Finn, now a most difficult cus- 
 tomer to handle, sat bolt upright in his chair, viperish, his 
 green angry eyes anticipating the attack personal. 
 
 But as Jemmy said in a lull: "Haven't I tried books? 
 Haven't I tried Beauty? Haven't I tried splatterdashers? 
 What do you want me to try now?" 
 
 He looked piteously from face to face. His eyes trembled. 
 
 "Didn't I wear down two sets of Blakey's boot protectors 
 the last two months over there in Walthsmstow, and in all 
 that length of houses there wasn't one to give me a cup o' tea, 
 and" (he flushed as he said it), "if there had I wouldn't have 
 taken it. Haven't I had me breeches torn twice and me little 
 packet of books thrown after me three times?" 
 
 He turned from the defensive to the offensive: "What about 
 the dogs? . . . tell me that. What about me corns? 
 . . . tell me that. Why, God dash my buttons!" (Jemmy's 
 most terrible oath), "haven't I tried safety razors an' pencils 
 and Bibles an' sporty pictures with wicked women and maybe 
 damned me soul and all? . . . haven't I, a teetotaller, 
 with me blue ribbon in me button-hole tried beer an' cough 
 mixture an' art vanish? . . . and wot about butter-nuts 
 an' shredded toasties an' triple-extract of beef? . . . ain't 
 I tried animal and vegetable? Ain't I dotty trying to sell 
 things that nobody wants . . .?" And then to Finn's ter- 
 
224 GODS 
 
 ror and sorrow his father broke down into sobs that shook him 
 as tfiough he had been a child. 
 
 Finn groped after the memory of something which it brought 
 and there came again the day of the hunger-line. It was the 
 same protest, weak, unavailing, against life as it was lived. 
 
 Ginger, who had stolen in again to fetch an imaginary duster, 
 which she metaphysically explained, " 'ad been there when she 
 was there before, but it 'ad been dark an' she wasn't quite 
 sure . . ." relieved the situation and herself by saying in 
 one of her audible whispers: "Blarst that Buldger!" which 
 met with such a unanimous roar of disapproval that Jemmy's 
 shaking shoulders had time to recover their equipoise. 
 
 "Why can't Finn stop his writing nonsense and earn some 
 money like other young men?" 
 
 It was Aunt Bella who spoke, with that tremor in her voice 
 which during the last year had been increasing. All eyes 
 slewed round to Finn, who had been thinking as the others 
 had talked. 
 
 He had been thinking of his hopeless struggle for journalis- 
 tic recognition the miserable pot-boilers the odd five shill- 
 ings he got for the news pars to which he sometimes descended 
 that high-water point of "The Imperialist" which paid him, 
 sometimes, and when he could collect it, seven shillings and 
 sixpence a column. There was Crux, the grey vista of the life 
 of the city clerk, and Deirdre, to the hem of whose dress he 
 did not dare to lift his eyes even though at heart he thought 
 himself good enough for the Queen of Heaven. And there was 
 that devil of a twisted girl who tormented him. There was 
 that Socialism and those Socialist meetings in which he had 
 not found himself or it the compass of life for which he was 
 searching. ... It was into this that the question had in- 
 serted itself: 
 
 "Why can't Finn stop his writing nonsense and earn some 
 money like other young men?" 
 
 He was about to reply when there came a double knock on 
 the street door which was immediately opened by a Ginger who 
 had had eye or ear glued to the keyhole of the room during the 
 whole of the conference. 
 
 A telegram. 
 
 The little golden envelope sent that thrill through them 
 which such things always did. It was from Crux. 
 
FAITH AND FINANCE 225 
 
 "Must leave for Black Rock immediately. Strike trouble. 
 Crux." 
 
 Instantly all their troubles were forgotten. It was that 
 "good Mr. Crux" and "the boy's fortune is as good as made." 
 Everything was forgotten. In some unexplained way that tele- 
 gram was going to change the fortunes of the Fontaines. If it 
 had been a letter it would have meant nothing. But a telegram ! 
 
 Finn alone was unmoved. He was beginning to learn his 
 lesson of life. 
 
XXII 
 
 SOULS RECALCITRANT 
 
 Finn returned to find Black Rock, not "fermenting," as Crux 
 had put it, but dourly sure of itself. He had been met at 
 Dunhallow by Johnny the Saint, who had greeted him with: 
 "Glory be to God! but 'tis you have the makin's of a fine 
 man, Masther Finn, yer honour." 
 
 It was always his franking into Ireland. If Johnny had 
 not been at the station to meet him he would have felt that 
 something was missing. 
 
 Kitty, who was crouched over the fire in the kitchen look- 
 ing into the depths of her black teapot, refused to let him come 
 near her, glancing up at him sideways in the crabbed way that 
 she had. "You're too big," she said. "You're not a little boy 
 any longer. You're a man. A nasty big man bad luck to 
 them, and may God forgive me for swearing and sure isn't it 
 meself that ought to know them with their cavortings and their 
 blandishments when they used to be round me them times I 
 was known as Kitty the Divil, like bees round a honeypot. 
 Sure, didn't they write verses, beautiful verses to me feet?" 
 She looked down at her nobbly fundaments, complacent, "and 
 what they said about me hair and eyes would fill a long book. 
 
 "Ah, g'long wid yez," she broke off indignantly, as she 
 caught the look in Finn's eye, "you that ought to be ashamed 
 to know about such things ah, and let me tell ye, things that 
 for all your laughing were wance worth lookin' at and throubled 
 the rest of honest men; and sure wasn't there Mr. Asthar only 
 the other day . . ." She struck her forehead with a free 
 hand. "Ah, but what is it I'm sayin'? Sure, 'tis the divil 
 that must still be in me. G'long wid yez! 'tis your fault," she 
 said, as she made a distant pass at Johnny, who all this time 
 had stood a little in the background, Finn's bag in his hands, 
 all his love in his eyes. "G'long wid yez," she said again to 
 
 226 
 
SOULS RECALCITRANT 227 
 
 that unfortunate, "why can't you shave the moss off of your 
 face like a decent Christian man?" 
 
 "Sure, didn't our Lord have it?" asked Johnny, simply. 
 
 The little angry eyes lighted up at him and dropped again 
 into the teapot. Kitty the Divil crossed herself silently. 
 
 "You'll have a cup of tea, Johnny," said she. "I've made 
 it hot and strong." 
 
 It was after tea that Father Con, in one of those friendly 
 conversations, when the laughing priest could be more serious 
 than any man he knew, had tried to advise him. 
 
 "Don't try to fight the Black Rock Turks, Finn, my boy. 
 Don't be tryin' to imagine that because Mr. Crux is a big man 
 in the great world that he is a big man in Ireland. Ireland 
 has the way of making the little great, and the great, little 
 . . . which, indeed, was the way of our Blessed Lord. Black 
 Rock doesn't care a traithnin about Crux, though it won't be 
 sayin' 'No' to his money. So don't try and fight them, Finn." 
 
 Finn smiled to himself as he heard the priest. Fight the 
 Black Rock Turks? Fight those great swarth men who feared 
 only God and devil. He was not that kind of fool. He left 
 that to the Slicks and the Cruxes. Yet he knew that if he 
 failed, Crux would either still keep him at his poverty-stricken 
 wage or throw him out. And he was so tired of his poor clothes 
 and of the repressions of poverty. They made him ashamed. 
 
 Crux's engineer, Busby, explained it all to him, in his high 
 voice. "They don't like organisation," he said. "And as for 
 'speeding-up,' they don't understand it. I've speeded up Eng- 
 lishmen and Scotsmen and Welshmen and, of course, I've 
 done my bit on Americans but these people here they're 
 uncivilised they simply don't understand it ... and I 
 think they're dangerous," he added after a moment j as though 
 something had just dawned upon him. 
 
 It seemed that the men with their womenfolk had reverted 
 to the pre-Crux period, doing a little fishing and a little farming 
 and a little salvage with a little life-saving in between, for 
 there were many wrecks on that iron coast. The Cruxian 
 towers for smoking the herrings did not smoke, but stood in all 
 their high square ugliness, like Crux's steam trawlers, deserted 
 Black Rock had gone back to its "hookers," turning its heavy 
 fustianed back upon the blessings of Crux's steam. But though 
 Black Rock didn't care for Crux's steam it still used his pier. 
 
228 GODS 
 
 As for the chapel of the Primitive Christians Free it stood 
 up there shunned as though it had contained the Seven 
 Plagues. There was not a cotter in Black Rock so poor or so 
 low that he would take the Reverend Slick's loaves and fishes. 
 As for Crux, if he could have visited Black Rock he would 
 have had some curious lights thrown upon the Cruxian philos- 
 ophy. 
 
 To Finn it all seemed a strange inconsequent echo of the in- 
 creasing thunders of those rebel movements out there in the 
 great world. Even here in nationalist Ireland, the last home 
 of conservative patriotism, the echoes of democracy were 
 making themselves heard. Politic and religion here as else- 
 where were clashing and disintegrating and a new faith form- 
 ing itself, nebulous, from the disintegration. Even Father 
 Hennessey had been unable to force the members of his flock 
 back to work for Crux, despite his threat of the terrors ecclesi- 
 astical. In vain had he pointed out the danger to their pockets 
 in this world and to their souls in the world to come if they 
 cut off the means by which the chapel of their faith might 
 be repaired and that stained glass window placed behind the 
 high altar. Deep in their hearts lay a faith indomitable over 
 which even he was powerless. 
 
 They paid their church dues; they went to confession; they 
 were docile to the teachings of their shepherd but they would 
 no more work for Crux than they would enter his tabernacle or 
 accept his loaves and fishes. They were tired of civilisation. 
 
 Already Finn was discovering that Protestant North and 
 Catholic South had begun to fraternise upon democratic labour 
 platforms, losing something of the acerbity of religious outline 
 in the process. Already, there Had been what was known as 
 the Maynooth revolt the revolt of the younger clerics against 
 the claims of the elder to decide their politics as their religion. 
 "We'll take our religion from Rome, but our politics from hell 
 or Constantinople!" one of them had said, and in the saying, 
 as was the way in Ireland with its fateful phrase-making, had 
 seemed to set the seal upon a new religion. And sometimes it 
 came to him that Democracy everywhere was becoming a re- 
 ligion and like the others was developing, perhaps had already 
 developed, its dogmas, its "authorities," and, in a sense, its 
 gods, which in its dawning it had called "Liberty, Equality and 
 
SOULS RECALCITRANT 229 
 
 Fraternity," and now was adding to them the Vote, with its 
 Divine Right of Majority. 
 
 But behind the revolt of the fishermen, Finn quickly felt 
 an invincible will. At the beginning, he had tried in a way, 
 having no heart in his work, to bend Black Rock to Crux's will, 
 but after a time the struggle had become very real only that 
 it had become a struggle not between him and Black Rock, 
 but between him and the will that stood behind. 
 
 Upon his coming to the House of Dreams, where Mrs. 
 O'Hara had received him with anxiety in her eyes and the 
 shake-hands that was like a caress, where he had found Patsey 
 as usual in his corner, his head heavy with dreams, he had 
 also found Deirdre Asthar, a hollow-cheeked, hollow-eyed 
 Deirdre, with something of desperation in her look. 
 
 It was she who had matched herself against Crux and against 
 Crux's lieutenant, as he learned from Father Hennessey, who 
 was deeply indignant . . . "and she a heretic," he had 
 said, forgetting Finn for the moment. It was she who had 
 preached revolt, showing the fishermen how the contracts they 
 had signed had put them in thrall to Crux. She had, it ap- 
 peared, been holding meetings up in the deserted schoolhouse. 
 
 The Reverend Slick had responded with one of his periodical 
 floods of tracts, but all in the way of business, which were as 
 incomprehensible to the Black Rock cabins as though they had 
 been written in Chinese, although, when faith was mixed with 
 finance, Black Rock saw the humour of it. 
 
 To make matters still worse, everything connected with Crux 
 was under excommunication. His engineers and his specially 
 imported workmen could get neither bite of bread nor drop of 
 water. When they addressed themselves to these queer people, 
 they found them to be both deaf and dumb. The English work- 
 men, decent, well-dressed, well-set up men, found to their 
 astonishment that the very founts of feminine nature had dried, 
 no girl of the village either speaking when spoken to or appar- 
 ently being aware of male existence. Even in Dunhallow it 
 was a matter of difficulty to get anything in the way of food, 
 and all appeals to Crux's ally, Father Hennessey, were use- 
 less: "Arrah, don't be botherin' me!" this whiskey-loving 
 prelate had said at last in flaring anger, as he rubbed up the 
 red knobs in his high angry forehead with a red bandana hand- 
 kerchief, "sure can't ye see I'm as helpless as yourselves with 
 
230 GODS 
 
 these contrairy divils . . . and I don't blame them," he 
 had added illogically. 
 
 That had always been the difficulty with the Irishman of any 
 type. "You never knew where you had him," Mr. Busby, the 
 engineer, said. 
 
 But to Finn there came all that old irritation as he felt the 
 girl behind. The battle quickly developed into a personal 
 struggle between him and Deirdre. After a time, almost for- 
 getting the origin of the quarrel, he ignored the fishermen, who 
 watched his efforts with that dark humour of the Southern 
 Celt, fully aware that he hated the job and sympathising with 
 him as fully, showing their personal esteem by bringing him 
 all sorts of little gifts newlaid eggs, a little "print" butter, 
 and so on, and there where the tides roared around Car- 
 rickdhuv lying in mid-channel, risking their lives to get him 
 seagull's eggs, of which to their unconcealed amazement he was 
 very fond, getting Mrs. O'Hara to cook them for his breakfast. 
 
 Finn, at last, torn between love and hate for the girl who 
 had defeated him, went back to London with failure writ large. 
 
 "Look at the money I have put into Black Rock and for 
 those people's good. I've put my faith and my money in this 
 thing. Save them!" Crux had commanded, the steel jaw set- 
 ting like a trap in the mechanism of the skull. "If you don't 
 you're fired." 
 
XXIII 
 
 THE SOUL OF A NATION 
 
 When Finn next returned to Dunhallow, under April skies 
 in which tear and smile blended, it was to the boom of drum 
 and the pierce of fife. As his train ran across the tideway, 
 he could see the white limestone roads under the warm April 
 sun that disrobed itself gradually from its mists, checkered with 
 the shapes of men walking, above their heads the emerald of 
 banner and the gleam of golden cord, all converging upon one 
 spot. It was from Johnny he discovered that "the country 
 was up." It was all about a right of way leading from nothing 
 to nowhere, a roundabout path which no one used or ever 
 wanted to use, but from which old Asthar, who owned the 
 property through which it ran, had turned an old peasant 
 woman. 
 
 One of the Irish members had been expelled after raising 
 the question first by tongue then by fist in the House of Com- 
 mons, "a question," according to him, "not only of national 
 import to Ireland, but to the British Empire, involving as it 
 does ..." The whole country was aflame with tar-bar- 
 rels, whilst each night beacon fires on the high mountains 
 ringed the island in a circle of flames. 
 
 Neither Father Con nor Kitty were at home. They, like 
 everybody else, "had gone to the demonstration." 
 
 It all seemed trivial enough, only that Finn had learned 
 one lesson in Ireland that in Ireland it was never the appar- 
 ent but the real that mattered not the thing on the outside, 
 but the thing behind. 
 
 This path, like so many other things in the island, was sym- 
 bolic. It wasn't the path, nobody cared a thought for the 
 path or even for old Asthar, it was for something that seemed 
 to stand behind both. Johnny had said: "It isn't the path, 
 Masther Finn, nor even ould Biddy Byrne" (that was the old 
 
 231 
 
232 GODS 
 
 peasant woman), "we'd be carin' about 'tisn't for them that 
 we're fightin' but for Ireland." And his eyes had lighted up 
 like those of Finn's father when he was roused about some- 
 thing. 
 
 Men, women and children surged past Father Con's house, 
 headed by bands of men in green caps and sashes, blowing furi- 
 ously into their fifes and beating their drums until the very 
 sides of the houses gave back the dull reverberations. Irish ter 
 riers and mongrels of unknown breed skirmished through the 
 riot. Man and animal, urged by some irresistible force, were 
 pouring into the old grey square along the four streets which 
 fed it like channels. Finn could no more resist that drag and 
 thrust than the green tide running under the sandstone bridge 
 could resist the drag and thrust of the moon. Presently he 
 found himself sucked into the square as through a gullet. He 
 might have been sucked into a great maw. 
 
 From where he stood perilously on the stone trough of the 
 old pump in the middle of the square, before the stark timber 
 platform with its drapings of green as though it had been a 
 great altar, ringed by the emerald banners with the Irish in- 
 scriptions, he was able to see over the square, now a bobbing 
 mass of heads and pinky faces and the white of eyeballs. Into 
 this conglomeration there would every now and then surge 
 from one of the four main roads leading into the place a cur- 
 rent of men as a tide race runs into a harbour. And now the 
 shrill of fife was mingled with the blare of brass rebellious, two 
 bands marching in, one after the other, to circle the square in 
 sheer flamboyance, the eyes of the cornetists staring, the ranks 
 of the kettle drums rattling like machine guns, and above all 
 the zoom of the big drum and smash of cymbals like the ex- 
 plosions of heavy artillery. Above, the sun shone down through 
 the mists of the afternoon, shone upon all this yeasty humanity 
 which seemed to ferment into new life under its rays. 
 
 It was as though the sun overhead, the author of all life, 
 pulsing up there like a heart in the grey-blue skies of Ireland, 
 sent with each pulsation its life-streams to earth, only to catch 
 them up once more after they had done their work. 
 
 Every window in the square was living with faces. The 
 green flags, hanging down from each window, quartered with 
 colour the grey fagades of the houses. And from out of that 
 square pit, the boom of drum, the blare of brass and the shrill 
 
THE SOUL OF A NATION 233 
 
 of fife, mingled with strident cheer and murmur of voices, 
 went up to the heavens above like a prayer. 
 
 It came to Finn, not as a political demonstration, but as a 
 service to some unknown God. And now the high green altar 
 was filling with people, towering amongst them Father Con, 
 who, as he looked, moved to the square boarded rostrum. And 
 in that instant the murmuring of the crowd like the roar of sea 
 upon rock was stilled. 
 
 He stood there under the shadow of the grey walls, bare- 
 headed. And his lips moved as though in prayer, every head 
 there uncovered before the soundless invocation. Finn, look- 
 ing down upon that sea of heads, saw them as ranks of wor- 
 shippers, their eyes fixed upon that tall figure as the Children 
 of Israel might have looked upon Moses. The big priest bent 
 over the edge of the rail and beckoned downwards to those on 
 the platform behind. And as Finn looked, he saw the slight 
 figure and the green dress with the tousled hair of bronze he 
 knew so well. 
 
 It was Deirdre Asthar who had mounted to the railed space. 
 
 He could never remember the exact words of the bare-headed 
 girl as she stood there with the sun shining upon her like a halo. 
 He was conscious of the opening of the firm red lips, the 
 steadily increasing pallor of the face for she, like himself, 
 was of the sort that pales under emotion and of that all-en- 
 veloping silence about her. She was no longer Deirdre Asthar, 
 the being of flesh and blood whom he loved, but a priestess, 
 holy, sacrosanct. 
 
 To each affirmation of the slender figure on the platform 
 came the answering affirmation from the crowd below like a 
 great Amen, as though they were chaunting a litany. Again and 
 again the great "Amen" swelled upwards, to be followed by a 
 silence. 
 
 And then something had murmured through the crowd which 
 began to sway in the sunlight. It stirred the hairs upon his 
 head. And the murmur had changed to something deeper, 
 menacing. And now the mass before him seemed to tremble 
 as wave on wave of some silent resistless force came shuddering 
 through it. And there had fallen another of those silences in 
 which he could feel his heart beating in his veins as though it 
 had been the heart of the great crowd of which he was now 
 
234 GODS 
 
 a part, or of that still greater burning heart that hung in the 
 skies above him. 
 
 It was when the silence had reached its deepest, as though 
 the low solitary note of some great organ were breathing be- 
 neath, that there came from far away on the outskirts of the 
 crowd a single voice. And it was this voice which seemed 
 to loose the spirit that had been crouching under the silence. 
 And then the note, taking volume, came like the rolling of 
 thunder, with crash on crash of cheer like the smash of light- 
 ning when it strikes, until, at last, all the waters of sea and 
 sky seemed to have run together as the figure on the high-railed 
 space had disappeared. 
 
 Here was neither passion nor politic, but the Thing Be- 
 hind all passion and all politic. Here was the soul of a peo- 
 ple in travail evolution itself. Not for the first time it seemed 
 to Finn that all things ran together. Was it that Nationalism 
 and Internationalism were but facets of the same diamond 
 that all these warrings of nation against nation and of class 
 against class were not for the things for which the contestants 
 believed they fought, but were simply urges from the thing 
 behind? 
 
XXIV 
 
 Finn drove out under the night skies to Mrs. O'Hara's, his 
 heart aflame with new emotions. Above him, on distant 
 Croagh Cromlech, the bale-fires after the demonstration blazed 
 under a firmament of stars chastened by immense distance. He 
 was both puzzled and angry puzzled to find that a narrow 
 nationalism should have power to move him, for by now Finn, 
 who had come into closer contact with "the movement," as the 
 left wing of democracy was being rather grandiloquently and 
 exclusively called, had, under the administrations of the Rev- 
 erend John Burring and Jock MacAdam, begun to have vague 
 ideas about Internationalism. 
 
 Had he never gone to Ireland he might now have been a 
 Socialist. But to him at least, nationalism and international- 
 ism were not the complements but the opposites of each other. 
 Even the Red Flag had not the power to thrill and hold that 
 the Green Flag had. Yet one stood for a narrow, national God 
 the other for no God at all ... unless there was an 
 International God. 
 
 It was as though two powerful spirits were battling in his 
 heart for its possession. From his seat on the side-car, look- 
 ing out over the darkened waters of the bay, wraithed by the 
 silvery mists of night, it seemed to him that Ireland was a 
 sleeping breathing thing, calling to him in her dreams. She 
 was a woman of dark eyes and tousled hair, calling to him: 
 "Will you not give up the world for me? I am more than the 
 world. Will you not come to me?" And then he saw it was 
 the face of Deirdre Asthar. 
 
 He wanted to throw himself from the car down over the 
 cliffs into the misty waters below and lose himself in the arms 
 of his mistress. 
 
 On the road before them he saw a figure walking, its cloak 
 
 235 
 
236 GODS 
 
 thrown back from its shoulders, its head bare. Very straight 
 and slenderly it walked before them upon the highway, its hat 
 in its hand. Under the witchery of the Irish night he could 
 see, as the car drove past, two eyes that gleamed like stars 
 looking straight before them. Sudden resolution came. 
 
 "Go back, Johnny, boy," he said to the driver. "I'll walk 
 the rest." He sprang from the car, which drove back to Dun- 
 hallow. 
 
 He waited for the girl to come up to him, and said: 
 
 "I heard you speak in the square today and I wanted so 
 much to tell you what I thought." There was something about 
 her that made him want to throw himself upon the white lime- 
 stone road before her. 
 
 The girl smiled at him a little, with that strange veiled look 
 to which he was now accustomed. She did not speak. 
 
 "It was splendid, magnificent," he burst out. "Now I 
 know why you love Ireland. I love her, too." He spoke with 
 all the fresh impulse of the day upon him and with the 
 magic of the night over all. 
 
 "Do you?" she said indifferently. "What will you give up 
 for Ireland?" 
 
 "Give up?" he said stupidly, as though that had never come 
 to him. He felt chilled and irritated. "What should I give 
 up?" 
 
 "Give up what you call your Internationalism," she said. 
 
 "But that is to give up the world." 
 
 "If you won't give up the world for your country, your 
 country doesn't want you," the girl countered. "Ireland is a 
 proud mistress. She demands all." 
 
 Again there came the longing unreasoning to throw himself 
 there on the white road before her the longing to worship and 
 to yield. The scent of her hair was in his nostrils, her beauti- 
 ful presence enveloped him. He did not know whether it was 
 Ireland or Deirdre Asthar he loved. In a way, they were 
 one and the same thing. 
 
 A sea bird cried far beneath. The loneliness of life came 
 to him poignantly. If this girl by his side would, could love 
 him he would not be afraid, although he had never thought of 
 her loving him. He only thought of giving not taking. He 
 felt afraid up there on that road high over the sea as though 
 he were on the roof of the world itself. 
 
"THIRTY PIECES OF SILVER" 237 
 
 The moon began to rise over the lip of the sea, a moon of 
 monstrous orange, a moon of passion and life. He looked into 
 the blood-red heart of it and then at the girl, her eyes now 
 misty under the new light. As she walked he could see the two 
 firm breasts that showed themselves under the stuff of her 
 dress. There was something in the night that was unbearable. 
 
 They were passing the place where she had once knelt over 
 little Paudeen. 
 
 "Do you remember that day with little Paudeen?" he asked, 
 turning to steal a glance at her. She looked at him, fleetingly, 
 surprised. "It was that day, as you bent over him that some- 
 thing snapped in my heart. It was that day that I first 
 glimpsed Ireland and what she meant to me. And it was 
 through you that I glimpsed her . . ." He waited, fear- 
 ing. This girl could be so unresponsive. 
 
 A figure had risen from the grey stone where Paudeen 's 
 mother had laid him that day. It limped over to them with 
 the little deep blackbird chuckle he knew so well and a "Good 
 evening, my dears!" It was Stella Fay, who was again in 
 Ireland. 
 
 "I had come out for a walk to see the rising of the moon," 
 she said. "How did the meeting go, Deirdre?" 
 
 The girl was silent. 
 
 "It went splendidly," Finn answered. "It was the best 
 demonstration I have ever seen." But he wondered whilst 
 he said it, whether she had heard. 
 
 "What? Better than those Tower Hill and Trafalgar Square 
 things?" said Stella. "Surely that splendid Internationalism 
 of which lately you are never tired of talking, can beat a miser- 
 able little nationalist meeting in a little Irish town!" Her words 
 were mocking. 
 
 Finn walked between the two girls, feeling angry at both, 
 and at himself. There was a new note in Stella's voice. It 
 was like the hissing of a man when he sets his dog at another 
 dog. 
 
 But the girl with the hair of copper walked at his side with 
 that curious glide as though unconscious. She had, in the 
 preceding months in London, been making rather fierce love to 
 him ... or perhaps it was he who had been making fierce 
 love to her. That, he could never decide, for she had a way 
 of coming forward as the hunter and drawing 'back as the 
 
238 GODS 
 
 hunted, filling him with desire intolerable, although since that 
 day when she had drawn the child from the sea they had never 
 kissed. When he was alone with Deirdre, this girl seemed dis- 
 gusting to him. When by himself, he alternated between sav- 
 age longing and repulsion. When with both of them together 
 he hated both. 
 
 As they came to the opening into the boreen, all at once 
 he missed Stella from his side, and, as he paused, uncertain, 
 he heard her mocking laugh from the other side of the red 
 hawthorn with its scented blossom, behind which she had slip- 
 ped. It was one of her queer ways, elfish of the twilight, for 
 at night this strange creature seemed to take on new vitality; 
 new lights would come into those grey eyes, and she loved 
 at these moments to play tricks on him. 
 
 "She must have gone to swim under Carrickmore," he said 
 to Deirdre, who stood silently by. "She is quite tireless in the 
 water. She has no fear. She swims there every night, going 
 out into the deep sea, although she has been warned of the 
 tides by the fishermen who since that day she saved Paudeen, 
 worship her." And then he flushed, remembering that day 
 of the saving of little Paudeen and Deirdre's terror. 
 
 She said nothing, but her face gleamed like a white flower 
 in the starshine that sifted through the hawthorn blossoms. 
 
 Finn looked at her and caught the pallor of her face. It 
 filled him with a great pity. 
 
 "I didn't mean that," he stammered, all the blood of his 
 body rushing to his face. 
 
 He found the girl looking at him in astonished anger, her 
 head held proudly up and back a trifle. 
 
 "I don't know what you are talking about," she said. "Do 
 you?" she added in cold insult. 
 
 "You never seem to think I know anything," Finn said, the 
 blood flying from his cheeks at her insult. Out of the dis- 
 tance came a mocking laugh. Something was urging him on. 
 And now the blood had come back to thunder in his ears. 
 
 "You have always disdained me or laughed at me since that 
 day when I first saw you at Thrum's. You think I am not good 
 enough for you. You despise my poverty. You have tried to 
 make me ashamed . . ." 
 
 He paused an instant to catch those eyes fixed on him with a 
 
"THIRTY PIECES OF SILVER" 239 
 
 look that was full of something a message suppressed. But 
 he would not listen to the eyes. He went on: 
 
 "You despise me because I am an Internationalist because 
 I stand up for the common people." (But he knew as he said 
 it that he was uncertain both about the one and the other.) 
 "You pity your puny nationalism of one country," he felt very 
 mean as he said it, "against the world. I am bigger than you," 
 he said, grandiloquent. "My country is the world, and as for 
 my God . . ." 
 
 "My God," put in the girl quietly, as he paused, "is a na- 
 tional God, not a thing of no nation." Her eyes gleamed me- 
 tallic in the moonlight as though it had shone on the wing of 
 a beetle. 
 
 "You talk of your nation," he said angrily, forgeting all his 
 impressions of the day. "Do you know I never heard any 
 Irishman either at Dunhallow or here in Black Rock say a 
 word for Ireland until to-day in the square. When I have 
 spoken to them about nationality they have been either silent 
 or laughing. Their nationality is a thing of the moment 
 thing of passion and impulse, a thing of unconsciousness" He 
 had broken off in savage triumph at that last word as though it 
 were annihilating. She was unconscious. Ireland was uncon- 
 scious. He, he, Finn Fontaine, was conscious. 
 
 And then she had turned to him and had said in low, sure 
 tones, as though she were speaking to herself: "Perhaps you 
 are right. I had never thought of that. And you you have 
 not learned that the unconscious life of a nation is its deepest 
 life. Was there not one who said: 'Let Ireland apostatise 
 for a thousand years; let all her sons and daughters hold their 
 silence when you speak to them of nationality; let them, like 
 Judas, sell their Lord that is, their birthright for thirty 
 pieces of silver . . . and then, even then, they will awake 
 from their dream and the unconscious will rise above the 
 threshold of consciousness to confound the world.' " Her eyes 
 shone. "And you know, Mr. Fontaine," she had added with 
 her little cold smile: "You have been calling yourself an Irish- 
 man, but you have been trying to sell your countrymen to 
 Crux for a little more than thirty pieces of silver for two 
 pounds a week. I think Judas must have been an Irishman." 
 
 And so, under the shadow of the House of Dreams, she had 
 turned and left him. He found himself alone, looking into the 
 
240 GODS 
 
 eye of the great yellow moon as, now a gold-laden argosy, it 
 swung out of the sea above the neighbouring hill. 
 
 He plunged down the boreen into the silver and black of the 
 night, hurt, angry. His mind was a riot of idea the riot in 
 which Deirdre Asthar so often left him. 
 
 So what had come from lips only in a moment of anger, 
 was true. She had despised his non-success, and with that 
 degenerate self-pity into which he even now could sometimes 
 sink, he held out one gaunt arm against the sky, threatening 
 heaven with his poverty. But he would show her. He would 
 succeed. He would succeed because he hated her and was 
 finished with her. 
 
 And he was finished with Crux. That astonishing resolu- 
 tion came to him there under the night skies. He was finished 
 with all that shadow-dance of millions finished with the 
 city and with its dirty commercialism. He was not a business 
 man. He, he, Finn Fontaine, was an artist! He shouted as 
 resolution came to him. 
 
 Ireland. What was Ireland to him? Ireland was Deirdre 
 Asthar. He was finished with both. Again he shouted out 
 into the night challenging high heaven with his raised fist. 
 For the moment he was outside himself. 
 
 Internationalism or Nationalism? What did they matter? 
 He stood for neither the one nor the other. He stood for Finn 
 Fontaine. He was going to force those surging thoughts of 
 his out into the world at the point of his pen. He would write 
 what Thrum wanted. "The Earth" was to be his channel, as 
 the earth was to be his goal. 
 
 He had plumbed the depths of a girl's heart. It was shallow. 
 She had called him "Judas." "Judas." He repeated the word 
 aloud. Well, he would be Judas. But he would not sell him- 
 self for thirty pieces of silver he would sell himself for gold 
 and for power. If there was to be a God to worship, and even 
 in that moment, tensioned and slightly ridiculous as it was, 
 he was not such a fool, he said to himself, as to say there 
 was no God, it should be a God of Gold and Power. 
 
 What a fool he had been. He had disdained delights and 
 lived laborious days for what? He had disdained the girl 
 with the bright hair and the scarlet lips. He had taken her 
 lips that once but not herself. He had kissed her that day 
 
11 THIRTY PIECES OF SILVER" 241 
 
 down by the waters and like a baby he had let her make love 
 to him in London. He would not only kiss. 
 
 And he laughed. Laughed as though he had thrown some- 
 thing from his back in that moment. Some burden. He was 
 free. 
 
 He was passing blindly down along the bottom of the valley 
 where the grass grew high by the running water under the 
 softness of the April night, when he heard an echo of his laugh, 
 and even before he saw her, caught the perfume of her body. 
 
 She was on him silently as was her custom and she laughed 
 again, crouching under his shoulder and looking up at him in 
 the way that she had. She wore a dress in one piece of the 
 colour and texture of a grey wrinkled poppy that, cut away 
 from her neck, left her skin shining like white satin under the 
 golden moon. The glint of the moonshine was caught in the 
 great knot of hair done low on the nape. She clung to him 
 as she slid her arm through his and as she pressed his arm she 
 laughed low again. 
 
 They were alone in the valley save for the full-throated call 
 of a song-bird from the solitary grove above them, and the 
 speckled foxgloves hung their bells as they passed. 
 
 Her hand was like fire on his arm. Her head against his 
 side seemed to burn him. And yet he had not spoken nor had 
 she. 
 
 And now her feet, like his, were laggard on the green lush 
 grass, and they had stopped for her to slide her other hand up 
 and around his neck to pull him down to her. He felt her 
 breath like a flame upon his cheek and the warmth of her 
 body came through her thin dress as she clung to him. 
 
 The place was very still. But some night insect was chirping 
 somewhere in the grass, like the tick-tack of one of Patsey's 
 fairy cobblers, whilst from the meadow above there came the 
 soft cooing of the wood doves and the lower ventriloquial note 
 of a cuckoo. The trickle of the water in his ears and the scent 
 of the early flowers and grasses, to mingle with that scent 
 which might have been the perfume of her clothes or the es- 
 sence of herself. 
 
 Her face turned up to his under the full moon, the scarlet 
 of the lips parted, inviting. She had pulled his great shoul- 
 ders down over her where they stood under an ash that grew 
 
242 GODS 
 
 lonely in that spot. And his lips had sought hers to cling to- 
 gether in an ecstasy of living. 
 
 She was twining herself about him and he was losing himself 
 in the perfume of her hair and her melting flesh, in that fire 
 and snow that lay in his arms, when from the shadows above 
 where the House of Dreams clung to the lip of the valley, there 
 came the sound of a lute with a voice singing: 
 
 Come, dear heart, where the shadows play 
 
 Out in the mists of yesterday. 
 Come, dear heart, where the shadows fall. . . . 
 
 The girl in his arms had trembled as the voice stole down 
 to them and then had nestled still closer, covering his lips and 
 eyes with her kisses as though to keep out the sound. Her eyes 
 were closed, her lips sought his again and again, the long slen- 
 der arms wound themselves about him. His senses were cloud- 
 ing, when the voice came again: 
 
 Come, dear heart, where the shadows creep 
 To the twilight edge of to-morrow's sleep . . . 
 
 He struggled a little in her arms. But she would not. She 
 laid them about him and pulled his head down still closer to 
 her. He felt the anaesthesia of the night stealing over him, 
 lulling him to forgetfullness, when low and sweet the voice 
 came again, pulsing downwards through the night: 
 
 Come, dear heart, on the shadows' flight 
 As we whisper together the last Good-night. . . . 
 
 The voice was calling to him from up there. He could 
 not bear it. 
 
 With a last effort he had freed himself from the girl, who, 
 panting, love-sick, looked at him with heavy languorous eyes. 
 
 And then he had fled into the night. 
 
XXV 
 
 IN THE MELTING POT 
 
 After that night in the valley, Finn felt that once more 
 he had been flung into the melting pot of doubt from which he 
 thought he had escaped. All the foundations upon which he 
 had been building had fallen away. There was not a foot 
 of firm foothold under his feet. 
 
 More than ever before was he like that piece of bait in the 
 deep waters under Carrickmore. Ireland had called to him 
 and he had lost her. Democracy had called, and because of 
 Ireland he had not responded. The faith of Father Lestrange, 
 like the faith of his parents, held nothing no, not that, but 
 it only held something for him it did not hold all, and he de- 
 manded all or nothing of faith as of people. The things he 
 wanted to love he hated and the things he hated he some- 
 times loved. From those first days when as a little child he 
 had begun to think of God and of life, life and God had eluded 
 him. Sometimes it almost seemed to him that neither the one 
 nor the other existed. That life, like God, was a mirage. 
 
 He had not even the poor satisfaction of yielding himself to 
 the pleasure of life. He could no more yield himself to Stella 
 Fay than he could win the love of Deirdre Asthar, whom he 
 hated and loved together. He was the lone inhabitant of a 
 sort of No Man's Land, doomed to lonely misery of soul and 
 body for these two things he could not separate. 
 
 After he had gone back to London and, with the instincts 
 of the devil turned monk, as Stella Fay had put it mockingly, 
 had tried to lose himself amongst the Universalists, at the 
 time when he believed that at last he had found an ark for 
 his faith, he had once more been flung wild by one of those 
 apparently trifling things which so often proved decisive for 
 him. 
 
 He had been at the headquarters in Piccadilly and through 
 
 243 
 
244 GODS 
 
 the door opening into the Temple, which hitherto had always 
 been kept religiously closed, had been watching that bull- 
 man, Buck Cronstairs, trying with clumsy fingers to arrange 
 the flowers in the vases and upsetting the contents in his well- 
 meant efforts. Strom, who had just finished a six months' 
 course of pine-nuts, and who was in consequence vibrating 
 a trifle thinly, had come in with his babies under his arms, 
 bringing to Finn the interrogation which had so often over- 
 taken him in that temple of cranks why was it that excellent 
 people who lived on nuts and water for their own or for 
 Christ's sake were often so obviously inferior in one way or 
 other to people who smoked, drank and ate meat? It was 
 once more that eternal contradiction inherent in things. 
 
 Ellen Masters, who had come out from the Temple, clad in 
 that white woollen garment which made her look more than 
 ever like a priest, was approached by the Swede, who shyly 
 drew the hoods from his statues, which Finn saw were very 
 beautiful and curious. 
 
 He held them out to her dumbly. 
 
 She looked at them indifferently and thanked him, but said: 
 "You know I don't care for them, as I said before. I much 
 prefer . . ." She broke off. "Why can't you do some- 
 thing like The Mother' over there?" She pointed at the plas- 
 ter horror of the statue Finn had seen that first day. 
 
 The Swede had said nothing but had covered his darlings 
 once more and silently left the place. And again Finn could 
 see the dust shaken from the sandalled feet. 
 
 This had both raised and explained all sorts of questions. If 
 it were possible for Ellen Masters to mistake fifth-rate art 
 for the real thing where was the value of the spiritual light 
 of which her followers boasted? A great spirit, Christ for 
 example, would not make that mistake. It would understand 
 everything and, first of all, art. Yet Ellen Masters was a 
 great spirit. Even now he could not deny that. It was, again, 
 vastly puzzling. 
 
 This shaking in his slowly formulating convictions had in- 
 creased as he overheard a conversation one day between that 
 lame young man whom, with his crutches, he had met in the 
 lift the day of his first visit and the white-haired young woman 
 who had once told him that "between Universalism and the 
 Universalists there was a great gulf fixed.' 7 The lame man 
 
IN THE MELTING POT 245 
 
 had said: "It is the Universalists who will kill Universalism 
 as the Christians have killed Christianity . . . perhaps I 
 am the only Universalist." And he had laughed. He had 
 gone on: " Universalism, like Catholicism and Protestantism 
 before it, is already in process of crystallisation, and it will 
 give way to a new religion, the central point of which will be 
 'consciousness,' without dogma, for dogma, basically, is un- 
 consciousness. It will be the religion of 'Conscious Democ- 
 racy' without temple or priest and it will erect its altars to 
 the Unknown God, in temples not made with hands." Some- 
 thing had stirred in Finn at the words, which came to him as 
 a memory. Paris Asthar had once said that. 
 
 The lame man had finished with that indulgent humour of 
 his, as he hobbled away on his black-rubbered crutches: "The 
 Universalists are always talking about 'eternal principles.' The 
 gods don't care a damn for eternal principles there are no 
 eternal principles!" 
 
 But for Finn, during the three years that followed his leav- 
 ing Crux, to that gentleman's disgustful astonishment, the 
 world about him was fast changing from grey to rose-red. 
 From the moment when that stream of articles on Ireland, 
 which he had written after his quarrel with Deirdre Asthar 
 that night on the road from Dunhallow, had appeared in "The 
 Earth," the articles which marked his surrender to Thrum, 
 everything had gone well with him. 
 
 For that three years, he went from strength to strength, los- 
 ing himself in the fevers of Fleet Street, all doors opened to 
 him and his pen winning the golden rewards of the successful 
 journalist. His book on Ireland he had, of course, long since 
 abandoned, leaving the MS. in a drawer. The quarterlies had 
 invited him to contribute his opinions upon Ireland after 
 Thrum had given them in his papers the prominence which he 
 alone could secure, and his name was constantly being quoted 
 in leading dailies as "that sane young Irishman, Finn Fon- 
 taine," or "that smart young journalist." 
 
 If he could only have prevented himself thinking, he would 
 have felt himself happy, basking in gratified recognition. 
 
 He was now well-dressed. His soft green wide-awakes had 
 even set a fashion amongst rising journalists, and as he went, his 
 tall broad-shouldered figure was one of the sights of Fleet 
 Street, the most admired by the youthful adventurers there. 
 
246 GODS 
 
 There were of course flies in the unguents of success. And 
 there was his father, who was getting tottery, with a tendency 
 to faintings. He was now selling or trying to sell a new ency- 
 clopaedia, the weight of which was causing varicose veins to 
 swell in his legs. It was a great shame, and although Finn 
 tried to help his now admiring people from time to time, his 
 money seemed to be swallowed up in the insatiable maw of that 
 man Spellbind, who at this time was swelling prodigiously both 
 in person and bank balance. With his dropsical swellings he 
 had always looked as though he had water on the brain. Now 
 it was his stomach which seemed full of water, giving to it the 
 flatulence of a corpse. At last Finn had refused to help any 
 more. 
 
 And he had lost his dear little grandmother, who, one day, 
 praying for him, was unable to rise from her knees and, for the 
 first time, had to be assisted up the three steps of ascent to 
 the great bed. And there, full of years, she had passed away 
 some days later, singing her quavering hymns to the last and 
 blessing and praying for Finn and all about her. Her very 
 last words had been for him the apple of her eye. 
 
 She had been lying with two big pillows to prop her up 
 in the bed, her thin wrinkled hands smoothing the coverlet, 
 tremulous, a wisp of grey coming from under her nightcap. 
 And she had said to him, as the evening sun came westering 
 through the window to fall upon the dim blue eyes that 
 searched the golden glory of the September heavens: "Finn, 
 boy, Finn." He had turned at the low pleading voice. "Come, 
 alannah, and put your arms around me." And he had done so. 
 
 "Oh, Finn, I'm goin' from you and from Jemmy and all. 
 But Finn, avick," and she had looked long and earnestly at 
 him, a sort of radiance shining from behind the eyes, "I will 
 still be pray in' for ye and lovin' ye where I am going. Death 
 cannot kill prayer or love. For love is everything." And then 
 she had smiled pleasantly at him and had said, low, distinct: 
 "God is love." 
 
 She had sighed in his arms like a very tired child and so 
 had fallen asleep. 
 
 It had affected him very much at the time and indeed had 
 plunged him into a sort of misery, in which his old thoughts 
 about God had once more surged up within him. Not that 
 he had ever forgotten them altogether or ever believed that he 
 
IN THE MELTING POT 247 
 
 could shut out God by refusing to think of him. But they 
 had come to trouble him, and with them had come a sort of 
 poignancy about Deirdre Asthar and about Ireland. Yet, 
 both these things he thought he had put out of his heart for- 
 ever. 
 
 But that had passed. As he said it to himself: "The virtue 
 had gone out of him." 
 
 He had, however, the strangest lapses, over which he seemed 
 to have no control. There were moments when the face of 
 Deirdre Asthar would come to him to arouse him to violent 
 despair, when it took all his strength of will to shut her out 
 and himself to peace again. And for the girl with the copper 
 hair he had moments when he felt a disgust to her as though 
 she had been some noxious animal moments that came to 
 him when least expected, even in the approachings of hot de- 
 sire. It seemed always that contact or nearer approach made 
 him hate her, and that moment of the valley had never re- 
 turned. 
 
 But perhaps this was because Paris Asthar, with that per- 
 versity which distinguished him, was always urging him to 
 surrender himself to Stella. 
 
 He had with a certain insistent suavity of his own, which 
 indeed was entirely logical, shown Finn that the suppression 
 of natural instinct was in itself unnatural; that above all it was 
 the chaste man who had not the right to refuse himself to 
 some poor woman to whose own development he was necessary, 
 and had generally comported himself as a very gentlemanly 
 pander indeed. 
 
 But Finn also had a perversity, which made him refuse just 
 because Paris Asthar wished it. As for Paris, his splendid 
 appearance was fast transforming, he seemed to be falling in 
 on himself, a splendid ruin of a man, and even his half sister 
 was gradually withdrawing herself from him. 
 
 Stella Fay he had met constantly. She seemd to have for- 
 gotten that night in the valley, and save for the little mocking 
 smile that haunted her lips, he might have thought that he 
 had dreamt it. Only she no longer made love to him, but 
 seemed to hold herself afar off, watching for something. They 
 were excellent comrades and had visited all sorts of queer 
 places together, including the great grey stone church in 
 Kensington known as "The Church of the Beautiful," the only 
 
248 GODS 
 
 church in the world without a head as Stella was careful to 
 inform him. It was the last thing in nebulousness. 
 
 It was one of the numerous sects in which she was always 
 dabbling and into which she seemed, at the beginning of each 
 new experiment, to plunge herself with zest, real or assumed. 
 Down at Forestford, they had once had a black cat which, 
 even when long past the vagaries of kittenhood, would, as night 
 came on, run about the grass of the little back garden like 
 a mad thing, rushing up into the top of the two fruit trees 
 and hiding herself in impenetrable positions from which she 
 would dart out upon an unsuspecting world. Ginger had 
 said the devil was in Semolina the name she had given her 
 and would add in her dreadful East-end slang that "she was 
 balmy on her crumpet." Stella Fay often reminded him of 
 that cat. 
 
 This church remained long in Finn's memory, because it 
 seemed to be typical of so many of the new sects and cults 
 that were at this time springing up everywhere in London, and, 
 indeed, throughout the world. Behind it was that atmosphere 
 of riches and " fashionable faith" which he had learned to 
 associate with a certain type of autocracy. Its congregation, 
 like so many of the Universalists themselves, like their horses 
 and carriages, were richly upholstered. They semed to play 
 with spirituality as a child plays with a new toy, though even 
 Finn, now fine-edged critically, was not prepared to say that 
 they did not feel something of what they professed. 
 
 The Church of the Beautiful was a noble building, the high 
 slender spire of which hung like a white shadow behind the 
 trees of Kensington. In the centre, was a whispering gal- 
 lery from which the pure sound of boys' voices spiralled down 
 to the congregation beneath. Around the walls, indifferently, 
 were statues of Christ, Buddha, and Minerva, and instead of 
 hymns the concealed singing, luscious and ethical, was from 
 the poems of Swinburne and Shelley. The whole thing was 
 really very well done. 
 
 He discovered later that instead of a head, this church had 
 a sort of Inner Council of Three, presided over by the man 
 who was called "The Founder," the name of whom was never 
 disclosed. Nobody ever knew who the founder really was. 
 Some said that "The Founder" was the man who had founded 
 the Church, a man of enormous wealth others that he was 
 
IN THE MELTING POT 249 
 
 changed each year, his identity being known alone to the 
 Council. 
 
 It was all very mysterious and cloudy and, of course, "beau- 
 tiful," that word which was always making its appearance in 
 the literature and singing. Not that its adherents were de- 
 barred from admixtures to that principle of beauty, which, 
 vaguely, they were supposed to worship if they wished to 
 add their own private gods they could do so and of course 
 they did wish. But between the Universalists and the mem- 
 bers of the Church Beautiful, as it was sometimes called, there 
 was feud none the less deadly in that it was carried on in 
 the politest and most forgiving manner. 
 
 So far as Finn could see, this was but a reflex of the 
 world as a whole, that world which was in a state of spiritual 
 disintegration, tending to a certain vagueness in religion, con- 
 fusing it more and more with politics as with patriotism. 
 Wave after wave seemed to be passing across it, and the 
 foundations of belief, like his own, seemed to be in the melting 
 pot. Each day the newspapers were filled with semi-humourous 
 articles about Lanthorn and his Borderland Bureau, only that 
 now, despite the frantic and not altogether scientifically dig- 
 nified protests of men like Professor Dust, bewildered, Sir 
 Lancaster Hogge, squawky, and another rationalist professor 
 roaring, these articles were gradually losing their humourous 
 tinge and, whilst holding themselves editorially circumspect, 
 there seemed to be a trend, under the public demand for more 
 of Lanthorn's "facts," although these facts were still always 
 inverted commaed, to permit them to be regarded with some 
 seriousness. "Spooks," materialising, were now becoming 
 "ghosts" in the daily paper. Soon they would attain the full 
 dignity of matter and become "matter of fact" as Asthar had 
 put it in an article in the "Contemporary." 
 
 An archdeacon in the church had boldly come out on the 
 side of spiritualism or, as he said, "on the side of the angels," 
 a phrase that was beginning to be used by the most varied 
 types of people. The bishops were in a constant state of 
 shock and alarm, not knowing how to orientate themselves 
 to the new tendencies, or, as the Bishop of Whitechapel said, 
 in one of his bewildered fulminations, "what to do for the 
 best." 
 
 The Reverend Slick, however, repulsed at Black Rock, was 
 
250 GODS 
 
 at the Kensington Rotunda going stronger than ever, keeping 
 all London awake with his howlings with Big Business boom- 
 ing behind. 
 
 To add to the confusion, Sir Raymond Hilary, whose dis- 
 tinguished investigations as physicist into the new atomic 
 theory, largely inspired by the discovery of radium, had com- 
 pelled his brother scientists to recognise him by making him 
 President for the year of the British Association, had come 
 out and shocked the very foundations of their beliefs by de- 
 claring, positively and even pugnaciously, that life and identity 
 persisted after death, giving his proofs and defying refuta- 
 tion. This had caused amongst his fellow-scientists very much 
 the same feeling that a Spanish Grand Inquisitor might be 
 supposed to have felt at the denial by a cardinal of the Im- 
 maculate Conception. But there the challenge stood and 
 the man in the street at any rate, just beginning to find in- 
 terest in such speculations, seemed to think that Sir Raymond 
 so far had had the best of the argument, which somebody sign- 
 ing himself "Lucifer, Son of the Morning," had done his best 
 alternately to back up and laugh at in the "Contemporary." 
 It was Paris Asthar, of course. 
 
 Even the immemorial placidity of the religions of the East 
 seemed to be feeling something of these new disturbances. 
 They had begun to flood the materialist West with their pam- 
 phlets and expositions, and Sri Kapila, the Indian Finn had 
 met at "The Cloisters," had been holding a series of lectures 
 in the West end of London to packed houses, declaring that 
 the East was breaking its long silence and indifference to 
 propaganda to convert the West. Of course the papers laughed 
 at him, but large and increasing numbers seemed to be taking 
 him seriously. 
 
 On the other hand, it was quite evident that these move- 
 ments so far were confined to minorities, the great mass of 
 Europeans being either indifferent or hostile, and from all sides 
 arose the complaint that Europe was fast sinking into the 
 slough of the material, with its motto: "Eat, drink, and be 
 merry, for tomorrow we die." 
 
 With all this went the ever-increasing growth of prophecies 
 of a Great War, coming from the most contradictory quar- 
 ters. Even men so widely divorced as Paris Asthar and Father 
 Lestrange said that such a war was inevitable, and for one 
 
IN THE MELTING POT 251 
 
 purpose only the saving of Europe from her materialist 
 hog-trough and the tearing down of the veils between the 
 worlds of the seen and the unseen, now wearing thin. It was 
 what these people had always said. 
 
 The European statesmen, both of Germany and France, as 
 of England and Austro-Hungary, constantly foreshadowed the 
 struggle in speech and article, although in veiled phrases, as 
 did the platforms of democracy. The pulpits were full of 
 vague denunciations of the profligacy of the times and of the 
 Armageddon that should follow them. Finn himself, an atom 
 in all this stir, dipped his pen deep and wrote about it as did 
 hundreds of other journalists, who felt that such a war would 
 in some unexplained way come as a relief. Like millions of 
 others he expected, and wanted, something to happen. He 
 scarcely knew what. But something. Europe was like a 
 woman about to travail to bring forth . . . what? It 
 was a feeling of tension unbearable the feeling of something 
 inevitable. 
 
XXVI 
 
 "GOD OF BATTLES" 
 
 Something else that jagged Finn like an old wound was the 
 constant impulse, despite his success, to attend, furtively, the 
 big labour meetings now being held under the advance of the 
 rising Democracy, where he had been considerably puzzled at 
 the varying outlooks of the leaders, who seemed to embrace 
 all types from "idealists" like Jock Mac Adam to material- 
 ists like Red Borb. 
 
 Another thing that puzzled was the thing which had first 
 struck him that day of the unemployed procession the curious 
 trend of Democracy to religion its habit of using bible quo- 
 tations on its banners and a religious terminology or phras- 
 ing on its platforms and in its pamphlets. It was gradually 
 coming to him that what was called "Democracy" was really a 
 new world-religion, and somebody had written of it that like 
 other faiths it was developing its priests and its dogmas. 
 
 He had been sent by Thrum to interview MacAdam prior 
 to a mass meeting of the unemployed, which at this time was 
 thought to herald open rebellion, and, incoherently enough, 
 was much distressed when MacAdam had looked at him from 
 under his shaggy brows to say: "I wonder, Mr. Fontaine, 
 that you care to serve the devil!" 
 
 It distressed him out of all relation to its importance, per- 
 haps because he had never been able entirely to get that pro- 
 cession of unemployed out of his head. He could sometimes 
 see it, blind, swinging through the fogs into the heart of the 
 red sun. 
 
 Thrum was now gathering his haunches under him for one 
 of his periodical "springs," in each one of which he usually 
 managed to engulf a competitor. He was beating the big 
 drum against Germany and making the press of the world, as 
 its chancelleries and parliaments, resound with his noise. 
 Gradually this paean of praise and hate was resolving itself 
 
 252 
 
"GOD OF BATTLES" 253 
 
 into a glorification of Nationalism and a damnation of In- 
 ternationalism. It had puzzled Finn very much at the time, 
 because Thrum's nationalism had seemed to be the exact 
 antithesis of that nationalism he had met in Ireland. He was 
 even beginning to speak in "The Earth" about "God and the 
 British Empire." The Almighty figured constantly in his 
 leaders. 
 
 Finn was now looked upon by Thrum as one of his best 
 men. He reserved him for all his big "stunts," as they called 
 them at the office. He now wanted him to write what he 
 called "a picturesque account" of the biggest stunt he had 
 hitherto attempted the private meeting of delegates whiclj 
 was to be the preliminary to the formation of an International 
 Peace Union which, upon the threat of war then materialising, 
 would, in the various European countries hold mass meetings 
 of protest and initiate united pacifist action. 
 
 There were to be at this preliminary meeting only a score 
 of delegates that is, representatives of the world's peace so- 
 cieties as of those of Labour and Socialism. Even the Churches, 
 those disciples of Christianity militant, had been invited to 
 send half a dozen delegates. The proceedings of the meeting 
 were to be secret, for the organisers were afraid of the laughter 
 of a scornful and practical world. 
 
 Finn had no right to be there. It was Thrum's idea. With 
 that admirable imagination which had given the great jour- 
 nalist the position he occupied, he had promptly formed a 
 "Peace" society of prominent friends, for the purpose, as he 
 said, of holding a watching brief upon the pacifists. They 
 were too prominent to be denied representation, and he had 
 sent Finn as their delegate. By this means, "The Earth" 
 would be the only paper to have a report of the proceedings. 
 It would be one more "scoop." 
 
 It was about n of a thundery August morning when Finn 
 entered the London headq'uarters of the Workers' Party, 
 where the meetings were to be held. It was a rather heavy 
 room, pictureless and bare, with a board table on trestles 
 standing bleakly across the centre, there being a large chair 
 in the middle with smaller chairs fringing the rest of the 
 table. Two long curtainless windows let in a stray light, 
 which, however, only served to accentuate the utilitarian gloom 
 of the place to which some relief was given by a gleam of silk 
 
254 GODS 
 
 in the corners where Democracy had left its banners after 
 some demonstration. Directly behind the big chair, how- 
 ever, stood a banner of smoky red, on it, in gold lettering: 
 "Workers of the World Unite!" 
 
 He slipped into the vacant chair at the end of the table 
 and looked at the men and women either entering the room 
 or already seated. Once more he was held by the astonishingly 
 diversified types of the new democracy. 
 
 A dusky-haired girl in the early twenties came through the 
 door with a young man who might have been her lover both 
 of them obviously aristocrats. Her hair, done low on her 
 neck and her long limbs set off by a rather close-fitting skirt, 
 reminded him of Stella Fay, only that the lightsome eyes had 
 another expression. She had a jaw and Finn thought looked 
 apt to be difficult. 
 
 The man he took to be her lover was a slender determined 
 idealist of a transition stage when men of the upper and middle 
 classes were showing themselves singly side by side with the 
 rising Democracy apparently a University man. There was 
 something spiritually impressive about the slender figure, the 
 fine head, and the mobile, clean-shaven mouth, but Finn, look- 
 ing at him, said to himself that he lacked something perhaps 
 passion. And in a sense Finn was right about a man who was 
 not humanly exciting any more than Christ would have been 
 humanly exciting had he appeared in the Twentieth Century. 
 There was a naturalness about him, however, which drew Finn. 
 
 The big, loose-framed Irishman who followed the man and 
 girl Finn knew by sight. That was Durgan, the Direct Ac- 
 tionist. He knew him for a man who could be obstinate, 
 pugnacious, and even brutal in his fanaticism, although there 
 was about him something beautiful, though fated. He was the 
 man of whom the Archbishop of Canterbury had once written 
 in the columns of "The Times" that in him was an evil spirit, a 
 theory eagerly though riotously upheld by Paris Asthar who, 
 in a long letter, had made out an excellent case for "pos- 
 session." 
 
 Ellen Masters, dressed in white muslin, already sat at one 
 end of the long table, looking with her heavy jowl and wise 
 saggy eyes like some great intelligent lioness, very conscious, 
 and very dangerous. 
 
 In the chair, already declaiming in a voice of anaesthesia, 
 
"GOD OF BATTLES" 255 
 
 a large soft-looking man was addressing his audience as though 
 they had been a congregation and the chair a pulpit. It was 
 a voice to which Finn had become accustomed from his fre- 
 quent attendances at Labour meetings. 
 
 On one side of the Chairman sat Adolph Gutenmann, the 
 German Socialist chief, whose heavy white walrus moustache, 
 round spectacles, and rubicund face were known at every 
 congress table in Europe. On the other, Sylvester Vallon, his 
 friend the enemy, his natural opposite, whose eyes behind their 
 darkened glasses gave him something of the gaze of the half- 
 blind man whose eyes are fixed beyond earthly horizons. 
 
 And now the chairman, who was one John Bluett, a per- 
 fectly honest, perfectly tame, member of the Labour Party 
 and a lay preacher, was going on in a fashion that was at 
 once balmy and slightly condescending as though he were at 
 a prayer meeting. . . . "We have gathered here to-day, 
 friends, for a great purpose, a solemn purpose the abolition of 
 war from the ahem! " giving a loose rein to his imagina- 
 tion "universe." Then followed the usual string of plati- 
 tudes to which Finn had become inured from John Bluett and 
 his like, in which the words "open mind" occurred at reg- 
 ular intervals. The blue eyes became misty as the speaker 
 went on: 
 
 "I remember when I was a little boy at Sunday-school we 
 used to have a hymn in which we sung about the beauty of 
 the earth 'From Greenland's icy mountains, to India's coral 
 strand,' and in which, if my memory serves me correctly, 
 we were accustomed to say that 'only man was vile. 7 Al- 
 though I do not see before me either Greenlander or Indian, 
 I believe that the hymn is suitable to the present international 
 gathering . . . Here, under a dubious "ahem!" from 
 another delegate, the chairman, who reminded Finn of his 
 Aunt Maria, showed a tendency to wander from the point, tried 
 to save himself, stuttered, stumbled, and finally extricated him- 
 self from the mess of his thinking by plunging into a generally 
 devout hope that "under the blessing of Providence our efforts 
 to-day may result in the nearer coming of that day when the 
 sword shall be beaten into the ploughshare and the spear into 
 the pruning hook." 
 
 It was not what the man said so held the attention of Finn 
 Fontaine, but the way in which he said it that queer tendency 
 
256 GODS 
 
 in modern politic to introduce religion and even to couch 
 the political message in the language of orthodoxy. Again 
 and again this was brought out in the remarks of those 
 who followed. Once more it came to him that Asthar, who 
 had so often said that the day war broke out in Europe the 
 gods would be fighting on either side above the protagonists, 
 was perhaps using something more than the language of 
 phantasy. 
 
 This was religion, not politic. Perhaps there was no politic. 
 
 This showed itself once more in the speech of the man who 
 had followed the soft-faced chairman. He was the tall, raw- 
 boned Irishman, bitter as only a Southern Irishman can be, 
 though his was actually but a protest against the religious 
 note. It was there when in a strong passage he said: "I will 
 tell you, Mr. Chairman, for what we have not come here to- 
 day to hold a prayer meeting. The time for prayer is past 
 the time for action come. You have quoted Providence as 
 I have heard it quoted at every Labour Congress I have ever 
 attended one of our democratic specialties is Providence and 
 politics and after all our providential politics through a 
 century, where do we stand to-day, I ask ye? ... on 
 the edge of fratricidal war, in which comrade will slaughter 
 comrade in the name of the very God you profess to serve 
 ..." and then he had added, bitterly: " ... he 
 is still the God of Battles. 
 
 "You have quoted your Sunday-school well, mine used to 
 tell me that God helped those who helped themselves; but the 
 master of tactics, your master and mine, said that Providence 
 was on the side of the big battalions. I believe that. We 
 have right and we have might. We have the big battalions 
 of democracy to prevent the bloody war now being talked 
 of throughout Europe. We have had enough talk. Now let 
 us have action. 
 
 "Ye talk of God!" (He said it with a savage contempt.) 
 "Well, if there is a God of Peace, there is also a God of 
 Battle it stands in the book you have just quoted and he is 
 perhaps the God of the Red International, the International 
 of Blood which is to replace that other capitalist International 
 of Gold, which in its turn replaced that other of Birth the 
 International that is beating into us workers the lesson that 
 
"GOD OF BATTLES" 257 
 
 combination is the price of life as it is the price of peace. 
 For combination means domination. . . ." 
 
 "And domination, damnation," inserted glibly one of the 
 delegates, a lanky young man who had just glided into an 
 empty chair and whose hair, parted in the centre and com- 
 ing up into horn points, gave him something of a benevo- 
 lent satyr. It was, as Finn recognised, Mr. Lancelot Fitz, 
 the pacifist whose tongue and pen were dipped in oil and 
 vinegar and who was known as "The Gamin," who, as Paris 
 Asthar once said, respected neither God nor man but loved 
 both." 
 
 "And domination, damnation," he had said. 
 
 "Dominate or be damned!" said the big Irishman, heavily. 
 "You talk about your meaningless labour resolutions and your 
 God of peace in every congress hall. Why, every congress 
 hall. . . ." 
 
 ". . . every congress hall is the temple of the Great 
 Majority the Majority Eternal, and you believe in the rule 
 of the majority not the minority. Vox populi, vox Dei" 
 banteied Fitz. 
 
 "Hear-hear! Hear-hear!" ejaculated the chairman, piously, 
 forgetting the neutrality of chairmanship. 
 
 "Always remembering that the minority is only right for 
 the time the majority, never," put in Fitz with the flippancy 
 that he had made his own. 
 
 "And I do believe in the majority," went on the Irishman 
 stubbornly, "but even the majority is powerless in face of 
 war of the Moloch that demands his meat to-day as he de- 
 manded it three thousand years ago in Carthage. It is the 
 majority which to-day, or to-morrow, in face of the threat 
 of war, is without policy. . . ." 
 
 A voice came from the end of the table in quiet challenge: 
 "Where is your policy?" 
 
 The big man drew himself up, triumphant: "The sword of 
 the strike." 
 
 'A sword with two edges that cuts both ways," came in 
 low distinctness the voice of an old man from his place under 
 the lee of the big Irishman. "You cannot fight the sword 
 with the sword." And then he had added, regretfully, faintly: 
 "He that lives by the sword shall die by the sword." 
 
 Finn had noticed this old Russian, who was familiarly and 
 
2 S 8 GODS 
 
 affectionately known as Old Breschoff, who, leaning upon 
 his wife's arm, had taken a chair upon the extreme right of 
 the table, facing the chairman, his wife, who accompanied him 
 everywhere, taking a chair on his left and a little behind him. 
 During the proceedings, this. Russian woman of furrowed lines 
 and smooth black hair had watched tenderly over her hus- 
 band, winner of the Nobel Prize and head of the International 
 Peace Society. 
 
 Finn knew something about him, this Tolstoyan non-resister 
 of no nation, whose weak mild blue eyes concealed a peculiar 
 tenacity of ideal and purpose, and who had won the admira- 
 tion of the crank as of the average man, the respect of both 
 friend and opponent. It had been said of him that he was 
 the only Twentieth Century European who had succeeded in 
 carrying out both in spirit and letter the teachings of the 
 Christ whom he professed to serve. 
 
 Finn brought back these wandering recollections to the Irish- 
 man, who was declaiming in dour, powerful sentences: ". . . 
 all this is only talk. We want action. War against Warl" 
 He brought out the words in one of his triumphant periods. 
 
 "Talk, talk, only talk," mimicked Fitz, who feared neither 
 god nor devil. 
 
 "No, not talk action," retorted his big opponent. "The 
 day the diplomats declare war we declare the International 
 Strike. Gutenmann here will give the word in Germany, Val- 
 lon in France, Masta in Italy and on the word every work- 
 man throws down his tools. No wheel turns in the munition 
 factory. No wheel in the streets. No wheel on the iron ways. 
 The labourer throws down his spade. . . ." 
 
 "And the gravedigger also, I suppose," said Fitz. 
 
 "Let the dead bury their dead," said the big man as he 
 sat down. 
 
 It was then that the young aristocrat who had first en- 
 tered with the dusky-haired girl stood up to say something 
 that rivetted Finn's attention. He was speaking of the im- 
 possibility of the General Strike, because he, like thousands 
 of others had felt unsure of their ground during the previous 
 weeks when Europe had seemed to be on the edge of war 
 over a Morocco incident. 
 
 "It is something," he said, "which has caused the blood 
 of some of us to stir to stir to something that I cannot 
 
"GOD OF BATTLES" 259 
 
 define perhaps to the call of the blood itself; or perhaps to 
 the Thing behind what we know as the call of the blood, 
 whatever that Thing or Person may be. It is a phenomenon 
 not easy to describe," he went on "it is more of a feeling 
 than a thing of consciousness. That thing is patriotism." 
 And then he had added: "It may be a sort of primeval stir- 
 ring it may be barbarous and uncivilised it may be the 
 highest form of virtue but it is there, even amongst us paci- 
 fists. It cannot be explained away, not even by Durgan. 
 There are instincts that are deeper than anything else 
 deeper than death and of these the strongest is the instinct 
 of country that men call patriotism. Perhaps patriotism is 
 the splendid spur by which the gods achieve their ends. I 
 don't know. But nothing is so dominating, so powerful, as 
 this patriotism." 
 
 "Internationalism," came a deep voice from the other end 
 of the table, at the moment when Finn had been watching 
 the heavy, wise eyes of Ellen Masters fixed upon the speaker 
 with something that might have been a smile behind. 
 
 But Ellen Masters had risen. It was curious to see how 
 complete was the hush that followed as she looked above the 
 head of the chairman. 
 
 "Internationalism is still only a word. It is not even a 
 habit," said the Universalist leader. "It is something from 
 the outside that has never been translated into consciousness 
 that consciousness which is the object of evolution" (some- 
 thing moved Finn at the words). "It is something that has 
 come down as a revelation to the workers and, like most revela- 
 tions, is not believed. Perhaps it is, as the previous speaker 
 has said, that patriotism is one of the spurs by which the 
 gods achieve their ends perhaps in our times the chief spur. 
 Perhaps, like men, the gods throw away their tools when 
 they have finished with them. Perhaps Internationalism and 
 the Democracy of which it is the result is a tool in the mak- 
 ing, to be used when the time comes. Who knows? Perhaps 
 it is that the gods grow upon the things on which they feed 
 but it that be so, the cpirit of Internationalism which is but 
 the mushroom growth of half a hundred years will, in the 
 face of war, break to-day before the spirit of Nationalism 
 which is the growth of the ages." 
 
260 GODS 
 
 She had paused to look about her, as though, for the first 
 time, aware of her surroundings. 
 
 "If England declare war if Germany declare it I will go 
 on the platform, like most -of you, to fight it as long as I 
 can. I will tell the workers not to fight and I will wait for 
 the German, the French, and the other democracies to recipro- 
 cate for the tocsin of War against War, as another speaker 
 has said . . . even though, as I say it, I believe I shall 
 be as a voice crying in the wilderness. . . ." 
 
 "To prepare the way of the Lord. . . ." It was Old 
 Breschoff. 
 
 ". . . to try ... and perhaps to fail," she had added 
 as she resumed her seat. 
 
 It was a wretched little cobbler from the East End who had 
 once said to Finn: "The soul of a crowd is not the soul of a 
 man it's another sort of soul. It grows with the thing upon 
 which it feeds. The crowd hisn't a collection of hindividuals 
 hit's a Thing. . . ." Finn remembered how the man 
 had stopped as though puzzled at his own words. 
 "Wot I mean," he had gone on, "is that there's something 
 behind a crowd ... " and then he had stopped again, 
 nor could Finn get him to explain. Yet what that little cob- 
 bler had tried to say was exactly what Ellen Masters and 
 the previous speaker had been putting into words. Paris 
 Asthar had said it more than once. And then, again, it 
 seemed nonsense. 
 
 John Bluett had been trying to follow Ellen Masters with a 
 look of bewilderment upon his good-natured face that brought 
 memories to Finn of the Bishop of Whitechapel. It was 
 that look which it often seemed to Finn was a characteristic 
 of the age in which he lived. All sorts of people had that 
 look people for whom the age of transition was flying too 
 fast. They were breathless and bewildered. 
 
 Bluett now broke in to protest against the previous speak- 
 er's idea of democracy, which "to us practical politicians 
 and men of affairs is something more than a a sort of rowdy 
 animal without any idea of a vote ..." which brought 
 in Fitz with a sarcastic: 
 
 "You've got votes on the brain, Mr. Chairman." 
 
 John Bluett was righteously indignant. "I hope I have," 
 
"GOD OF BATTLES" 261 
 
 he said, almost spluttering. "Is it not the vote that has 
 placed England where she is. . . ." 
 
 "Where is that?" 
 
 "Where is what? Why of course of course" (he hesitated 
 a moment, then plunged) . . . "of course ahead of every 
 other nation the home of liberty and free speech the home 
 of the Bible the home that all other nations look to as a 
 'ome from 'ome;" and then, completely forgetting himself: 
 "everyone knows that the Union Jack. . . ." He remem- 
 bered himself . . . "but of course this is an International 
 gathering. . . ." 
 
 "In which, unfortunately, foreigners are present," inserted 
 Fitz. The meeting laughed, but to Finn it had seemed as 
 the chairman spoke that something was speaking through 
 him, something irresistible. It was the feeling he had about 
 the big Irishman as about the young aristocrat and Ellen 
 Masters. In a sense, they were but channels for a message 
 but from whom? for what? For one nauseating moment 
 he had the feeling that all those about him were automata 
 that he himself was an automaton. Then he put it away. 
 
 But is was quite clear that in this meeting, as in those 
 others he had so often attended, there were distinct currents. 
 Men and women seemed to be sent into the world by different 
 streams, to do their particular work in those streams, and al- 
 though the streams sometimes blended momentarily, yet, as 
 a whole, they remained separate. And then again it came to 
 him that what was really happening in the world about him 
 was a blending of some of those streams, a blending that 
 men called, indifferently, Democracy, or Internationalism, or 
 Religion, according to the facet upon which they looked. 
 And the blending was difficult. 
 
 And now Breschoff was speaking again. Finn, lost in his 
 thoughts, had a vague notion, as he ruminated, that several 
 delegates had risen to support the Irishman to urge the use 
 of force to kill force war to stop war. It was then that 
 Old Breschoff had intervened. 
 
 "I have seen more revolutions than any man or woman here 
 has winters," he said "I have heard the rattle of the rifle 
 blend with the rattle of death and I, Old Breschoff, once 
 known as the Grandfather of the Revolution, tell you that 
 blood never yet staunched blood, hate killed hate, or force, 
 
262 GODS 
 
 force. Love alone can destroy hate, and non-resistance annul 
 force. Love is the universal solvent." 
 
 "But it cannot solve the problem of defence of country," 
 interposed Vallon, for the first time, from behind his smoked 
 glasses in that half-blind gentle way of his, only that in his 
 voice, to those who knew him, there lay unaccustomed fierce- 
 ness. "That is the real problem." 
 
 The Irishman flung in bitterly to ask whether he would let 
 their masters tread them, defenceless, under the iron hoof 
 of brute force to force them to the slaughter benches. 
 
 Old Breschoff had replied, calmly: "And you what would 
 you have? Would you have a holocaust in our streets? Would 
 you have demon passions unchained which cannot again be 
 leashed? Would you have those masses who are only now 
 finding, however blindly, their way to freedom, now nosing 
 for the light, thrust back by superior force into shameful for- 
 getfulness? Would you have the sun of the rising democracy 
 blotted out by the dark clouds of reaction as" he pointed 
 through the windows "the blue sky outside is dulling under 
 the thunderclouds that are rolling up? 
 
 "But," and his voice took a stronger note, "I tell you that 
 war to-day is impossible. The modern man is too nervous, 
 too highly strung, too civilised, to kill his fellows in the battue 
 of a European war. Most of our fellow beings could not 
 kill a sheep much less a man." 
 
 "Man-killing is the easier I've tried both," said the Irish- 
 man. 
 
 "I tell you war is impossible there is a new spirit in the 
 world," replied the Russian. "We shall not again hear the 
 thunder of the guns. . . ." 
 
 He broke off as a peal of thunder came rolling overhead, 
 to be followed by a lightning flash which illumined the in- 
 creasing darkness of the place. 
 
 "There you have your answer," said the big man dourly. 
 "Where is your policy?" 
 
 "My policy is the oldest policy in the world," went on 
 the old man in that gentle voice of his. The policy of "Love 
 your enemies!" 
 
 As Finn sat listening, there came to him again old voices 
 to murmur in his ears. It seemed to him, as Breschoff spoke, 
 that new lights were being thrown on old places. Old prob- 
 
"GOD OF BATTLES" 263 
 
 lems were solving themselves. Perhaps love was the heart 
 of religion. He had felt that so often but his love had so 
 much hate in it something like that big Irishman felt. But, 
 still, love. 
 
 His old grandmother had said the same as she died: "God 
 is love," she had said, and just before: "Even death cannot 
 kill love." Sometimes he thought that death and love like 
 hate and love, were but two facets of some common fact 
 were, perhaps, the same thing. 
 
 But the Irishman had interpolated: "That is an ethic 
 not a policy. How will you apply it?" 
 
 "Refuse to kill. That is how we will apply it." 
 
 "And you will have democracy slaughtered for its refusal 
 because of this policy of the coward. You will have our young 
 men, weaponless, slaughtered like defenceless sheep. Would 
 you have them crucified?" 
 
 The old Russian had looked long and sadly at his fierce 
 opponent and then he had said in a voice so low that it was 
 difficult to catch: "Yes, I would. The Christ that is coming 
 to save the world will be a Christ in corduroy not the Man 
 with the Red Flag on a barricade. He will hang, he must 
 hang, on his cross, crowned with the thorns of his beliefs. 
 He will be hanged, and be mocked, and die but his death 
 will not be in vain. He will die for a world." And then 
 he had collapsed in his seat, as though he had been fighting 
 with something. 
 
 There had been a great silence as though something were 
 grappling with each person there. It was as though some 
 presence had been with them in the room and, having de- 
 livered its message, had passed out again. 
 
 Vallon had followed after a few moments with an appeal 
 mainly directed to his comrade Gutenmann, of an exquisite 
 courtesy of phrase and diction. It was as though that Pres- 
 ence were still felt. He had been saying that, in the event 
 of a European war, his French comrades would refuse to vote 
 the war credits in the Chamber,, and had added, significantly: 
 "if our German comrades do the same." 
 
 It was then that the German had come for the first time 
 into the discussion, heavily: 
 
 "If ve do not move in de Reichstag, and if France see de 
 chance to get tack Alsace-Lorraine?" 
 
264 GODS 
 
 It was as though a new spirit had entered the place. 
 
 And then Vallon had blenched a little as he said: "That 
 is another matter. . . . Alsace stands outside all else. 
 Then . . . perhaps . . . then . . . then" he drew 
 himself up as he peered blindly through his shaded spectacles 
 . . . "then we shall fight Social Democrat and Conserva- 
 tive, Republican and Monarchist, side by side, proud to die 
 for France." He turned for the last time and looked, sadly, 
 proudly, at Gutenmann, who sat unmoved, crouched over his 
 papers. 
 
 It was John Bluett who tried to bring back the meeting 
 to what he called "facts," by saying that instead of taking 
 steps to prevent war they had been talking about country 
 and killing. "Gentlemen I mean Ladies and Gentlemen," 
 he had said, "I ask you as a practical politician standing for 
 a responsible and practical party is this sanity? Where 
 are your facts?" 
 
 It was then Gutenmann rose for the first time and made 
 the speech which lived long in Finn's memory. 
 
 "You vant facts, Mr. Shairman," he had said in his heavy 
 German guttural. "Here is von de fact of de Sherman Em- 
 pire. Dat and de British Empire are de two biggest facts in 
 de vorld. And vot is dis fact? 
 
 "It is de fact of a nation in arms of sevendy millions 
 of peoples ready from a boot button to a big gun . . . 
 ready for vot? for killing. Behind dose sevendy millions 
 stands von vill, von voice de voice neither of Kaiser nor 
 Junker but de voice of Shermany de voice of de Sherman 
 discipline, de brazen voice, and de mailed fist von voice dat 
 svings de whole de voice, de instinct, of country. A voice, 
 if you vill, clanked into de Sherman mind from de cradle to 
 de grave de voice of Vaterland. 
 
 "And do you know vot Vaterland means?" he had con- 
 tinued. "It means iron obedience; automatic vill; killing 
 vidout conscience; var widout mercy. It means," and he 
 had paused a moment as he said it, "it means de vorship of 
 gods. It means de Sherman Superman; de Sherman Michael; 
 de Sherman God" 
 
 "But will the German proletariat fight?" asked the Irish- 
 man. "Will they fight? That is the question." 
 
 As he spoke, the sound of a military band, coming out of 
 
"GOD OF BATTLES" 265 
 
 the distance, which had petered through once or twice as the 
 German had been speaking, now swelled in volume as it ap- 
 proached, the speaker pausing to listen with the others. It 
 was playing "The British Grenadiers," which, as it passed 
 the hall, burst into "Rule Britannia!" the crash of drum and 
 brass being drowned by the rolling cheers of the crowd. 
 
 "Vill dey fight? Ask dose, outside, if dey vill. . . . Dey 
 vill not ask themselves dat or any udder question when der 
 Tag de Day comes. De Socialist, like de Conservative 
 Junker, vill hear only de clang of de trumpet de voice of 
 de drill sergeant de crash of de Krupp. Krupp vill call, 
 and dey vill follow as de little children followed de Pied Piper. 
 And de Piper who vill do de piping vill be Michael de 
 Sherman God. Dose, Mr. Shairman, are de facts." He sat 
 down slowly in the silence. Behind him, Finn seemed to see 
 a terrible figure in gleaming armour the German Michael. 
 
 It was in the silence which followed that John Bluett, be- 
 wildered, had said: "Then there is nothing for us to do here. 
 If those are the facts, God help the International ! " 
 
 And it was Fitz who, for the first time solemn, had answered: 
 "He won't. He's a national, not an International God still 
 the God of Battles." 
 
 And it was on those words that the meeting had broken 
 up, with Finn, torn by new emotions, as by old emotions to 
 which he had long been closed, going out from the building 
 to take the step that was to be so decisive in his life: to 
 write, not the "picturesque," but the facts Gutenmann's 
 facts the facts of the God of Battles. 
 
 Once more the thin grey line dragged itself into the heart 
 of the mists and into that fiery sun which was now the brazen 
 throat of Moloch. Once more he saw the piteous, helpless 
 faces, to be led as sheep to the slaughter. Led by what? 
 By men or by gods? 
 
PART III 
 LOVE AND DEATH 
 
XXVII 
 
 OUT OF THE GREEN WATERS 
 
 Of course, looked at from all ordinary human viewpoints, 
 Finn's action was mad enough. But Finn was mad, with that 
 splendid madness which has always come up to defy the cal- 
 culations of the mighty. Someone has written of this sort of 
 madness that "it is the graving tool of the Power Behind, 
 flashing in the shadows, and with its own secret paths." 
 
 He knew what he was doing. He knew that his article upon 
 the Peace Conference, about which Thrum had left special in- 
 structions that it was not to be sub-edited, and handed in just 
 before the paper went to press, would be uncensored. The 
 result was that "The Earth" the next morning appeared with 
 the "facts," un-dressed and unashamed. They were Guten- 
 mann's brutal facts, taken from the lips of Gutenmann and 
 placed in the lips of the statesmen of Europe, irrespective of 
 country the statesmen who, as the writer said, had made them 
 possible. 
 
 It was an indictment of Twentieth Century statesmanship 
 and civilisation, of a clarity surprising, but, the unforgivable, 
 it was also a knife placed at the throat of the policy of the very 
 paper in which these "facts" appeared. 
 
 It was not at all that the writer was clear about what was 
 called Internationalism any more than he was clear about 
 the faith of the rising democracy. Indeed, the more he looked 
 into the one and the other, the more unsure he felt. 
 
 This was partly due to Ireland, the nationalism of which 
 had, in a way, left him immensely confused, it being, as he 
 naturally supposed, the antithesis of Internationalism, and 
 yet it was this very Nationalism which had drawn him so 
 strongly. With this, however, he felt that appeal of the Democ- 
 racy which also drew him. 
 
 The thing that moved him in the latter was something rather 
 
270 GODS 
 
 of permeation something of the call of those voiceless mil- 
 lions out there in the great world those millions that had 
 made themselves first felt to him that day on the Embank- 
 ment. Theirs, if it were a faith, was a dumb faith, "wor- 
 shipped in temples not made with hands." But whether for 
 good or ill, he stood for those dumb things. He felt he had 
 to speak for those who could not speak for themselves. 
 
 The results of his article, for him, were annihilating. But he 
 had expected annihilation. Yet, he had never felt so sure of 
 himself, with an undercurrent of the exaltation that came to 
 him, at moments unbidden, out of nothingness. 
 
 After Thrum's hammer had descended, and when he had 
 spent all his money and was very low down, with all doors 
 turned against him and his writing, for the hammer of Thrum 
 was heavy and his arm, like his memory, long, Lanthorn gave 
 him a "lift" by sending him to Ireland to write a series upon 
 the faith that was Ireland's. 
 
 Ireland was not Fleet Street. In Ireland he was not ashamed 
 of his shabby tweed suit. From Father Con, as from Kitty, 
 he got his old welcome, but, to his great grief, Johnny the 
 Saint was not there to come scuttering along the platform 
 to take his bag and to bless him. "Johnny had departed 
 this life," as Kitty O'Halloran said, "in a great blaze of 
 glory entirely and had had the beautifullest makings of a 
 funeral you ever saw in your life." All the town, it appeared, 
 had turned out to do honour to the passing of Johnny's 
 ragged blessedness and now, as Father Con said, Dunhallow 
 was in the way of placing a halo around his head "and sure 
 small blame to them. For didn't God love innocents and 
 children?" 
 
 Black Rock, in the way that it had, got to know that 
 "Masther Finn was in trouble," and in its own way did 
 everything it could to show him that he was beloved. A 
 ragged sheepish giant with his elbows sticking out of the 
 blue of his woollen shirt, would always be at the door with 
 a crab, or a few seagulls' eggs, or a red gurnard, "fresh 
 caught from the deep sea for the Masther's breakfast." 
 
 Crux's ruined towers stood down by the edge of the waters 
 with the winds of heaven blowing through their jagged timbers. 
 The patent chapel was being used by the villagers for all 
 sorts of utilitarian purposes, including pigs "poor sowls that 
 
OUT OF THE GREEN WATERS 271 
 
 had a right to a roof as well as the next Christian," as the lady 
 known as "ould Biddy the Rag" had put it to Finn in plaintive 
 apologia. But, looking out, four square to eternity, stood 
 the chapel of the old faith, unconquered and unconquerable. 
 
 It was the full flood of the Irish summer afternoon when 
 Finn found his way to the House of Dreams. As he walked 
 across the yard, he could see through the windows of the glass 
 verandah Mrs. O'Hara, now a little feeble, but with the grey 
 eyes and black brows unquenchable, telling her beads upon her 
 knees in the little room beyond. She rose to her feet to give 
 him her own bountiful blessing, holding both his hands in 
 hers. It was her benediction, for she never ventured to kiss 
 him or he, her. There was a sort of shyness between them. 
 
 As he was greeting the old lady, a shadow fell across the 
 floor. He turned to find a tall, almost strange, young woman 
 looking at him with that cold penetration of long ago. It 
 was Deirdre Asthar. 
 
 In the four years that had gone since they had met, since 
 that day when after the demonstration in the square she had 
 accused him of selling his country to Crux for thirty pieces 
 of silver, when, turning on her heel, she had finished: "I 
 think Judas must have been an Irishman!" Deirdre Asthar 
 had changed much. It was not only the physical transforma- 
 tion from girlhood into the splendour of an awakening woman- 
 hood it was the psychological change informing the other. 
 
 The young woman who stood before him this August evening 
 was a young woman not only sure of herself she had always 
 been that but a young woman, conscious. He caught it in- 
 stantly that new quality. It was the quality which had stolen 
 into himself since that day of the Peace Conference to which 
 Thrum had sent him perhaps had always been with him. 
 Adversity had hardened him into consciousness had struck 
 fire from the hidden depths. He wondered what it was that 
 had brought consciousness to this girl. 
 
 There was something translucent in her gaze as it turned 
 indifferently away from him or was it indifference? It might 
 as easily have been close concern. It was that quality of 
 elusiveness which had so often baffled him in this girl of 
 queer impulses and hidden meanings. It was something that 
 permeated her whole being. It was there in the fair clean 
 neck with the hair cut to its base; in the rather short, strong 
 
272 GODS 
 
 nose, and in the eyes under their clean brows that looked out 
 across the grey stones of the mossy courtyard. It was the 
 same Deirdre with a difference. 
 
 And it was the Deirdre that brought back that dull pang 
 which he thought he had buried for ever. 
 
 It was in that moment he knew he could never forget. 
 Deirdre Asthar was of the sort who are not forgotten. 
 
 Then it came to him. She had in her, as such women had, 
 a quality that was eternal. 
 
 These things swept across his mind as wind shadows across 
 the face of a mountain. And then, with a cold little bow, she 
 had gone past him, leaving Mrs. O'Hara to look after her 
 with that loving hopeless look of hers, which somehow fixed 
 the pang in Finn's heart. Then she had turned to Finn and 
 pressed his hand to lead him into the parlour. The eyes were 
 wet with tears. 
 
 Mrs. O'Hara had another surprise for him. Paris Asthar 
 and Stella Fay were staying at Black Rock for Asthar's health. 
 It seemed that his legs would take him where he didn't want 
 to go, and the people had begun to whisper about him. 
 
 He lay within, propped up on a sort of settee and swathed, 
 despite the sun outside, in a magnificent blotched rug of 
 llama wool. Finn, who had not seen him for two years, 
 was shocked at his appearance. The whole face seemed to 
 have fallen in upon itself, whipped as it was with a network 
 of fine lines that cris-crossed themselves in tanglement in- 
 extricable. Patsey in one corner sat watching him, never 
 removing his eyes from the man's face. Patsey himself had 
 scarcely grown, and the head was now out of all proportion 
 to the body, a heavy blossom upon a slender stalk. 
 
 But Asthar greeted Finn strongly enough, in a voice that 
 now seemed like a bell coming from a great distance, offering 
 him his left hand. "Can't be bothered to lift the other a 
 contrary devil won't do what I tell him." He looked down 
 on the rug as though he could see through it to the unruly 
 member lying underneath. "But it's the hand nearest the 
 heart eh Finn?" 
 
 He asked it with that faint touch of the brogue which in 
 his more extreme moments crept into his voice and looked 
 affectionately at Finn, who, as of old, would have warmed to 
 
OUT OF THE GREEN WATERS 273 
 
 him had it not been for the shock of his appearance which 
 still clung. 
 
 Asthar's eyes searched his face as though he would ask him 
 a question, but seemed to change his mind. 
 
 "Don't look so scared, Finn," he said, "I'm not dead yet. 
 I am not going to die," he added more fiercely. And then: 
 
 "There is nothing inevitable in death. Death is but a 
 way of thinking. If we can persuade ourselves we will not 
 die, Death can never overtake us." And then after a pause. 
 . . . "Man is a spirit, Finn. We are the stuff of which 
 the gods are made." The eyes blazed in the parchment of 
 the skull. And then there came from the mouth a meaning- 
 less babble the lower jaw had dropped. 
 
 "Creeping paralysis," Mrs. O'Hara had whispered. 
 
 And then Finn had caught the great dark eyes, the only 
 things unchanged in that human wreckage, looking behind 
 him, and he had turned to find Stella Fay standing there, re- 
 garding him silently. She stood there with something of a 
 ghost about her, or, as he put it to himself, as one who might 
 fade away even as he looked, like a wraith. She also had 
 taken a new quality since he had seen her last, also some two 
 years ago a quality of winsomeness. She was no longer so 
 desperate looking. 
 
 She had run in on him and to his astonishment had thrown 
 both her long arms about his neck and had kissed him quickly, 
 closely, but, as it seemed to him, not passionately but affec- 
 tionately not upon his lips but upon his hair and 
 forehead, pulling him down to her before the great wonder- 
 ing eyes of Patsey. And then she had run out with that 
 awkward graceful limp and had gone before he could get 
 his breath. 
 
 Asthar smiled but said nothing. He had the gift of boun- 
 teous silence. 
 
 But as Finn, bewildered, looked about him, he caught the 
 outline of Deirdre Asthar passing quickly across the window, 
 her head a little bent and her face averted. 
 
 She had come in, her arms full of roses, had flashed a 
 breathless look at Finn, whose face was one crimson flush, 
 and going quickly over to her half-brother, had thrown the 
 blood-red blossoms upon the rug before him, leaving the dead 
 white of his face with the blazing eyes above in stark relief. 
 
274 GODS 
 
 She had leant over him to speak to him, had arranged his 
 cushions behind him, and had gone out, with a little stoop- 
 ing seeking gesture of the head, passing Finn without glancing 
 at him. But he had noticed that although she spoke to Paris 
 tenderly enough, she seemed at moments not to be able to 
 bear to look at him, and would turn her head away. 
 
 Then he was sure she had seen and of course had not 
 understood that the kiss Stella Fay had given him might 
 have been that of a sister, with something loving, intimate, 
 added. But that could not be explained to her and, any- 
 how, what did it matter? She was nothing to him or, 
 rather, he was nothing to her. She had passed beyond him, 
 unattainable as a star. 
 
 All such things were so impossible of explanation yet Finn 
 knew the kiss Stella Fay had given him was different to those 
 others. That first time when before the dinner at "The Clois- 
 ters" she had said to him: "Little boy, I'm going to spoil 
 you;" and that other time down by the green waters when she 
 had pressed her wet body to his and with her red lips had 
 kissed him twice full on his own. And that last time for 
 he had never kissed her afterwards that night in the valley 
 under a moon of passion when their lips had sought each other 
 to cling together in an ecstasy of living, that night when she 
 had sought to keep out the sound of Deirdre's voice by her 
 hot kisses upon lips and eyes. 
 
 But in this kiss, to-day, there was something of affection 
 of farewell. And it was in that kiss he knew, for the first 
 time, that Stella Fay loved him. 
 
 He shivered a little there in the hot sunlight and looked 
 at Patsey, who was now staring at him not at Paris Asthar. 
 
 "Take Patsey out," said Asthar with a smile on his face 
 that might have been the grin of a gargoyle. "He's always 
 looking at me aren't you, Patsey? I can't stand his eyes." 
 He laughed, but there was anxiety in his laugh. Finn had 
 never seen Paris Asthar anxious before. 
 
 "Do you know what I heard him tell Togo there, only 
 last night, when he thought I had gone to bed?" (the little 
 Japanese had come in like a gnome and having made his jerky 
 little bow to Finn had busied himself about his master). 
 "He said to him: l You're only a poor yellow heathen and 
 there's no harm tellin' you but you won't have your masther 
 
OUT OF THE GREEN WATERS 275 
 
 long sure didn't I see death in his face and three scaldy 
 crows on the roof- tree in yesterday's dawn.' And he's been 
 telling Mrs. O'Hara something about Stella. I can't get it out 
 of her, but she is so superstitious and she's troubled. 
 
 "A most uncanny person to have about the place. He's 
 always looking at Stella these latter days with those great 
 round eyes of his, and they give me the creeps." He pretended 
 to shudder, but the pretence had passed into the reality and 
 the muscles of his lower jaw began to rattle like castanets, 
 causing Togo to bring him some brandy, which he poured 
 between them with difficulty, spilling some of it over the breast 
 of his dressing gown of stuffed silk. Asthar tried to steady 
 his mouth with his left hand, and altogether it was a pitiable 
 exhibition. 
 
 But all the time Patsey stared at him, until at last Finn, 
 fearing he would laugh or cry out or something, literally ran 
 out of the place into the dark night. He found his way along 
 the valley and down the winding path to the Cove lying with 
 its golden sands lapped between the low-lying rocks covered 
 with seaweed on one side and, on the other, the shadow of 
 Carrickmore which towered up into the stars the stars that, 
 seawards, hung low and dewy over the blackened waters under 
 the half-moon. 
 
 The sea, strewn with Stardust, was heavy, with an uneasy 
 stirring on its sullen gleaming surface. Sentient, it rose and 
 fell in satiny pulsations like a vast pall. The great scimitar 
 of moon hung low over the waters as though the thing that 
 breathed below were dragging it downwards. The concavity 
 of the night was soundless save for the plash oT a heavy curl 
 where it sank exhausted on the beach, which glimmered in 
 the starshine like Hull gold. A solitary seabird cried away in 
 the heart of the blackness. 
 
 Finn's heart was very heavy heavy as the leaden surge it- 
 self. He stretched his length on the hot sand and looked up 
 into the darkness, lost himself in the velvety speckled dome 
 above, and felt the secret attraction of the planet that seemed 
 to lie so heavy on the tides and on him. As he lay there, 
 himself now part of the smother of earth, sea, and sky, he 
 felt again that desire to lose himself in the heart of the sea 
 as he had once felt the desire in that tabernacle of long ago 
 to lose himself upon the bosom of Infinity. But he did not 
 
276 GODS 
 
 want to lose consciousness but to find it even in that 
 moment he knew that. 
 
 The pall of waters was broken by a great wave that creamed 
 itself palely out of the night to fling its thunderous length upon 
 the beach to be followed by the brooding silence. 
 
 It was then that it crept to him where he lay. 
 
 It came creeping to him over the sea with something ele- 
 mental in it, a woman's voice out there in the velvet of the 
 night. It was a kind of ullagoane arising and falling in the 
 minor and then dying away in that place of enchantments. 
 
 Who could be singing out there in that blackness? The 
 boats were all in. He felt a stirring of the skin. 
 
 He listened again, but could hear nothing and then it 
 seemed to him that he had imagined it all. The night seas 
 had always held queer noises as they broke into the caves 
 under Carrickmore. 
 
 Behind him he heard a soft scatter of sand in the stillness. 
 He turned half on his elbow to see a figure coming towards 
 him wrapped in a long fleecy cloak which, in that light, seemed 
 to have been woven by golden spiders. And then, unheed- 
 ing, the figure had almost stumbled in the shadows over the 
 man lying at its feet. 
 
 He had turned to rear his long bulk under the stars which 
 now seemed almost to be touching the earth. It seemed to 
 him that he was looking at a ghost. 
 
 As he looked, the voice had once more crept out of the 
 night. And the figure had turned its head to listen, dropping 
 a corner of the fleecy wrap as it did so and leaving revealed 
 to him the head and neck of Deirdre. 
 
 "What is it?" he asked stupidly, in that glamour forgetting 
 her hardness and indifference. 
 
 "You should know." And the low voice with its contralto 
 note was vibrant as, with her old gesture, she shook her face 
 clear from its veil of hair. It astonished him. Deirdre Asthar 
 had never shown feeling before. For the first time, she was 
 incredibly concerning herself with him. 
 
 Something rose within him like a blinding flame only the 
 next moment to die away. 
 
 And then, still bewildered, he had asked: "Why?" 
 
 "You should know. You do know." He was again aston- 
 
OUT OF THE GREEN WATERS 277 
 
 ished at her feeling. It left him stupid, seeking, like a man, 
 blind, to find the door of his own prison. 
 
 "I do not." And he said it honestly enough. 
 
 "You have kissed the lips which are singing out there. 
 You have kissed them within the last hour." And she had 
 laughed a little stinging laugh. 
 
 Then it burst upon him. The voice from the seas was 
 Stella's. It was Stella Fay who was swimming and singing 
 out there. 
 
 "I did not," he answered in simple directness. 
 
 "Then you are also a liar," said the girl with a calculated 
 brutality. "I saw you kiss her." 
 
 "You did not," he said. "It is you who lie." But even 
 as he spoke in his anger, he knew she thought it. And who 
 would not have thought it? 
 
 And now he was enraged with her. It was the mood of 
 that day when he had written his last article in "The Earth." 
 A mood that could not be controlled. It was that Berserk 
 madness which had always come upon him since a child when 
 unjustly treated. 
 
 "You dare to say I lie. Who are you that dare to say it?" 
 he had gone on in low, fierce tones, looking her in the eyes. 
 "You have never been fair to me. You have always been 
 unjust. You have always been . . ." he hesitated a moment, 
 then pounced: "baffling. You who are you that you should 
 speak to me so?" It seemed the pent up anger of years that 
 at last was breaking forth. 
 
 "Stop!" she said, and in her eye as it turned was that 
 metallic flash he knew so well. "If you did not kiss Stella 
 Fay an hour ago she kissed you. And you have kissed her 
 before. You know you have kissed her." And then, after 
 pausing one breathless instant, she had flashed: "You know 
 you kissed her that day down by the waters kissed her twice 
 full on the lips. I saw you. Deny that!" 
 
 He stood silent, amazed, not at the accusation but at the 
 feeling behind. Hitherto, this queer girl had always treated 
 him as of no account treated him with contempt. 
 
 "You can't" she said triumphantly, flinging her hair back 
 from her face as though to see more clearly. "You did kiss 
 her." And now her wrap had fallen from her shoulders to 
 the golden sands, unheeded, to show the beautiful neck with 
 
278 GODS 
 
 the two round breasts underneath the silken stuff of her dress. 
 "Nor can you deny that you tried to sell Black Rock to 
 Crux, as you have already sold yourself and your country to 
 Thrum. I have read your articles. Ireland has read them." 
 
 A cry came to them out from the sea. It had seemed to 
 come from the heart of the waters a great hollow cry it was. 
 And then stillness. They had both heard it but their pas- 
 sion had held them indifferent to everything around them. 
 
 "Now, you have your gratified ambition," she went on. 
 "You have your rewards. You have had your thirty pieces 
 of silver or is it gold?" she added mockingly. "But the girl 
 out there " and she swept one long rounded arm out over the 
 waters "she bought you more cheaply. . . . She bought 
 you with a kiss soul and body." She had added the last 
 word almost under her breath and had come close to him, 
 breathing fiercely, her whole being quivering. It was as 
 though anger and hatred had taken her out of herself. 
 
 And he, who, hearing her last accusation, so untrue but 
 only untrue because the girl who was speaking had saved 
 him from himself he who realised that this girl knew nothing 
 of his article in "The Earth" and of his poverty he flamed 
 against her. He did not know whether he hated her or loved 
 her. Afterwards it seemed to him that he had lifted his 
 great arm to strike her down. It had been lifted there under 
 the stars, the fist clenched, whilst she stood underneath its 
 shadow, dauntless, the litle red lips parted over the gleam- 
 ing teeth, the eyes without fear. 
 
 It was in that white-hotted moment of passion, pregnant 
 with love and death, that moment when the burning eyes of 
 the girl, falling a moment, searched the waters beyond him, 
 that the low curl of a long roller, sheening in the starshine 
 as it broke towards them in low thunder the length of the 
 shore, drew them both for him to see her staring at some- 
 thing behind him. He had turned to see the sheen of the 
 dark surge under the starlight with the copper strands of a 
 woman's hair caught up in the waters and the outline of a 
 naked form. And then the great wave had broken past them 
 to cast there at their feet under the shadow of Carrickmore 
 the body of Stella Fay. 
 
 The uplifted arm had fallen but about that other, who 
 
OUT OF THE GREEN WATERS 279 
 
 had looked into his eyes and fallen forward to the arms that 
 were waiting. 
 
 They stood there on the hot sands stood there in each 
 other's arms under the dewy stars with only the beating of 
 their hearts and the splash of the sea in their ears. 
 
XXVIII 
 
 THE WAKE 
 
 The August moon, heavy with labour, travailed low in the 
 western sky. A great sea gannet lolloped heavily across the 
 surface of the planet, whose golden shadows irradiated the sea 
 with a light neither of earth nor heaven. 
 
 The sea scarcely breathed under its spangled pall. The ex- 
 panse of waters was deserted save for a hooker that 
 swung nakedly on the swell, its cordage crying out there in 
 the half lights like a thing in pain. The little village strag- 
 gled darkly in the shadows. The lightless windows of the 
 cabins were socketless eyes that wept for what had been. 
 
 Only one spot beaconed out in that place of death the 
 house beyond the valley, which could be seen by the way- 
 farer gleaming softly in the darkness as though it were raised 
 on a high altar beneath the dome of the night skies. 
 
 One room alone was suffused with light the room where 
 the flame of the waxen candles stirred, sluggish, in the heavy 
 airs. In one corner, under the blue of an arching canopy 
 spangled with golden stars, Stella Fay lay like a bride, her 
 hair of burnished copper strewing the bed in great waves that 
 flowed over the lace of the pillow and down to the floor. A 
 bride of death, clad in blue silk and lace drawn closely over 
 the childish bosoms that showed themselves faint in that 
 ghostly light, Stella Fay lay there, and as Finn and Deirdre 
 standing there alone hand in hand, thought, looking at them, 
 not unkindly but searchingly, through the dark circles of the 
 eyes. 
 
 On her bosom, just under the slim white throat, lay a cross 
 of ebony, about which the slender hands entwined themselves. 
 In that rosy waxen light, the face was not pale, but flushed 
 faintly. 
 
 The eyes were not those of a dead woman. She lay there 
 
 280 
 
THE WAKE 281 
 
 as though the spirit were not far away, and as though, having 
 done her work, she was secure and satisfied. 
 
 She had died in the bosom of Holy Church, for, as they 
 had discovered from Father Con, Stella Fay had come to him 
 one evening after vespers and, weary of earth, had flung 
 herself upon the broad breast of the Church. 
 
 There came from the outside of the house a long hollow 
 cry. Their hands gripped, in sudden fear it was like the 
 cry that had come to them that evening out there from the 
 dark waters. It hung for a moment in the sluggish airs of 
 night, wound about the house, and then came full as though 
 it had been thrown into the room itself circled a moment, 
 passed, and died away into the heart of the pregnant stillness. 
 
 They heard it rise again, and with it another that lifted 
 itself underneath, at last to blend and so the others, until 
 the whole house was filled with the ullagoane of the keeners 
 the old women who had known and loved the girl that lay 
 there, listening. 
 
 And now words were forming themselves to stray through 
 the rising volume of sound that echoed itself about the house. 
 
 "Oh! ochone! ochone! Sure it was she that had eyes like 
 the heart of the grey waters the red of her lips was like 
 the hawthorn berries in the autumn days her step was 
 thistledown on the wind. . . ." 
 
 The voices of the old women came gustfully in the Irish. 
 
 Deirdre and Finn stood there staring at the girl on the 
 bed the girl who seemed to smile to them as though in 
 secret. Had she risen and spoken to them they would not 
 have been surprised. In the magic of the night all things 
 were possible. It seemed to them a night when the two worlds 
 had drawn very near and the spirits of God were abroad. 
 
 "Who was it that tuk little Paudeen out of the heart of 
 the green waters?" wailed the voice of the leader that voice 
 which seemed to run through and sustain all the others. 
 
 And then the others in answer: 
 
 "Sure it was she that lies there in the arms of death this 
 night." 
 
 The single voice came again: 
 
 "Sure the look on her face was the look on the face of an 
 angel of light. It was she that had the gracious presence 
 and that the children loved. The perfume of her presence was 
 
282 GODS 
 
 like the rose of summer and the smile on her face was like 
 the dawn on Slievebloom. 
 
 "She came to us out of the great waters and it was the 
 great waters that tuk her. 
 
 "When she would be lukin' at you she would not be lukin' 
 at all for the breath of this world was not in her it was she 
 that was an angel of God. 
 
 "Oh, sure 'twas she that was good to Black Rock and that 
 made her nest in the hearts of the people. 
 
 "Oh Mary, mother of God, friend of virgins and of loving 
 hearts have mercy upon her and intercede for her. May her 
 soul rest in glory!" 
 
 "Oh Mary, mother of God, pray for her!" came in wailing 
 chorus. 
 
 "Oh mystical rose! Tower of ivory! Heart of Gold! Star 
 of the Morning!" came the voice of the leader. And then the 
 reply: 
 
 "Pray for her!" 
 
 "Oh, holy St. Joseph, chaste guardian of the Virgin! Guar- 
 dian of Virgins! Terror of demons!" 
 
 "Pray for her!" 
 
 The voices came and went in the Litany of Death. Finn 
 looking above the dead girl could almost see the Roman gods, 
 in halos and coloured robes that galaxy of saints and angels 
 set golden in the tenuous blue of the starry firmament. 
 
 And the girl on the bed smiled to them, friendly, with that 
 secret smile. 
 
 And out from a corner of the room where Mrs. O'Hara had 
 stolen, there came her voice as she prayed and blessed her- 
 self: "Holy Mary, Mother of God, be with us now and in 
 the hour of our death. Amen." 
 
 Finn, for the third time in his life, wanted to throw him- 
 self down there by the side of the girl on the bed and to 
 pray for her and for all the world. It was the feeling that 
 had come to him that day in the Tabernacle and afterwards 
 in the Westminster Cathedral. But it was the same impulse 
 which, without his realising it at the time, had been behind 
 so many of the determinative acts of his life, as that day when 
 he had gone from the Peace Conference to write the article 
 which was to sever him from Thrum and from success that 
 article which in its way was a prayer. 
 
THE WAKE 283 
 
 In that moment, there was neither Protestant nor Catholic 
 Jew, atheist, nor Universalist all were one. It was that 
 feeling of oneness that came over him in his times of the 
 greater emotions the feeling that made all faiths the same 
 all faiths wonderful and all faiths indifferent. 
 
 And now he turned from those eyes of the dead to feel 
 the eyes of the living. For Deirdre, still holding his hand, 
 as a child holds its father's, was looking into his face, and then 
 she had come close to him and sunk her head as though to 
 hide it within his breast and had whispered: "Take me out, 
 Finn dear. I cannot bear more." 
 
 They had gone out into the dusk of the August night and 
 had wandered across the mossy cobbles and down the boreen 
 now dark with its massy foliage. And so they had wandered 
 into the valley and along by the stream where he had walked 
 that night with the dead girl who lay up there. Not to be 
 ashamed but to think of that and of all. 
 
 The lush grass rose high about them and the night was 
 heavy with thoughts unspoken. He could feel the girl under the 
 lee of his shoulder clinging closely to him with both her 
 slender hands, pressing his elbow tightly to her side. Not a 
 sound came from the thicket beside them they were there 
 deserted save for the ullag&ane that rose and fell in the airless 
 night. Above them, gleaming softly in the darkness, the light- 
 house of the House of Dreams stood sentinel. 
 
 All at once, the little hands had broken loose from him 
 and the girl had come round to face him, barring his way, 
 her arms hanging loosely at her sides. 
 
 "Love me, Finn," she said, her breath coming and going hot 
 on his face. "Love me. You must love me now" And 
 then: "I am not dead, but living." There was fierceness in 
 the voice. And then she had whispered as though she were 
 unconscious of what she said: 
 
 "Love and Death are the same thing." 
 
 He looked at her wonderingly, and something stirred deep 
 within him as something that is wakened from sleep. 
 
 "You must love me now now." 
 
 She had drawn herself closer to place an arm about the 
 neck so high above her the other sinking at her side. 
 
 Above them the keen came and went on the fluttering night 
 wind that had risen. It seemed to them as though the dead 
 
284 GODS 
 
 girl up there were crying crying for the things that had 
 been, that might have been. But they left that thought un- 
 spoken. 
 
 The scent of the grasses came heavily to his nostrils. The 
 girl was close fo him this girl once so cold, so unapproachable 
 and as his arms stole about her waist and he felt the cool- 
 ness of her body in the hot night, she hung resistless. 
 
 And now both arms had closed about her as she hung there, 
 to draw her into him. The little red lips were parted to show 
 the gleam of the tiny teeth behind. The veil of hair had fallen 
 over her face, over the hanging head as though to hide her 
 shame, the shame of her hot love under the August night. 
 
 From above them came the sound of the keen that swelled 
 once more out of the darkness and then died away into the 
 silence. 
 
XXIX 
 
 IN THE SHADOW OF THE OLD CHAPEL 
 
 For four days and four nights they waked Stella Fay. She 
 lay there in waxen beauty under the corpse-candles, smiling to 
 those who entered. And there were many who entered, for all 
 the country around loved the girl who had had the strange 
 queer spirit in her that was the spirit of Black Rock. 
 
 And they took her down through the valley that led from 
 the House of Dreams took her down in the long black coffin 
 with the silver handles, where she rested on the shoulders of the 
 four giants of the sea like a queen on her bed. And so up 
 to the old chapel that on this afternoon of setting sun seemed 
 to smile bounteously to the daughter that had come to it in 
 the long last, whilst the choir, which had come to meet her, 
 sang "The Song of Death." 
 
 And there before the tapestried lighted altar she lay, trestled 
 high above the people who loved her and who knelt about her 
 to pray for the unquiet soul. She lay there, raised over them 
 like a queen of heaven, with the tapers in the lofty candle- 
 sticks burning steadily in the incensed air, three on each side. 
 And there, Father Con, a priest of God, helped by Father 
 Hennessey, who took a new nobility from his office under the 
 high lights, celebrated the Requiem High Mass that mass of 
 the dead hallowed by the centuries, with its cadences of haunt- 
 ing beauty; its prayers; and its silences. 
 
 "Recordare Jesu pie . . . perdas ilia die" shivered 
 through the old building, finding its echo in the hearts of all 
 there. And then the figures of the choristers, each with a 
 lighted taper in his hand, standing within the Sanctuary before 
 the coffin as beings from another world to light the dead girl on 
 her way; all to end in the triumph of the Consecration of the 
 Host and the Church's blessing and assurance final, absolute. 
 
 Finn and Deirdre, behind the others, could see her staring 
 
 285 
 
286 GODS 
 
 upwards through the darkness of her coffin, listening to the 
 Latin words and smiling to herself with that secret smile they 
 had seen down there in the House of Dreams. 
 
 And behind, Paris Asthar, with his crutches, dragged his 
 legs about the stone pavement the dark eyes looking mourn- 
 fully out from their sockets, with Togo, a yellow shadow, 
 haunting him in the rear. For he had been fond of Stella Fay 
 had loved her as a good comrade. And with her passing, 
 something, final, had seemed to break in him. He was crum- 
 bling, resistlessly, to ruin. 
 
 It was here that Finn, who had missed Deirdre, found her to 
 his astonishment, praying, or trying to pray, in a remote cor- 
 ner of the chapel. "Oh, God! give me faith," he heard her 
 pray as he stood behind. Ancl then, the broken: "But I can't 
 . . . my God does not live in temples." 
 
 And he had put his arm about the slender neck where the 
 sun-freckles dappled themselves on the white skin. 
 
 And so they laid Stella Fay to rest. In the shadow of 
 the old chapel, where the winds of ocean haunted the graves. 
 But it was Deirdre who said: 
 
 "Finn, she is not dead. You cannot kill things like Stella 
 Fay. She is living and listening." And then she had shud- 
 dered a little and had flung herself, impetuous, into Finn's 
 arms. And then, almost in a whisper, as though it were forced 
 out of her: "I hate her, Finn ... I hate her . . . 
 and fear her. May God forgive me!" 
 
 It was Deirdre's Asthar's first prayer since she was a little 
 child. 
 
 It was one of his recurring astonishments. This girl who 
 had held herself in frozen aloofness from him through the 
 years was now almost pathetic in her surrender. To others, 
 as reserved as ever, she seemed filled with the desire to sacrifice 
 herself to her lover. She would be walking with him alone and 
 would all at once wind her arms about him and drag down his 
 head to kiss him passionately on the lips. She would forget 
 her shyness and press her body against him as though she de- 
 sired to absorb him. And Finn, touched inexpressibly by her 
 surrender, forbore to take advantage of it cherishing her as 
 fine gold and wearing her as a lover should. 
 
 Paris Asthar accepted it all with his whimsical philosophy, 
 
IN THE SHADOW OF THE OLD CHAPEL 287 
 
 smiling at them as a very old man might smile at playing chil- 
 dren. Only once he had said to his half-sister: 
 
 "Deirdre, you and I once played for a stake the soul of a 
 man only that you did not know it and you won. But you 
 are the only being that has ever taken from me the thing that 
 I desired but love is stronger than desire love is the strong- 
 est thing in the world. Only it cost the life of a girl, and per- 
 haps it is going to cost the life of a man." 
 
 And that was the only time he spoke of the girl lying up 
 there in the shadow of the chapel. Nor were Finn and Deirdre 
 ever to know the secret of the cry from the sea whether it 
 was the waters that took Stella Fay or whether she died for 
 the sake of love. 
 
 But from the day they laid Stella Fay up there, Paris As- 
 thar seemed to fall headlong into dissolution. It was as 
 though a living man were dissolving before them into the cor- 
 ruption of the grave. There was something awesome in his 
 fight to live. The olive glow of the years that were gone had 
 faded from the face, and it was now like shrivelled parchment, 
 for each day the life-blood seemed to ebb, leaving the extremi- 
 ties to wither. The ears in particular had something apish 
 in them, and the dark locks were now streaked with grey. 
 
 He battled against his invisible antagonist moment by mo- 
 ment, sinking lower each day with burning eyes, for all his 
 vitality as it receded from his members seemed to pass into 
 those eyes. But in his decay there was something statuesque. 
 
 And so Paris Asthar fought with death . . and then, near 
 the extremity of dissolution, prayed for death. But death 
 would not come at will. Paris Asthar could not die. Had he 
 not said he was immortal? 
 
 Until that evening of late September when Deirdre, forcing 
 herself to the task, went in to busy herself about the couch 
 where he lay he would not go to bed and found him propped 
 up in his silken gown looking out through her, a strange fierce 
 smile on the broken face, a smile of conviction triumphant: 
 
 "The Gods live!" he had whispered, not to her, but as 
 though to himself. 
 
 And then: 
 
 "I am here," he said, looking out and a little up before him, 
 smiling. The broken head had fallen forward. Paris Asthar 
 Immortal. 
 
288 GODS 
 
 Five days afterwards they laid him up there by the side 
 of Stella Fay, but she, as became a daughter of the church, in 
 consecrated, he, in unconsecrated ground, beneath the shadow 
 of the chapel that gathered them all in. 
 
XXX 
 
 It was one night of early September, under a golden harvest 
 moon that Deirdre had told Finn, shyly, that she had loved 
 him from the moment when he had kissed Stella Fay down 
 by the waters after she had taken Paudeen from them. "I 
 don't know, why, Finn, dear," she had said. "But that was 
 the first time I realised it ... I think I think " she 
 had added a moment after, "I always loved you, but I would 
 not let myself believe it. I did not know whether I loved or 
 hated you. But it was that day by the green waters I first 
 knew that, whether for good or ill, I loved you and for al- 
 ways." 
 
 Deirdre had written to her father, Old Asthar, to tell him 
 of her engagement, when he very promptly and brutally told 
 her "to lie on the bed which she had made and that he didn't 
 care if he never saw her face again." Old Asthar never did 
 things by halves. He was as thorough as his daughter. 
 
 But Deirdre in one of those queer moments of hers had 
 made Finn promise solemnly that they should never again 
 be separated; that wherever he went she should go and he 
 had promised and then she had forgotten her father and the 
 whole of a world which had never been hers. And indeed her 
 father had neither forgotten nor forgiven the affair of the 
 path, and the Dunhallow demonstration, and the part that 
 Deirdre had played. 
 
 Finn had to return to London to write his articles after 
 speaking with Lanthorn, who wanted to see him. For Deirdre 
 and himself he took, to that young lady's astonished disgust 
 at his care for the proprieties, rooms in separate houses in 
 the same Hammersmith road, flinging her so to speak on to the 
 friendly bosom of his landlady, a Mrs. Witherton, a dessicated 
 little woman with a big heart, who, Cockney that she was, had 
 not been out of Hammersmith for twenty years and had never 
 
 289 
 
290 GODS 
 
 seen St. Paul's or the House of Commons. "Nor don't want 
 to," she had said when she told this to Finn, pridefully. "The 
 Old Mall Road's good enough for me." 
 
 Mrs. Witherton was the lady to whom he had gone, through 
 a chance recommendation,, upon his return, as he felt that, 
 with Deirdre, Ash Villa and the Forestford road had reached 
 for him their limits of toleration. Since what his mother had 
 called "that disgusting exhibition" in "The Earth," which had 
 led to his fall from grace, Ash Villa had been nearly intoler- 
 able. 
 
 Deirdre, as always dignified and self-possessed, had written 
 an impersonal note to her father, saying that she would send 
 for her things on a certain day, when Old Asthar, now thor- 
 oughly roused, had sent everything in two four-wheeled cabs 
 he would never use anything more modern. And so Deirdre 
 was installed in the tiny Hammersmith room, her more inti- 
 mate possessions of silver and tortoise shell, with lingerie fit 
 for a princess, filling her landlady with an ecstasy but imper- 
 fectly suppressed. Her lute hung on the wall. 
 
 There was something that touched Finn in the way that 
 Deirdre deliberately, so to speak, took her new life by the 
 tnroat. She made out a list of her resources and calculated 
 that she would not want any new clothes for many years. 
 "She did not want to be a handicap," she said. But in her 
 dress and person she was as dainty as ever. 
 
 Finally, after much searching, Finn found a box-like flat 
 with a green door by the side of the river, for which he con- 
 tracted to pay the landlord, a most uncalculating baker of tha 
 Plymouth Brethren persuasion, the sum of eight shillings and 
 sixpence per week. They would have a Lilliputian kitchen, a 
 box room into which one might or might not be able to get a 
 hip bath, a tiny sitting room and a bedroom, to hold one. 
 
 The mathematics of householding staggered them. The 
 problem seemed simple enough: how to furnish an eight and 
 sixpenny flat upon nothing at all save good will, some forty 
 pounds sterling which Deirdre, luckily, had standing to her 
 private account, and a precarious free-lance journalism. Ne- 
 cessity developed for them all sorts of ingenious "contrap- 
 tions," as the word went in Black Rock, for getting over the 
 irreducible minimum. 
 
 An oak divan in the sitting room could be used at night by 
 
"IN SICKNESS AND HEALTH ..." 291 
 
 Finn as a bed. The lighting problem was solved by a single 
 burner with an incandescent mantle over the solitary table, 
 which could be used for working at or eating off. Wardrobes 
 were avoided by one shelf-wardrobe forgotten by a previous 
 tenant, who had left in a hurry, and by a cunningly arranged 
 hanging curtain on rings. Carpets were a luxury and could be 
 dispensed with in the early days by staining the floors and 
 using some mats alleged Chinese. 
 
 It was not until all this had been settled that Deirdre re- 
 membered the question of marriage, as Finn one day discov- 
 ered. He had been giving some anxious hours each day to the 
 point. 
 
 Should it be in a church? Or should it be at a registrar's? 
 Neither Deirdre nor he were members of any church, but if 
 they were not married in a church they would be "living in 
 sin," whatever that might mean, according to Mrs. Fontaine, 
 who expounded her convictions without ambiguity. In an 
 evil moment, Finn had told his mother that they were going 
 "to marry each other," when she had gravely corrected: "You 
 mean, you are going to marry her, Finn. A man must be 
 head in his own house." Mrs. Fontaine, who was really femi- 
 nism incarnate, was in theory a staunch upholder of the male 
 principle. 
 
 Jemmy had twiddled his thumbs, as, when perplexed, was 
 the way with him. Aunt Maria wilted. But Aunt Bella, now 
 a malignant paralytic, clamped to her bed, cursed them in no 
 uncertain voice. 
 
 "May God strike you down and your children!" she had 
 said to Finn. "May He in His divine mercy, send down His 
 curse upon you and your children's children." Having done 
 her duty she had turned herself to the wall. 
 
 And so Finn had gone away heavy at heart. There was 
 nothing to be done with such a woman. 
 
 Finally, Deirdre and Finn decided that the extreme limit 
 of their concession to civilisation would be marriage at a regis- 
 trar's, and very shame-faced, as though he were committing a 
 crime, Finn went round to make enquiries in the Goldhawk 
 road from a gentleman who gave him full verbal and fuller 
 printed information. 
 
 It was really a matter which concerned nobody but their 
 two selves, but upon Finn's mother threatening to die on the 
 
292 GODS 
 
 spot if uninvited and, more shadowy, to haunt them afterwards, 
 it was decided to invite Jemmy and his very much better half. 
 So, one fine morning at the end of September, at a quarter 
 to twelve of the clock, Finn and Deirdre stood in Mrs. Wither- 
 ton's hall, awaiting his progenitors. He was dressed in his 
 only presentable lounge suit an Irish stuff of greys and greens, 
 and very well indeed he looked with a frame that seemed to 
 fill the hall, and very beautiful and noble looked Deirdre, 
 who had taken the whimsey to wear a cloak of Limerick lace 
 with the shamrock of Ireland in Connemara marble dauntless 
 upon her breast. She looked almost a child. 
 
 And here they were when Jemmy and his wife appeared at 
 the gate; he, got up to the very limit of respectability and a 
 trifle over, with his top-hat slightly over his ears, but fresh 
 polished, a frock-coat that might have looked worse than it 
 did, a pair of black cotton gloves, and trousers of which, 
 with his last pair of cheap boots liberally slashed, the less said 
 the better. And the inevitable umbrella. 
 
 He looked to Finn like a man who was near the end of 
 the road, and his son's heart went out to him in affectionate 
 compassion. 
 
 But Mrs. Fontaine put the day to shame. She might her- 
 self have been the bride, clothed in white from head to foot, 
 with white kid button boots and a perfect breastwork of glassy 
 jewellery. 
 
 Introduced to Deirdre, who for the first time in her life lost 
 something of her possession, she gave her a perfunctory peck 
 upon the forehead, for the young girl at the last moment had 
 bent her head down as though she were going to butt her 
 mother-in-law, who looked with a certain cold disapproval upon 
 the flash of green at Deirdre's breast. 
 
 "You should have had orange blossoms, my dear," she said 
 in a voice of oil and vinegar. 
 
 "But it is the symbol of your own Trinity, given to the Irish, 
 to my people" she said it proudly "by St. Patrick. I am 
 a better Christian than you, Mrs. Fontaine." It was an omi- 
 nous beginning. 
 
 But to Jemmy she was cordial, kissing his poor shrunken face 
 with her red young lips and smiling on him. 
 
 Finn's mother was adamant. "The Irish are pagans," she 
 
"IN SICKNESS AND HEALTH ..." 293 
 
 said, "and I do not doubt that Patrick himself was a pagan 
 person, too." 
 
 The cab was before the door, and so they were driven by 
 easy stages and a knock-kneed horse, in Mrs. Fontaine's words, 
 guided by "an antiquated horror of a cabman," who indeed 
 had a gargantuan nose like a pantomime mask, to the regis- 
 trar's in the Hammersmith Road, where they had to wait their 
 turn on a long lean bench whilst a coster was being, as he 
 said, "spliced" to the lady of his choice, who really had come 
 out most alarmingly for the occasion, quite throwing Mrs. 
 Fontaine into the shade. 
 
 The Fontaine sniff was much in evidence in what Finn's 
 mother termed "these unholy precincts." Mrs. Fontaine looked 
 and felt that it was all most irregular that damning word 
 which she used for all things with which she did not agree. 
 And so, after a quite friendly old gentleman had said something 
 over them both and had asked Finn to place an inconsequen- 
 tial ring upon the third finger of Deirdre's left hand, and after 
 the aforesaid old gentleman had made a vague and professional 
 effort to pretend that he was not doing this sort of thing all 
 his life, had been doing it five minutes before with the coster 
 gentleman, and would be doing it five minutes after, they all 
 went out. But Finn noticed that Deirdre, proud little aristo- 
 crat, bowed only to the outstretched hand of the old gentle- 
 man when he offered his congratulations, which was a shame. 
 
 As they were leaving the building, Mrs. Fontaine whispered 
 to Mr. Fontaine: 
 
 "I do hope, Jemmy, it's legal." 
 
XXXI 
 
 JEMMY FONTAINE DIES IN HARNESS 
 
 On the evening of his wedding day, Finn got a telegram from 
 his mother, for once surprised into the statement direct. It 
 contained only three words: "Come at once." 
 
 Two hours later, in the cool of what for September had 
 been a very hot day, Finn was knocking at the door of Ash 
 Villa, scenting the blooms of the Marechal Niel over his head, 
 still in full glory and murmurous with the laden bees of eve- 
 ning. Ever after, the scent of roses blended in his memory 
 with the scent of death. 
 
 His mother, bewildered and a trifle blown as though she 
 had been running, all her self-possession gone, met him in 
 the hall to point in silent confusion to the door of the little 
 drawing-room where that June morning of eleven years be- 
 fore Finn had first asked his question: "Who was God? Was 
 he?" Once again through the lowered blinds, he caught the 
 scent of the roses and there came to him the soft murmur of 
 the blooms laden with their clambering bees, the velvety backs, 
 red and black and yellow, standing softly against the ivory of 
 the flowers. 
 
 The murmur had mingled with another more sterterous, in- 
 sistent the murmur that came from the figure lying on its 
 back under the window upon the mattress stretched upon the 
 floor. 
 
 Jemmy Fontaine was near the end of the road. 
 
 Finn saw the poor broken mouth where it opened itself in 
 the frame of the scanty greying beard eager to suck in the 
 air that was now so precious, as through a bellows, but a bel- 
 lows that was broken. He saw the shrunken skull and the 
 shining yellow of the scalp and the filming of the eyes that 
 never again would look upon him in bewilderment caught 
 the chest that laboured beneath the frock-coat and cheap black 
 
 294 
 
JEMMY FONTAINE DIES IN HARNESS 295 
 
 tie of the wedding morning, awry and loosened, in which 
 Jemmy had been carried in from the hot street where he had 
 fallen with his encyclopaedia that terrible encyclopaedia which 
 was to restore the fortunes of the Fontaines, now irretrievably 
 lost in the Happy Homes of England. 
 
 Ginger had discovered this last in some mysterious way of 
 her own, for as Finn passed up to his bed he could hear her in 
 the little closet where she slept with the tank and an abbrevi- 
 ated wooden box which she called a trunk, and where she was 
 at that moment on her knees praying: "Gawd blarst Buldger! 
 Gawd blarst Buldger!" repeated prayerfully again and again. 
 A light came from under the door of the room of Strom, the 
 lodger, the tap of his mallet like the tap of a hammer on a 
 coffin. 
 
 All through the night Jemmy Fontaine battled with his in- 
 visible enemy, the enemy who had so often followed him in the 
 heat of the long summer days, waiting to drag him down, to 
 whom the encyclopaedia had given his chance, at last. Through 
 the hours of the September night, through the little hours when 
 his enemy waxed stronger, into the heat of the new day the 
 broken bellows did its work, now crackling a little through the 
 nozzle of the broken mouth where it fell a little on one side. 
 And through the whole of the long day there was a steady 
 thronging to see him die. Jemmy Fontaine was assuming a 
 new importance. 
 
 Amongst the first was Uncle Bobs, who blew in immediately 
 after breakfast, having, as he pridefully declared, "padded the 
 hoof" from London. Uncle Bobs steadily ignored Death. For 
 him, dissolution had no existence. His mortality was of an 
 immortal texture. 
 
 "Nature, Sir, Nature!" he declared to all and sundry as he 
 went from room to room, ignoring the fact that all those to 
 whom he spoke, save Finn, were of the female sex. "Nature, 
 Sir, Nature! If he had only lived on onions and water and 
 slept under the air of heaven," said Bobs, now sacrificing to 
 his hygienic gods, "we should have him with us now." 
 
 They did have him with them, however, for Jemmy was 
 not dead yet. He could not die. But the bellows was giving 
 out a wheeze, intermittent, was adding itself to the crackle. 
 
 Aunt Judy haunted the dark corners, laying her nose over 
 chair edges and looking with a certain inflamed curiosity upon 
 
296 GODS 
 
 Jemmy as though he might solve the great secret. Sometimes 
 she would stand up to get a better view, her head rolling from 
 side to side and sometimes a-tremble. But towards the close 
 of the day it was quite obvious that Aunt Judy regarded 
 Jemmy as finished in every sense. She was now hopelessly non- 
 believing and had given up the Spirit's Elect without, for 
 the first time in her life, finding another experiment. 
 
 Every now and then Uncle Bobs would come in, vastly im- 
 portant and, despite the solemnity of the occasion, enjoying 
 himself hugely, to urge his final remedy for all ills bleeding. 
 It was, it seemed, now too late for onions. 
 
 "Bleed him, Sir, bleed him!" he said in the voice of a 
 genial butcher. "Cleanse the pores and vessels from the accre- 
 tions of uric acid, Sir. Meat, Sir, meat, has been his poison." 
 
 And through the house Ginger flitted, a red-haired avenger, 
 showing even for her, an unusual amount of red flannel in her 
 distress and muttering her eternal: "Gawd blarst Buldger!" 
 
 Aunt Bella, accompanied by Aunt Maria, her eye squint- 
 ing horribly, lifted herself for the first time in many months 
 from her bed to come in like an insane raven, the Choctaw 
 feathers, black and menacing, sticking out from her turban, 
 to stand over her unconscious brother-in-law, now fast pass- 
 ing beyond the reach of the terrible denunciations, disguised as 
 prayers, which she hurled upon his unconscious head. 
 
 Aunt Bella at least was determined that there should be 
 no question of Jemmy's eternal destination and so she cursed 
 him by bell, book and candle, the venomous mouth slightly 
 slavering as she described with an anatomical minuteness which 
 reminded Finn of "The Tortures of the Saints" he had once 
 read at Dunhallow, the fate that awaited him. 
 
 For the first time and under this terrible stream, her sister 
 Fanny wilted. This sudden striking down of Jemmy appeared 
 quite to have destroyed that cool-headedness that had enabled 
 Mrs. Fontaine through life to triumph over her ad- 
 versaries. 
 
 With a minuteness that was intolerable, Aunt Bella, giving 
 rein to her imagination, painted Eternity for her unconscious 
 hearer. She revelled in its unceasingness. "If every grain of 
 sand were a thousand years . . ." and Finn, listening, 
 waited for the thing that was coming as though he had heard 
 it all before as indeed he had 
 
JEMMY FONTAINE DIES IN HARNESS 297 
 
 And so, a trifle palsied and. still spitting and slavering 
 Aunt Bella having done her duty for the last time went from 
 the room back to that bed to which she was now to be clamped 
 for the rest of her life. She had done her work. 
 
 Mr. Titterling, unmonocled but spruce as ever except for his 
 collar, which looked distinctly soiled, came in dust coat and 
 white bowler, a chalk-faced convert. For Trevor Titterling 
 had been converted to the Spirit's Elect some weeks before, 
 and now was revelling, with difficulty, in a luxurious sense 
 of security. It was obviously a call de convenance, as he sat 
 there, his tail, metaphorically speaking, between his legs, his 
 hair now thinning coming up into its horn points, and the 
 rascally pitying humour in the pale eyes. He did his best, 
 poor fellow, and, as Finn saw, was genuine enough in his own 
 way, and he showed as little of his white gleaming teeth as 
 possible, but it was not easy. 
 
 "Feel quite lost without my glass," he said in sorrowful aside 
 to Finn. "The wife and elder Tompkins think it immoral. 
 Crushing hard work, this conversion business, Finn. Fairly 
 makes you sweat. Feel like a winner of the Grand National 
 before the last fence don't know if I can stand up . . ." 
 
 "You see, I've fallen down so often," he added ruefully. 
 
 Father Lestrange, a figure of gloom, passed through the 
 house like a shadow. He was still cordial to Finn, but it 
 was clear that he had given him up as far as giving up was 
 possible to such a man. And Finn, the old memories, com- 
 ing back, felt old regrets and the old friendliness. But the 
 glamour was gone. For now there was Deirdre. 
 
 Finn, sitting there in the small hours, found himself listen- 
 ing for something. And then he found he was listening to 
 silence. The bellows had finished. The grey eyes were star- 
 ing upwards, unseeing. The black tie and frock-coat had 
 ceased to move. 
 
 Jemmy Fontaine had died in harness. 
 
 They laid him up there deep in the yellow clay under the 
 black leaf mould, beneath a great oak, in the little church- 
 yard on the edge of the forest, in the only land that Jemmv 
 had ever owned, and without a tombstone. Only Finn and 
 Deirdre followed the coffin and heard the "Ashes to ashes 
 
298 GODS 
 
 . . ." and then the yellow clay playing its tattoo upon the 
 
 black lid. 
 
 When they got back Mrs. Fontaine said to them: 
 
 "I hope you have not laid him amongst the paupers." 
 
 Mr. Fontaine was always genteel. 
 
XXXII 
 
 MELLERAY 
 
 Instead of having their noses placed straight away against 
 the whetstone of life in the eight and sixpenny bandbox by 
 the side of the Thames, after the old gentleman had said 
 something over them in the Hammersmith Road, Finn Fon- 
 taine and Deirdre Asthar were able, through the unexpected 
 munificence of Lanthorn in connection with Finn's Irish ar- 
 ticles appearing in his review, to fulfil the wish of their 
 hearts. Their heart's desire was that they might spend their 
 first days together in what Paris Asthar used to call "the fast- 
 ness of the White Gods," that ghostly pile of buildings up 
 there in the purple heather-covered mountains, given over to 
 the wild plover and the glory of God. 
 
 They drove up towards the mountains on the jaunting 
 car which, as the driver said, only hung together by half a 
 spring and the blessing of heaven. Up and up, leaving the 
 little village straggling down there by the side of the deep 
 shining Blackwater, flecked with the foam bubbles of morn- 
 ing. Up and up, past the solitary wayside cabin where the 
 bare-footed ragged children came out to smile in friendly shy- 
 ness at Deirdre. Up, into the blue air of the morning of early 
 autumn scented with the tang of the peat, until the habitations 
 of men were left behind and, as Mick the driver said, they 
 were "alone with God. And sure," said he, "isn't that a 
 terrible thing entirely?" 
 
 So they came to the gates of naked iron that barred the 
 way to the granite Paradise behind which, like a grey mush- 
 room, nestled the tiny stone lodge, from which ran a cowled 
 shadowy figure with knotted rope girdle, from which, like a 
 second St. Peter, a bunch of keys dangled. The great gates 
 swung silently apart and they found themselves between the 
 high narrow walls of the grey stone of which the place was 
 
 299 
 
300 GODS 
 
 built, a veritable rock of God. Behind, the cells of those 
 monks, who, that they might the better make the sacrifice of 
 immolation .with the Ineffable, had vowed themselves to eter- 
 nal silence. 
 
 Deirdre, her eyes shining in that high thin air, her red lips 
 parted, bloomed there between the high walls like the moss 
 roses which nestled in the shadows at their feet, the blooms 
 standing velvety against the stone. 
 
 They drove out of the narrowness of the way that wound 
 into the heart of holiness to find themselves in the great square 
 of the courtyard before a low grated postern, to be conscious 
 of a face that searched them from the shadow, then the shut- 
 ting of it out, and then the silent opening of the door. 
 
 Here in the guest-house they found the young monk with 
 the rosy complexion and the brown kindling eyes who brought 
 their first separation on earth. In vain that Deirdre, pagan 
 that she was, bit her lip and looked in mute rebellion upon 
 the rosy-faced janitor. But it seemed that here in Paradise 
 the male sheep had to be shepherded from the female goats. 
 
 The ladies had an enclosure to themselves, so that the more 
 vulnerable sides of masculinity might be segregated from the 
 assaults of the flesh and the female devil. The White Gods, 
 for all that Beautiful Lady, crowned and throned amongst 
 them, were male. Woman was the unclean being. 
 
 There, amongst a lot of holy women, who told their beads 
 and their stories with equal assiduity, Deirdre, young and beau- 
 tiful, a dove amongst hens, found herself. Young mountainy 
 women told her of sins they had never committed, and old 
 women from the plains and bogs, of dead sins they would like 
 to commit, but couldn't. And here, herded together in this 
 corral of the faith, they drenched themselves with tea, that 
 "spiritual drink" of Miss Kitty. 
 
 As for Finn, he found himself at one corner of a long table 
 surrounded by rosy-cheeked, snub-nosed pig buyers, long-faced, 
 cautious-eyed farmers, and young gentlemen from the cities, 
 with inclination to pimples, all fast returning under the minis- 
 trations of the monks to a state of grace. There also were 
 those great dome-headed theologians of Ireland, in whom Finn 
 recognised the breed of Father Con, and amongst them, look- 
 ing thoroughly ashamed of himself, a very rare theological goat, 
 still clothed in the black coat of righteousness, sent for his 
 
MELLERAY 301 
 
 sins up here into the cleansing air of the mountains a goat 
 who sat furtively alone and watched out at the circumambient 
 state of grace from which he had fallen through putting too 
 little water in his whiskey. Whilst from behind came the voice 
 of a young and ghostly visitant, habited in white, who, un- 
 noticed, had stolen in to read for their spiritual edification an 
 account of the lives, and especially of the deaths, of the saints, 
 describing to an intensive accompaniment of knife and fork, 
 which seemed to gather zest from the recital, an anatomically 
 minute analysis of their sufferings. 
 
 The air of the mountains the consciousness of grace all 
 led to inordinate consumption of the juicy mutton, succulent 
 beef and sour milk, which were the nectar and ambrosia of 
 Melleray the food of the gods. 
 
 And then, afterwards, the sudden hush, and the low even 
 voice of the monk who had entered, the other gliding out when 
 his work was done: 
 
 "Confiteantur tibi, Domine, omnia opera tua." With the 
 murmured reply from those around: 
 
 "Et sancti tul benedicant tibi" 
 
 Again came the voice of the monk: 
 
 "Gloria Patri, 'et Filio, et Spiritu sancto" 
 
 And then the chorussed, indomitable: 
 
 "Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in scecula 
 sceculorum. Amen." 
 
 "As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world 
 without end. Amen." 
 
 There came to Finn the grey ruin of a chapel, standing on 
 a high shelf of cliff, looking out over broad seas. 
 
 Here, in Melleray, the spiritual and the material were close. 
 The two worlds were not separated by the barrier of the in- 
 visible. The White Gods of Paris Asthar up there on the slopes 
 of the mountains were very aloof and very familiar tenderly 
 indulgent to the frailities of poor mortality. Like Father Le- 
 strange, inflexible in dogma, they were flexible in conduct. A 
 permanent state of grace, save for the lambs of the elect, white- 
 fleeced in habit and cowl, who even then had to mortify the 
 flesh by flagellation and penance, shut themselves in behind 
 stone walls, and, generally, isolate themselves from the wooing 
 of the earthy world outside was impossible. The love of 
 whiskey; the love of those unclean creatures, women; the love 
 
302 GODS 
 
 of forbidden fruits: these things were inherent in Adamic hu- 
 manity, spiritual lapses were in a sense the normal, as were 
 their concomitants spiritual bursts into Melleray so conse- 
 crated, refreshed, for further falls. 
 
 And so, the women stilL'shut up within their enclosure, the 
 male sheep, with some male goats among them, were taken the 
 rounds for their moral edification. They were shown those 
 bare cubicles of chastity in which the monks spent but a hand- 
 ful of hours out of the twenty-four, giving the rest to the glory 
 and praise of the Godhead in the Mass. And it was from 
 one such cubicle that Finn, left for a moment behind, saw a 
 sorrowful figure steal the high pale brow glistening with the 
 sweat of the spirit under the flagellations of that flesh which 
 here was not its temple but its mortal enemy. And all this 
 time, Deirdre, for the first time in her life protestant as her 
 heretic father, strained at the invisible bars to come to life and 
 love, listening unheeding to the women about her, to the holy 
 talk which flowed along its time-worn grooves, ceaseless and 
 unchecked. 
 
 Faith and morals tended to rest up here on the slopes of 
 the purple hills. Complin, and then to bed in that tiny room 
 where in the holy books on the narrow table Finn met once 
 more the tortures of the saints. Reading by the light of the 
 thin solitary candle, his eye lifted now and again to the plain 
 crucifix, with, underneath: "Oh, sweet Jesus, may'st thou be 
 ever crucified in my heart by nails of love, who for love of me 
 wast crucified with nails of iron on the hard wood of the cross 
 . . ." And over the high mantelpiece the plain black and 
 white of the printed text, with the word "Eternity" brooding 
 over all, and below that frantic ticking of the square wooden 
 clock with its hurrying pendulum: Tick- tick tick- tick, that 
 seemed to say Et-er-ni-ty Et-er-ni-ty then a success of ticks: 
 Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick, each moment treading upon the 
 heels of the other, tremulous, insistent, menacing. 
 
 Finn's eyes, searching the text, read: "If each grain of 
 sand were a million years . . . that would not be eter- 
 nity . . ." Where was it he had read it before, or heard 
 it? 
 
 Then he remembered. It was the Elder's prayer that day 
 of long ago at Mrs. Titterling's. It was those great White 
 Gods, set against the starry firmament of blue and gold, meet- 
 
MELLERAY 303 
 
 ing in the circle of faith that darker, gloomier god of the 
 Spirit's Elect and those gods of blood and fire of Aunt Bella. 
 Faith was one thing after all, under all guises. It took differ- 
 ent forms, but it was the same thing. 
 
 Up there in the silence, it broke on Finn. Perhaps all faiths 
 had the same kernel. Perhaps all these faiths were but means 
 to find out God perhaps all roads led to God. Perhaps the 
 God of his father and grandmother and Mrs. Titterling as 
 of Father Lestrange and Billy Pickles was the same God. Per- 
 haps no man by searching could find out God, but perhaps no 
 man could escape Him. 
 
 And thinking this, he fell asleep to the hurried ticking of that 
 clock : Et-er-ni-ty Et-er-ni-ty Et-er-ni-ty Et-er-ni-ty. 
 
 Finn awoke in the grey of the dawn where the shadows 
 still clung like cobwebs outside the window panes awoke in 
 that silence which seemed to have grown there like a concretion 
 through the years, from that day when these poor monks, flee- 
 ing from a hostile land, had come up there to the bleak hill- 
 sides to find to their hands only the purple heather and the 
 grey boulders those willing hearts animated by that love 
 which had conjured out of nothingness the battlements of the 
 faith. 
 
 He found himself listening to the breathless beat of the 
 clock which warned the sinner of the shortness of time and 
 horror unending. 
 
 A hollow cough came from beneath his window. 
 
 He rose, to see in the tiny enclosed yard below, with the 
 grey cobblestones that brought back the House of Dreams, a 
 lonely cowled figure. It was that of an old bearded man, his 
 hands laid in the hanging sleeves of his brown habit, the cowled 
 face, dimly realised, searching up there over the high grey 
 walls to where a single shaft of light struck rosy upon a dis- 
 tant mountain peak. 
 
 The old grey face searched for it as a blinded man turns 
 towards the light: the old grey lips moved in prayer: the fin- 
 gers stole down for the beads that hung from the corded waist. 
 Something stirred in Finn. 
 
 It was outside, wandering in the golden dawn within that 
 iron compound of the faith that Finn, pondering that face 
 of the old man as he searched towards the rosy spurs of Knock- 
 
304 GODS 
 
 mealdown, saw across the space of the green walled courtyard 
 a face looking at him through the grating of the wooden gate. 
 It was the face of Eve shut out from Paradise the tousled 
 hair and green eyes of Deirdre, who beat herself like a bird 
 at the grating. And then the face had disappeared and had 
 shown itself over the wall at the side, to be followed by the 
 figure that wriggled over and so she came running to him in 
 the green and bronze of the autumn morning, running across 
 those precincts sacred to the male, and had thrown herself into 
 his arms before the line of monks then filing in lonely file to 
 their chapel, and had kissed him upon the lips. 
 
 The cowled heads bowed themselves as though blinded by 
 an unaccustomed light, and then had passed. 
 
 A white-robed figure came stealing to them across the grey 
 stones, a man of waxen face and great dark eyes. Only that 
 the eyes softened a little as they rested upon the face of the 
 young girl softened with the pity of knowledge for the ignor- 
 ance of young life. A flush had come into the hollow cheeks 
 as they fell upon the fair young breast that showed itself be- 
 neath the V of the green dress, and so the cowled head had 
 turned to Finn with a grave: "No woman has ever before 
 set her foot within this enclosure. It is a very great sin. And 
 your wife will please close her dress for Christ's sake." 
 
 And so fairness had to be covered in so that it might not 
 shame the glory of the white gods and so Deirdre, her little 
 green dressed pinned closely up, was led away through the 
 barred portals, which were locked upon her but not before 
 she had turned and sent a lightning message to her man who 
 stood there looking after her. 
 
 But Finn felt that these gods were all-powerful implacable. 
 Had they not shut out love? 
 
 It was with him as the brown-eyed monk of the first day 
 unlocked the shuttered window to show them those lonely 
 mounds with their crosses of black timber to mark where the 
 children of God, waiting the signal for judgment, crouched un- 
 derneath in the way of their Order. It was with him as he 
 saw the solitary figure of a young monk, the grave in which he 
 stood still shallow in the springtime of life, lifting his daily 
 sod from the hollow that was one day to receive him. With 
 him even when he remembered how once Stella Fay, that girl 
 lying now so cold up there under the shadow of the old chapel, 
 
MELLERAY 305 
 
 had broken the law against love that day when, in this 
 place of dying men, she had sprung into the open grave by 
 the side of a young monk and had kissed him full upon 
 his lips. 
 
 But the white gods had shut out love. 
 
 It was with him in the glory of the mass of the early morning 
 where the sun shone rosy upon the loftiness of the bare altar, 
 served by the high, tonsured priests, where the sacrifice to 
 Omnipotence made its circle of the hours. With him as he 
 gazed upon the faces of the monks, those faces of parch- 
 ment or ivory or wax, segregated from sin and suffering up 
 there in the heart of the mountains those faces before which 
 the span of life, its nights and mornings merging, passed as 
 one long day. It was with him as he looked upon the face of 
 one old man, now almost at his hundreth milestone, the white- 
 bearded face rosy as a child's with the rapture of the Mass, as 
 he repeated: "Et expecto resurrectionem, mortuorum, et vitam 
 venturi sceculi. Amen." Waiting in the sure and certain hope 
 to meet his God, his eyes aglow with the light of portals not 
 of earth a soul who had glimpsed the golden floor through 
 the gates ajar, the light shining upon him from within. 
 
 But the gods were implacable they had shut out love. 
 
 It was with him at the midnight mass, when the hooded fig- 
 ures stole into the chapel in the tapered darkness, shadows 
 materialising from shadow. With him in that song of all the 
 seamen of the world: the gentle "Ave Maris Stella," the greet- 
 ing to the star of evening the gentle friend of poor sailormen 
 the Queen of Heaven and the Mother of God. It was with 
 him in that mystic carillon, herald of that Elevation when 
 bread and wine became flesh and blood, as in the tremendous 
 murmured: "Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, 
 Factorem coeli et term, visibilium omnium et invisibilium" 
 "I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven 
 and earth, and of all things visible and invisible." 
 
 It was with them in the soft glow of the tapers burned to 
 those gods with him there under the incensed lights. 
 
 And it was with him that last evening of late autumn when 
 he and Deirdre, going outside the walls of the monastery to 
 make love out there on the hillside, had seen that solitary 
 cowled monk, mattock in hand, the skirt looped over naked 
 sandalled feet, returning from his day of toil, the man who 
 
306 GODS 
 
 brought back to him his father. He, too, was reaching the end 
 of the road 
 
 For above and beyond all were the gods; the gods implaca- 
 ble; who gathered them all in. 
 
 But they had turned and kissed there in the autumn gloam- 
 ing. Kissed with passion. Love and life amidst death. 
 
 Even the White Gods could not shut out love. 
 
XXXIII 
 
 THE FIGHT TO LIVE 
 
 Finn and Deirdre went back to London to begin the strug- 
 gle for existence in the little flat with the green door by the 
 side of the Thames. Of the means to live, they had under 
 fifty pounds and would have had less had it not been for the 
 generosity of the monks up there in the mountains who would 
 not take anything from them. "The fight to live is hard 
 enough," that monk with the dark eyes and waxen face, who 
 had made Deirdre close her dress for the glory of God, had said. 
 
 Each week saw a hole in their fifty pounds. The mathe- 
 matics of free-lancing in Fleet Street were those of subtraction 
 seldom of addition. His difference with Thrum trailed him 
 everywhere. It was not that he had quarrelled with Thrum 
 that hurt him, but the rumour spread through Fleet Street that 
 he had not been "loyal," was "untrustworthy." Although he 
 managed to pick up the scraps of journalism, writing little ar- 
 ticles here and there upon anything and everything, the big 
 things always seemed to elude him. 
 
 That was the thing that ate into him. He knew he could 
 do the things that brought the greater rewards some of them 
 at least not unworthy in themselves, things that he wanted to 
 do, the things that mattered, and here he was condemned to 
 delve in the scrapheaps of journalism. He suffered many in- 
 dignities, some of them imagined; had been turned out of an 
 office by a blackguardly pirate editor, and had been received 
 by the luminaries of Fleet Street with much genuine kindness 
 although many regrets. What was always surprising him about 
 Fleet street was its kindly brutality. 
 
 He changed his name again and yet again. But his manu- 
 scripts went out and came back saving those infrequent flip- 
 pancies which were helping them to live. For the lialf guineas 
 mounted up in bulk. If he used his name it spoiled his chances. 
 If he did not, he instantly became one of the great unknown. 
 
 In the little home with the green door a new Deirdre showed 
 
 307 
 
3 o8 GODS 
 
 herself. The old Deirdre of wayward indulgence had long 
 since vanished. She was Finn's guide and comforter and 
 friend. The delicately kept hands now had hard finger ends 
 and broken quicks. But the face and body were as fresh 
 as that day when he first had seen her at the office of "The 
 Earth." 
 
 In the beginning they had indulged in a char-lady a Mrs. 
 Coffin, who sometimes turned up and sometimes didn't, as wild 
 fancy moved her. She was a voluminous voluble person a 
 slave to hiccoughs, and her ideas of cleanliness were scanty. 
 
 She would drop in casually about midday, tapping her silken 
 bosom she always wore silks of variegated colours and 
 would recite between hiccoughs a short story which rapidly de- 
 veloped into a romance about "herself and another lady." Mrs. 
 Coffin invariably referred to herself as "a lady," and, as Deirdre 
 discovered from hearing a passage at arms between her and 
 the cabdriver's wife downstairs, upon a question of dustbin 
 precedence, had her Achillean heel in the epithet "woman." 
 This was the affront unpardonable. 
 
 This lady disarranged the furniture once a week at a re- 
 muneration of one shilling and threepence, the threepence be- 
 ing in lieu of that nourishing stout so essential to a woman 
 in her condition. She was always referring to her "condition." 
 
 But as the shillings waned in the postoffice savings book, 
 Mrs. Coffin had to be shelved, and so Deirdre did the work 
 herself and, after initial knocked fingers and some barren ex- 
 periments in patent house-saving appliances, did the work very 
 much better than her predecessor. Finn washed the floors with 
 an arrangement which Deirdre, following Black Rock nomen- 
 clature, called "the contraption." It was a dishclout tied upon 
 a worn sweeping-brush which made housemaid's knee a super- 
 fluity. 
 
 The food question was for them slightly more involved than 
 the provisioning of the armies of Ca3sar. Finn knew nothing 
 at all about commissariat and Deirdre just as much. As Deir- 
 dre said, "they saw them coming." 
 
 Butchers, otherwise normal kindly hearted slaughterers, 
 seemed to reserve for them the most leathery portions of their 
 beef and mutton, until they fell upon the greasy bosom of Mr. 
 Belcher in the High Road, who, one day, after selling them 
 an entirely uneatable piece of brisket, had suddenly changed 
 
THE FIGHT TO LIVE 309 
 
 his mind from frantic recommendation to subtle condemna- 
 tion, taking back the yellow monstrosity from Finn's net bag 
 and substituting for it a piece of meat of a juiciness till then 
 unknown in the flat with the green door. The Belcher wife, 
 who always sat like a gigantic hen behind, in the pay-box, 
 taking pity on them, had signalled him. 
 
 From that moment the meat problem was solved. Mrs. 
 Belcher would extract herself from the invisible eggs upon 
 which she always seemed to be sitting and come out for the 
 purpose of adjuring "John" that was Mr. Belcher to see 
 that they got the choicest portions. So it was that delectable 
 pig's frys (Mr. Belcher had also a Pork Establishment at the 
 side), tongues that tasted like marrow and pieces of corned 
 beef that with carrots and potatoes melted in the mouth, found 
 their way into the little bag which Finn carried each Saturday 
 morning up to the High Road all at prices which they did 
 not discover until long afterwards were in or about the cost 
 of production. 
 
 There was a certain etiquette about these things. Mr. 
 Belcher, displaying a delicacy hitherto unsuspected in the 
 brisket days, would show Finn a tongue marked 43. 6d., bend 
 down, find an imaginary coarseness of grain in the libelled ani- 
 mal which had been its possessor, whip off the brass label, 
 and using injurious language to Bill, the butcher's boy, for put- 
 ting the wrong label upon the meat, that young gentleman at 
 this juncture usually wearing an air of injured innocence, al- 
 though obviously in the plot, would gravely substitute one at 
 a shilling less, take it out again, and cram the lot into the net 
 bag. 
 
 Vegetables were much easier. But that was owing to a Span- 
 ish looking man in a back street with two greasy dark-eyed 
 daughters, who, chattering, sat at the receipt of custom. 
 
 There seemed in fact to be a general conspiracy to protect 
 these two innocents, who, in unconscious ingratitude, rather 
 fancied themselves, imagining it was growing experience which 
 enabled them to get such excellent value for their money. 
 
 Mr. Majolica that was the greengrocer his dark eyes 
 gleaming over his white spade beard, would himself dive 
 amongst the cauliflowers and cabbages for the firmest, whitest 
 and greenest. He it was who warned them of the red potatoes 
 and guided them to the balls of flour. 
 
310 GODS 
 
 Groceries were more difficult. 
 
 At the beginning, Finn, alone in the early mornings, would 
 take the net bag and go up to Mr. Hilltop's because it was 
 convenient and because Mr. Hilltop, who was a member of the 
 Strict Baptists, was such a nice man. It was only when many 
 months afterwards he discovered that the Danish bacon for 
 which Mr. Hilltop in the fulness of his heart charged one shil- 
 ling and threepence, could be purchased in the Multiple Stores 
 in the High Road for twopence per pound less and standard 
 jams for one penny less than at Mr. Hilltop's, that Finn, to 
 whom the pennies were now beginning to matter, left Mr. Hill- 
 top to that gentleman's unaccountably un-Christian astonish- 
 ment, and went to the stores. 
 
 Domestic finance was fast taking upon itself the nature of 
 a fine art. In the beginning, before Deirdre's new clothes wore 
 out, such things for them had no existence. It was only on 
 that fatal day when Deirdre, lifting up her foot, showed Finn 
 the broken upper and that other day of darkness when her 
 best dress refused any longer to permit itself to be mended un- 
 der the arms, that it broke upon them that clothes did not 
 grow like skins. And, not so long after, there was that dark- 
 est day of all when they drew their last four shillings from 
 the savings bank. 
 
 There was nobody to help them. Old Asthar, now a sullen 
 old vulture, haunting the darkness of his clubs, was silent as 
 the grave into which he was fast falling. Finn's father had 
 died with just enough to bury him after the furniture had been 
 auctioned off, and Finn's mother, still bewildered, had gone into 
 a dreadfully respectable Home for Decayed Gentlewomen, 
 where she was fast regaining that self-possession which had 
 been her support in life. Finn prowled Fleet Street, some- 
 times wildly fluttered by transient cheque sometimes as 
 deeply depressed. 
 
 But through it all Deirdre comforted him, developing a 
 philosophy of faith which supported Finn, the impatient, even 
 in his darkest moments. 
 
 And all the time, Finn worked upon the book, long since 
 discarded that book upon Ireland and its spiritual significance 
 for the coming Europe the book he had begun that day when 
 Paudeen had been nearly drowned. 
 
 It was in the opening chapters of Finn's and Deirdre's for- 
 
THE FIGHT TO LIVE 311 
 
 tunes that what was known as the Moroccan Incident took 
 place. It was about an intractable tract of earth, the position 
 of which nobody knew and about which, seemingly, nobodjf 
 cared. It was inhabited by some caf au lait people, about 
 whose views, because they were stained brown instead of being 
 white, nobody troubled. It seemed, however, that, in the lan- 
 guage of diplomacy, it was "a sphere of influence." 
 
 Thrum instantly thundered from his Fleet Street Olympus. 
 Lanthorn blew his penny trumpet in reply. The man in the 
 street paid his halfpennies and read it all as though the world 
 and war were a penny peepshow. As time went on, he even 
 developed a new-found patriotism about this sphere of influ- 
 ence, without having any precise idea as to where or why it was. 
 Without knowledge of empire, he called himself imperialist. 
 He took sides. Even the churches took sides. Church was 
 on one side chapel on another. But through it all, Thrum 
 thundered. 
 
 There was a fluttering of flags. Questions in Parliament. 
 The stirring up of old treaties. Men, ill-considered unimpor- 
 tant men throughout the world, and of all colours, prophe- 
 sied, and like their predecessors the prophets of old were 
 laughed at and forgotten. 
 
 Then Morocco vanished from the map of Europe as it van- 
 ished from the papers and was forgotten in a handspace. 
 
 It was in this time, when Europe, heavy, was travailing for 
 the Event, that Deirdre stood in the grey of the morning be- 
 fore Finn, still half-asleep on his divan-bed, and bending over 
 him hid her head within his arms. 
 
 "Finn," she whispered so low that he could only just catch 
 it. "Finn," she said, as she pressed herself against him. And 
 then after a little . . . "can you not feel it can you not 
 feel it stirring?" 
 
 A tremor came to him from her. It ran through him like 
 a nervous shock. It was the new life. 
 
XXXIV 
 
 THE CLEANSING OF TREVOR TITTERLING 
 
 It was a dark January evening in the House of Titterling. 
 The leaden skies that hung above London had held their frozen 
 mask throughout the short January day. The cold seeped 
 through everywhere like some slimy thing trying to crawl its 
 way into the house through each cranny. 
 
 Not a sound came from the outside. Not a note of bird. 
 For the very sparrows cowered together under the icy eaves in 
 trying to keep out the frozen death. Even the brood of the 
 younger Titterlings in the attic above were frozen into silence. 
 
 Only one sound came to break the brooding heaviness of 
 that soundless day. The sound of a woman's voice a woman 
 singing softly to herself as she moved about the house, some- 
 times coming in to watch her husband, sitting crouched to- 
 baccoless before the tiny fire a pale-faced penitent trying to 
 read one of the black-bound books of the Elect. 
 
 She would come in as though about to do something and 
 would turn her great grey eyes upon him as he crouched un- 
 lovely, with a stare that at times was terrifying. She would 
 croon to herself as though over a child, looking upon him with 
 that terrible tenderness and would then go out, closing the 
 door softly behind her. 
 
 Trevor Titterling, sitting there, felt that stare, and careless 
 devil though he was, it made him uneasy. Now he was listen- 
 ing to her go down the steps into the cellar underneath the 
 house that cellar hollowed from the solid ground, with the 
 single barred window and low thick clamped door that bolted 
 on the outside to prevent the thieves who in the night break 
 through and steal getting into the house itself, the cellar in 
 v^hich the young Titterlings played at "bears and lions." He 
 heard her raking amongst the coals and a little afterwards lis- 
 tened to the ascending steps which passed out to the side of 
 
 312 
 
THE CLEANSING OF TREVOR TITTERLING 313 
 
 the house, and then the dull clang of the iron shutter which 
 could be locked over the cellar window at nights. 
 
 Something seemed to echo in his soul as the dull clamp 
 struck cold upon him. It was as though the door of a tomb 
 had closed. 
 
 He shivered. 
 
 And then, inconsequent, his mind ran to that day some three 
 weeks before when his train had stopped suddenly outside a sta- 
 tion, a train in a carriage of which he had been making love to 
 Joan Elliott, that young woman, the last of his light o' loves, 
 to whom Finn had seen him saying good-bye that day of the 
 dead years at Liverpool Street Station and who had now come 
 back to him. He had always had a weakness for Joan. He 
 had had the girl in his arms when that other train had stopped 
 opposite his as though by the hand of God . . . and he 
 thought the woman in the grey dress and grey hat in that other 
 carriage was his wife. But he could not be sure. And he had 
 been afraid to ask. 
 
 But she had gone that day up to town to see her mother 
 and it might have been so. Yet he had not seen her looking at 
 them. He had not even thought of the train in his hot kisses 
 and had only looked up to see the woman in grey, alone in her 
 carriage, staring away from them and out of her own window. 
 It could not have been she. 
 
 But Trevor Titterling was uneasy. "Had the creeps," he 
 said. 
 
 His wife had been busying herself about that cellar for the 
 last few days. He had asked her about it, but she had said 
 something about separating the wood and tinder and coal which 
 had become mixed together. He did not bother about that. 
 He never went into the cellar. But there had been the sound 
 of hammering a dull sound as though something were being 
 stopped up. 
 
 But what should be stopped up? Down there they had the 
 cask of petroleum and some wood and some coal. Nothing 
 more. 
 
 But Trevor Titterling was uneasy. 
 
 And still the crooning came to him. 
 
 Mary Titterling was singing those terrible hymns of the 
 Spirit's Elect those hymns of bitter-sweetness. They had 
 always terrified him in a queer way as though they were the 
 
314 GODS 
 
 spells of malignant implacable spirits. It was they which had 
 frightened him into religion that last fright of the mid-sum- 
 mer which, like all those other frights before it, had passed. 
 
 For Joan had come back to him. And Joan was adorably 
 sweet and enticing, and the tides of life still ran strongly in 
 his thin veins. After all, time enough for religion when Joan 
 was gone and his pulses had ceased to throb. 
 
 If it were not that he feared those spirits. They would not 
 let him escape. They were watching out for him watching 
 to strike him down at the very moment he felt most safe 
 to consign him to eternal tortures. They could not be escaped, 
 or the Thing behind them. Trevor Titterling knew that. 
 
 He shivered again as he listened to the low clear voice sing- 
 ing now more strongly, with something aspirant, pleading: 
 
 But oh! the avenging fires of hell, 
 That choke and scorch and writhe, 
 
 Whilst in the midst 
 
 The sinner sits 
 In torment yet alive. 
 
 For oh! the flames 
 
 The cleansing flames 
 That purge the sinner's sin. 
 
 They burn the fear, 
 
 They burn the tear, 
 They bring him heaven within. 
 
 But now she was silent. He could hear her coming up those 
 stairs for the last time with that steady padding of the feet. 
 
 He could hear her outside the door. He saw the handle turn 
 and then his wife as she came in, the grey eyes, luminous, bent 
 upon him with a certain exaltation. But the glance of the eyes 
 was terrifying. 
 
 There was nothing of which to be afraid. Mary would not 
 look at him like that with that pure-souled utter love of hers 
 shining through the veils of her eyes if she were the woman 
 who had that day been in the train. She knew nothing. 
 
 And he loved her. He knew that. He had not made his 
 own body or the soul which it dominated. It was not his fault 
 that he could no more make love to those clear calm eyes than 
 to a vestal virgin. The Joans of the world were for the bodies 
 of the world. The Mary Titterlings were for the souls. 
 
THE CLEANSING OF TREVOR TITTERLING 315 
 
 She only wanted him to help her with the coals below. They 
 were too heavy for her and a partition had fallen. 
 
 It came to him as a sudden relief. Of what had he been 
 afraid? 
 
 She went before him down the cold stone steps. There was a 
 pungent smell of paraffin. 
 
 She threw back the heavy door of clamped iron. He could 
 see through into the murk of the place which was filled by a 
 greyness as of a pit, the only light seeping its way through the 
 holes of the narrow iron shutter now clamped in place. 
 
 A great pile of wood and straw had been swept together in 
 the middle of the cellar, a mass of coal thrown loosely over 
 and through it. It covered the centre of the floor, throwing 
 grotesque shadows upon the stone walls. The smell of the oil 
 was overpowering. The floor was drenched with it. He drew 
 back a moment from the place as though it had been a place 
 of torture. 
 
 He turned at the sound of the grating match, saw its fiery 
 passage through the close cold air, and then its falling upon 
 the pile. He looked, stupidly, as a tiny wreath of smoke curled 
 upwards and then he had found himself and had hurled him- 
 self upon the liquid flame that ran along the ground, writh- 
 ing before him like a living thing. He beat and trampled fran- 
 tically. But still the flames ran about him, their blue tongues 
 licking hungrily upwards. 
 
 He turned as he heard the clamp of the great door behind 
 and the shooting of the bolts. Hurled himself again and yet 
 again against the wood and iron, leaving pieces of his flesh 
 upon the iron studs. Breathless, he listened for a moment, 
 hearing only the thudding of his heart and the spitting of the 
 flames . . . 
 
 And then the voice. That terrible voice, crooning: 
 
 . . . the cleansing flames 
 
 That purge the sinner's sin. 
 They burn the fear . . . 
 
 He called. And now above the crackling of the flames he 
 could hear her praying praying behind that closed door: 
 
 "Oh, God ! cleanse Trevor cleanse him, oh Almighty Father 
 for his soul's sake cleanse him in the flames of hell. Cleanse 
 
3 i6 GODS 
 
 him from the things that clog from carnal love make him 
 pure within like a little child." 
 
 He flung himself on his knees against the door, .fighting for 
 air. He also prayed. He prayed her to open. He promised 
 repentance, but still that terrible prayer went on beyond the 
 door shut implacable as the door of a tomb: "Cleanse him, oh, 
 Father! In thy Divine Mercy, purge him with thy purifying 
 
 fires. Purge him for the children's sake for Christ's sake 
 
 
 
 "Mary! Mary!" he cried. 
 
 But still the voice came, insistent, pitiless. 
 
 The flames roared, the prayer inside had sunk to a hoarse 
 whisper. 
 
 And then the first long scream rang out and then another 
 and then that dreadful animal whimpering. 
 
 And then, at last, silence, save for the roaring of the flames, 
 now breaking through the door to turn the house of Titterling 
 into a funeral pyre. 
 
XXXV 
 
 THE BIRTH OF FINN 
 
 Finn Fontaine, visiting his friends upon that dark evening 
 of January, had found only the gutted walls of the house about 
 the glowing bed in which lay the ashes of the Titterlings. All 
 except the mother, who had been found wandering around the 
 furnace of the house crooning to herself, her eyes ablaze with 
 madness, to be led away to her final home the Broadmoor 
 criminal lunatic asylum, "to be confined at His Majesty's 
 pleasure." 
 
 He had come with a heavy heart because he and Deirdre 
 now knew that the threat of two months before had materi- 
 alised. 
 
 The little life of which he had learnt in the dawn of that 
 morning had ceased to be life. It had almost ceased to stir 
 in its gropings from the infinite to the finite. And so they 
 had been troubled, and in their doubts had gone to a local 
 doctor. 
 
 The case was not one with which he could deal, he had said. 
 It was a case for the specialist. A certain sample would have 
 to be submitted. Tests would have to be made . . . 
 
 But it had seemed to them there was nothing to fear. Deirdre 
 had not felt ill. It was only that silence within as of a tomb. 
 
 He had sat in the gloomy consulting room in Portland Place 
 and had listened to the steady ticking of the clock in the 
 silence. 
 
 And then the great man had stood before him, silent, as 
 befitted an arbiter of fate. He had listened to the story of 
 Finn as a man listens to an old tale listened with his head 
 resting in his hand that soft white hand which yet had some- 
 thing pitiless in it. 
 
 Finn had watched his back as he held the sample he had 
 brought in a tiny test-tube over the blue flame of the Buntzen 
 burner had watched the liquid contents turn to ink and had 
 
3i8 GODS 
 
 felt his own heart become darker and darker with the play of 
 the flame. 
 
 Then he had delivered judgment. Remorseless judgment. 
 
 Finn had heard him as from a great distance and as though 
 he were not concerned in it. It seemed superfluous. For he 
 had known it in his own way. He knew it as he watched the 
 play of the flame and the poise of the man with the tube. 
 
 A gleam of pity, transient, came into the face of the man 
 with the tube, passed, and was gone. 
 
 It was a curious case, he had said in some respects unique, 
 but it was not quite unknown. It was a case of sugar secretion 
 that sugar which, in the last stages, turned to deadly acid. 
 Yes, Deirdre would have her child, but the child would be 
 born either crippled or dead, and the mother would scarcely 
 know of its coming. She would pass into a merciful un- 
 consciousness and with the coming of life there would also 
 be a going death was the corollary of life. She would pass 
 out in that coma from which only one woman had awakened 
 . . . And that was all. 
 
 Finn found himself listening with meticulous interest to the 
 ticking of the watch in his pocket and noting a tiny vein that 
 twisted itself across the large signet garnet upon the white 
 hand before him. Then he had laid the five golden sovereigns 
 and the two half crowns upon the table. He had placed his 
 hand within the white hand of the man in front of him the 
 man who now had something strained in his eyes. And then 
 he had found himself in the roar of the Regent Street traffic. 
 
 The thrash of the hoofs; the cry of the paper boys; the voice 
 of the bus conductor as he asked for his fare all came to him 
 as from the other side of something from another place, far 
 away. 
 
 He had gone through the little green door to where Deirdre 
 waited, all unconscious. She looked up from where she was 
 working over some tiny garment under the oil lamp looked 
 up, to know the truth in that moment. 
 
 It was Deirdre who faced the thing that was coming with 
 that new faith which sometimes seemed to Finn to hold all 
 things. It was Deirdre, her little face framed in the halo of 
 her hair under the oil lamp, who turned to him and kissed him 
 Deirdre who had sat upon his knee as he told her the whole 
 story as he might a child. 'And it was Deirdre who had said: 
 
THE BIRTH OF FINN 319 
 
 "That is all right, Finn. You and I cannot fear God is 
 everywhere." 
 
 And then, inconsequent, she had broken down, hiding her 
 face as was her way in his shoulder and crying softly to her- 
 self. "I don't want to leave you, Finn," she had whispered as 
 though in apology. "But God is everywhere." 
 
 She had never before spoken of God not in that way. Even 
 in that moment, that came to him. 
 
 It was then that, still sobbing uncontrollably at intervals, 
 she told him that whether life or death came, she wanted it 
 to come in Ireland. It was in that moment Finn knew what 
 country meant for Deirdre. "If little Finn" she. had always 
 been sure the child would be a boy "if little Finn were born 
 anywhere but in Ireland, he would never forgive his dead 
 mother." And so it had been decided. 
 
 They had come to Dublin to a home of which Mrs. O'Hara 
 knew. When they reached the ancient Dublin mansion, it was 
 like meeting an old friend. Finn remembered in some time 
 or place the great kindly house at the corner with the door, 
 so curiously unproportioned, at the side the old low door of 
 oak that had been darkened by the centuries, with the oak 
 garlands carved out of the solid mass, and, above, the big 
 brass knocker with the face of the cherub. 
 
 Inside, and he recognised the great stairs that wound them- 
 selves into the upper regions the low gloomy reception rooms 
 with the floors of polished oak the white marble mantelpieces 
 stained by age, and all the tender windings of the place. It 
 was an old friend. 
 
 An old man, of thin bearded face and misty kindly eyes, 
 was crossing the marble flagstones on his sticks as they came 
 through, had looked at them a moment, and then had passed 
 into a room at the side. 
 
 Deirdre, happy in the old house, had made friends in her 
 own shy, impulsive way with the white-haired beautiful woman 
 who had yielded marriage and children for the sake of others, 
 and that first night had laid herself to rest with a smile of 
 happy content. 
 
 But always that terrible acid increased that malignant se- 
 cretion that was to be fatal to her own life and that threat- 
 ened the child within the little life that struggled ever fainter 
 as its time drew near. 
 
320 GODS 
 
 And then that morning when Finn had come in to find the 
 first travailing of life, and Deirdre, white-faced, with the tears 
 shining in her eyes unafraid. 
 
 "You will be with me, Finn, dear," she had whispered, still 
 with that sad happy smile "with me until the end that is 
 not an end but a beginning," she had added after a moment. 
 She had pressed his hand in both of hers. 
 
 "There is nothing more to say, dear heart," she had gone 
 on. "We have spoken of all and arranged all and if I pass 
 over you shall not long be alone, for you shall come to me 
 soon but not too soon, for you have your work to do and I 
 shall be with you always. I shall be with you in the air you 
 breathe and in the room at night I shall be with you dream- 
 ing and waking. And some day you will see me as you see 
 me now . . ." She had paused an instant, and then had 
 said, in a whisper: "But perhaps God will give me the hun- 
 dredth chance . . . perhaps he thinks you must not be 
 left alone yet." 
 
 She gasped a little, her eyes shining with vision, as though 
 she had searched the immutable and got her answer. 
 
 So he had been with her through the day that day of pain. 
 They had sat together like children, each clasping the other's 
 hands and when the pains had been too much he had placed 
 his arm about her as though to shield her. 
 
 They had been together throughout the day until the mo- 
 ment when he had to leave her. She looked at him, in long 
 dreaming, as he turned to go and she did not take his hand 
 or say good-bye. He had turned at the door and then had 
 closed it softly. 
 
 Downstairs in the great hall he found the gentle old man 
 who with his sticks had sat below in the room with the big 
 chair through the years. He had sat there through the years, 
 crippled, and had prayed for those above him who gave new 
 life to the earth. And there it was that Finn found him, the 
 blue eyes looking on him with a great pity. 
 
 "Wait a bit," he had said. "Wait a bit, now. Sure, can't 
 you leave a little bit to God?" 
 
 And there they had sat on either side of the great fireplace 
 with the brass dogs, watching the dying embers in the unlighted 
 room. 
 
 They had heard the trot of the horses' hoofs on the hard 
 
THE BIRTH OF FINN 321 
 
 road and the knock that had meant the doctor. They had 
 listened to the steps ascending the stairs. And so the hours had 
 gone by and Finn, to his bitter self-reproach, had found himself 
 unafraid. In the darkened womb of the great house it seemed 
 as though all things were enclosed and sure as though a new 
 philosophy were coming to him in the silence a philosophy not 
 of death, but of life and yet of death, too. 
 
 He had ceased to think of the little white face lying up there 
 waiting on the threshold where life and death meet had, in- 
 stead, come to think of her as something far away not as 
 Deirdre, but as a dear being he had once known and would 
 always know. 
 
 Only the tick of the grandfather's clock in the hall came to 
 them as they sat there in the shadows youth and age. And 
 once in a while, the old man's: "Wait a bit. Wait a bit, now. 
 Sure, can't you leave a little bit to God?" 
 
 And then the steps descending the stairs. 
 
 The doctor stood before him in the open doorway with the 
 flames playing on his white face the face of a man who had 
 wrestled with Death and who was being beaten, the red strong 
 hair lying dankly across the moist forehead. 
 
 Deirdre was in coma. It was the beginning of the end as- 
 sured. He had to be prepared. 
 
 But still that strange indifference, that almost terrible confi- 
 dence filled him. 
 
 And then the steps going up the stairs again. And again 
 the old man's recurrent: "Wait a bit wait a bit now. You 
 must leave a little bit to God." 
 
 And still the tick of the clock in the silence of the house. 
 And once more the steps descending and the pale face stand- 
 ing again before him with a tiny spot hectic in either cheek, 
 but this time the face of a man who had wrestled with Death 
 and won. It was Deirdre's "hundredth chance." 
 
 "You can come now," was all that he said. 
 
 But Finn's heart rose within him to stifle. Up through 
 the old house up to that room where Deirdre, white-faced, 
 the dank death-dews still standing upon her forehead but 
 smiling to him, smiling to him in that deathless way of hers. 
 
 And by her side a tiny creature lay stiffly, its eyes closed, but 
 its tiny chest rising and falling. 
 
 Finn's heart leaped. It was their child. 
 
XXXVI 
 
 THE STORY OF FINN 
 
 Finn looked down upon the morsel of life which the white- 
 haired nurse had placed in his arms in a sort of wonder. The 
 shrunken withered face seemed to him of the stuff of which 
 gods are made. The eyes, now unclosing, that petered up to 
 him unseeing, became for him the most beautiful eyes in the 
 world the tiny clenched fists and the shrivelled limbs, perished 
 by that cruel poison, assumed for him dimensions more than 
 mortal, and, as he held this soundless thing in his arms for 
 little Finn was silent from his birth it seemed to him that the 
 continuity of life upon the planet was assured through this 
 frail combination of bone, blood and nerve. 
 
 Finn the little had to be placed before the fire in the lap 
 of the nurse to keep alive the spark of life which had been 
 awakened by the beating hands of the doctor. For little Finn 
 had been beaten into life. He fought silently to live, lying 
 there, eyes and fists clenched, the little straightened limbs set 
 stiffly out before him. It was a silent, hateful fight as between 
 two invisible enemies who grappled there in silence and dark- 
 ness. The doctor said that little Finn could not live no 
 such child had lived but night after night Finn Fontaine sat 
 in the great chair between the bed of Deirdre and the tiny 
 thing that fought its silent battle in the crib at the side. 
 
 It was the ninth night when Finn the little gave the first sign 
 of life. It was a sneeze. To Finn, half dosing there in the 
 dark night it came like the emission from a tiny piston, with 
 steam behind. And in that moment he knew that the child 
 would live. 
 
 And he did live. The little thing gradually came to life, its 
 tiny arms still jointless but now pawing the air, the eyes open- 
 ing more and more as the days went by, the pulse beating ever 
 more strongly. 
 
 322 
 
THE STORY OF FINN 323 
 
 Finn the little lay there day after day, as, later, he lay 
 through the months in the house with the green door. He 
 lay there silent sometimes they thought silently reproach- 
 ful with the big eyes now changing to- dark, lustrous wonder- 
 ment as they looked upon a strange world. 
 
 So the months went by but little Finn was still silent. He 
 lay there like a chrysalis in a cocoon, receptive to everything 
 about him. He seemed to feel neither pain nor sorrow, but, 
 as it sometimes came to his father and mother, to be looking 
 out upon a strange world as an angel might look out upon the 
 earth from a cloud. 
 
 For the first months he ate hungrily and then turned from 
 physical food as though it were distasteful as though he had 
 not the necessity of it. 
 
 Only, one evening in summer, Finn, coming in upon him 
 where he lay in his crib, staring upwards as was his way, 
 found the little mouth on one side, as though the muscles had 
 only just relaxed for the first time, the face twisting into a 
 smile, painfully. He was staring upwards at something with 
 the great dark eyes that seemed to be peering into other 
 worlds. 
 
 And from that moment, the little face would break into, 
 first, a wry twisted smile, as though it hurt, and afterwards into 
 the all-embracing welcoming smile that they got to know and 
 which was his way of showing them how he loved. 
 
 At two years he was a child of shrivelled immovable body, 
 but of beautiful glowing face, his life only showing itself in his 
 eyes and in the little strained movements of his arms as though 
 he were still fighting with things unseen. 
 
 It was towards the end of the second year that they heard 
 coming from the tiny garden where he lay under a solitary 
 pear tree, one spring day, a chuckle: deep, long, ecstatic. It 
 had in it the lust of life; in its cadence something deep, satisfy- 
 ing. 
 
 They saw him lying on his back upon the little grass plot, 
 chuckling deeply to himself as at some huge joke sending out 
 chuckle on chuckle to something to them invisible. Nor, as 
 they found later, did he ever seem to distinguish between them 
 as real and those other things, whatever things they were, as 
 unreal. It often came to them that three parts of his life lay in 
 the world of the invisible and only flickering moments in this 
 
324 GODS 
 
 but however that might be, to him both worlds were as one. 
 
 And when they had taken him to Ireland and had laid him 
 amongst the daisies on the uplands of Carrickmore, he would 
 lie there for hours by himself sending out those deep chuckles 
 of content. 
 
 To show him a spotted foxglove was to bring from him happy 
 sighs, and once down there by the sea where Deirdre had taken 
 him upon her lap by the edge of the green waters, he had stared 
 first at them and then at her, as was his way, his eyes lumi- 
 nous with love for of all things he loved her most, and then 
 the little strained arms had reached up towards her and he 
 had tried to caress her, cooing in his dumb way. 
 
 She had bent down over him, brushing back the mass of his 
 hair from his eyes and the tears had fallen fast upon the little 
 face upturned, whilst underneath he trembled with joy as a 
 flower in rain. 
 
 Finn could not sit up. He would struggle sometimes to raise 
 himself, and his mother, placing a hand behind the crippled 
 spine would help him to look out on the world from another 
 angle but even as the tiny body raised itself the little head 
 would hang brokenly forward like a flower too heavy for its 
 stalk and the eyes would fall, helpless. And they would think 
 of the woman by the roadside of long ago and little Paudeen. 
 
 Once, from the high road below, there had come to them 
 where they rested with Finn a tall woman clad in grey a 
 woman of white hair and the eyes the colour of her dress. She 
 had looked at the child who lay cooing softly to himself under 
 the foxgloves, whilst over his head a golden thrush sang out 
 its soul before the Lord in the dusk of the autumn day. She 
 had come over to the child, and Finn and Deirdre, as people 
 expectant of some miracle, had looked long and earnestly upon 
 her as they might have looked upon a saint of God. 
 
 She herself had gazed upon the boy, who had looked up into 
 her face, a great glow suffusing head and neck as was his way 
 with strangers. She had looked long into his eyes and then 
 had turned to them. 
 
 "This child is not a human child," she had said. "He is 
 one of those others. The earth is not his dwelling place. He 
 must go back to his own people." In loving pity she looked 
 at them and had passed downwards, disappearing at the turn 
 of the road into the Irish gloaming. 
 
THE STORY OF FINN 325 
 
 For his father, little Finn had his own separate love. The 
 eyes would follow him everywhere, and the tears for he had 
 learned to cry as he had learned to smile would stand in his 
 eyes as water over sun. He would lie in his arms with great 
 sighs of content, and it would seem to Finn and Deirdre as they 
 looked upon him that all their luck in the world lay with little 
 Finn. He had been loaned to them. He was theirs and not 
 theirs. They would say to themselves, half-laughing, half-be- 
 lieving, that, as the Black Rock wise woman would tell them, 
 he had come to them as a child of the Sidhe or Fairy People 
 half mortal and half god. 
 
 And so all was well with them or would have been well 
 had it not been for a dead woman. For Deirdre could never 
 forget Stella Fay, and it was Stella who first came between 
 them dead Stella. 
 
XXXVII 
 
 THE STORY OF FINN (Continued) 
 
 In the beginning, after the coming of the child, Deirdre and 
 Finn seemed to find a new unity in the frailness of the crib. 
 The coming of Finn seemed to bind them together, the two 
 streams of their being meeting to feed the flickering flame of 
 life which now, after three years, seemed only to have been 
 lighted to extinguish. 
 
 As they looked into the eyes which flamed from the cloud 
 of hair that swept back and upwards into a halo of ruddy 
 brown, it seemed to them that in that flame their own selves 
 had found both their expression and their fulfilment. It seemed 
 to them, as Finn sometimes said, that "their luck was bound 
 up" in the child that could sometimes look like a Jesus-child, 
 sometimes like a wild spirit of air one of the Sidhe themselves. 
 
 He would lie in Deirdre's lap out on the purple hills of Ire- 
 land, looking at some dusky bee, heavy with honey, as he 
 worked over the heather bells, sometimes falling into that 
 ecstasy which found itself in those deep, pleasureful chuckles 
 which seemed to hold in them all the zest of life. Or where, 
 from some lofty headland, he hung brokenly, he would bend 
 his eyes downwards from the arms of his fair young mother 
 upon the shadowy amethysts of the swelling ocean, as though 
 he would drink his fill from the depths. Or, as sometimes 
 happened, he would lose himself from his bed of scented 
 heather in the blue concave above him. 
 
 Finn and Deirdre in those early years had fought against the 
 will that had doomed their child to silence and immobility, 
 first with hope then, with dull impotence and then they 
 had quarrelled. 
 
 It was partly the hopeless struggle down there in the house 
 with the green door the struggle to live. It was little Finn 
 lying there the length of the days, soundless, and, as it some- 
 
 326 
 
THE STORY OF FINN 327 
 
 times came to them, reproachful. And at last it was the girl 
 with the copper hair. 
 
 For there were times when Stella Fay seemed to drag her 
 gliding halting presence across their most intimate moments. 
 Her laugh came to them out of the shadows about the House 
 of Dreams where they sometimes brought Finn to lay him in 
 Mrs. O'Hara's arms. 
 
 They would let him lie out on the dappled grass, with Patsey, 
 whose bead as he became older, ever seemed to grow heavier 
 for the slender neck the child who had never grown up. For, 
 outside his father and mother, of all creatures of human kind, 
 Patsey was closest to him. They seemed to have a secret be- 
 tween them. 
 
 He would look into Patsey's wondering eyes of grey with 
 his own those great dark orbs with the golden-green lights 
 that shone so assuredly as though he were very old and Pat^ 
 sey the youngest, or was it the oldest, thing in the world? and 
 would smile up to him. And, except his mother, and more 
 rarely his father, Patsey was the only human being he tried 
 to caress with those poor broken arms, reaching up towards the 
 great head. 
 
 But there was always the girl with the copper hair. And 
 Finn would remember that day when they had laid her up there 
 near the old chapel and Deirdre's passionate confession of fear: 
 "Finn she is living. Things like Stella Fay do not die." 
 
 The dead girl would come between them in the very mo- 
 ments when outer things seemed most remote, and they would 
 catch the brightness of her hair and see the grey eyes with 
 the stinging irises and the hooking vulpine nostrils. 
 
 Until that day when little Finn, hearing the bitter words 
 between them, when Deirdre had reproached Finn with his 
 memory of the girl, reproached him unfairly for Deirdre 
 could sometimes be very unfair in an angry, passionate way 
 had looked with troubled eyes into their faces, and to their 
 haunting sorrow, the lips had drooped piteously and the child 
 had uttered a cry that seemed to come from his heart. The 
 tears brimmed in his eyes, and the little body shook with his 
 sobs. 
 
 It seemed to them they had been sinning against the little 
 child. 
 
 From that moment, it was as though the girl with the cop- 
 
328 GODS 
 
 per hair had ceased to have power. From that moment, neither 
 of them mentioned her, and Deirdre forgot that strange in- 
 consequent jealousy. 
 
 Each felt that in some way little Finn and his suffering were 
 essentials to their learning. Despite Finn's continued failures; 
 despite the fact that they often, in the early days, and before 
 Finn's name once more began to loom large in Fleet Street, 
 were hungry and often wanted the ordinary things of life, or 
 just because of these things, Deirdre and Finn were learning 
 their lesson. In them was growing a linking-up with the 
 things about them that consciousness of continuity that was 
 immortality and with it, the love of the common things, the 
 common people. But always consciousness, as dead men might 
 find the shadowy things of death dispelling in the whiteness 
 of resurrection. 
 
 It came to them ever more clearly that they were children 
 learning in a great school, perhaps one of many that their 
 schoolmaster was life itself, or, as it sometimes came to them 
 little Finn, who seemed to be guarding a secret from them, 
 a secret some day to be revealed. 
 
 They would look into the flaming eyes for their secret and 
 would feel like very young children looking into the eyes of 
 age. And with it all, love grew in them, love for each other 
 and through themselves for all things, a love that in Finn, the 
 artist, seemed to be turning to creation. 
 
 He now understood something which Father Lestrange had 
 once said to him. "God," he had said, "was in Himself com- 
 plete and all-sufficient, but He was so filled with the yearn- 
 ing of love that His love turned to creation. So it was He 
 called the world into being and, having called it, He yearned 
 to draw it into Himself again." 
 
 Finn found himself impelled to give of his new-found con- 
 sciousness and of the message that seemed, dimly, to be mak- 
 ing itself felt through him, to the people whom he met. There 
 came to him ever more strongly that love of his fellows, which 
 seemed to proceed from his love for little Finn, mixed some- 
 times, now more rarely, with that loving-hate of old there 
 came the impulse irresistible to give that love to the world as 
 a man gives off superfluous energy, to tell the world that love 
 was the only thing that mattered the only faith. It sent 
 him out into the highways and byeways of life, sent him 
 
THE STORY OF FINN 329 
 
 amongst the poor and rejected of men, and, as it sometimes 
 seemed, of God. But with this democracy of love there grew 
 steadily in him the feeling of spiritual aristocracy, that quality 
 of Deirdre's, or, as he put it, a desire for an economic equality 
 combined with an aristocracy of spirit. Human beings were 
 not the same. They were different as they advanced, increas- 
 ingly different. They were separated by chasms of spirit and 
 mind which only love could bridge. 
 
 It was at this time that another Incident came to disturb the 
 mind of Europe another Moroccan incident as it seemed to 
 most something to be wondered at, to be talked over, and 
 then to be forgotten. Europe rumbled. Thrum thundered. 
 Only this time the reverberations did not die away they be- 
 came louder, with something banking up behind struggling to 
 make itself felt, something that was dully coming to the minds 
 of the common people the dull menace of the coming fact 
 that fact which was to change the history of the world. 
 
 It was at this moment, big with fate, that Sir Raymond 
 Hilary threw into the sere complacency of the Union of Scien- 
 tists the second bombshell of the new school following up 
 that first bombshell of the years before flung by him into the 
 ranks of the British Association, challenging the Concrete to 
 disproof, declaring that in his hands he now held fresh and 
 absolutely incontestable proofs of continuity of personality 
 after death. Changing for the first time from defence to of- 
 fence, he faced the grave and reverend doctors as One before 
 him had faced them, doing so from the fastness of his presiden- 
 tial chair where his reputation as physicist alone saved him 
 from the auto-da-fe of science, Hogge, first touching his fore- 
 head significantly, then finally lending himself to the eternal 
 gesture of doubt which at the time had the shocked sympathy 
 of the world of science, in his impotent wrath placing his fingers 
 to the snub of his scientific nose and extending them before 
 him, to be followed by Professor Dust, who gave his now 
 famous dissertation upon worms as a sort of antidote to 
 immortality. 
 
 The presses of the world began to stir with the new liter- 
 ature, vomiting over the now ribald, now believing, conti- 
 nents an old story in new forms, reducing the men of science 
 to dumb amazement at the credulity of some, the superstition 
 
330 GODS 
 
 of others, and the, to them, retrogression that seemed to be an 
 unfortunate intrinsic of human development. 
 
 A prince of the pen, once agnostic, had made his famous re- 
 cantation his credo to the glory of the gods and the con- 
 fusion of the concrete. The gods were calling, and, at the call, 
 Man, the Atavist, seemed to be tumbling headlong into the 
 the beliefs of the human twilight, now being called "the 
 twilight of the gods," from which, through the ages, he had 
 emerged. It seemed as though his doom were to be the comple- 
 tion of the circle everlasting, the circle of the ascending spiral, 
 returning again and yet again at the call of memory, returning 
 to forgotten beliefs, although perhaps upon a higher level, re- 
 turning to something that perhaps in itself was the eternal 
 motor of this turning world. For had not man himself once 
 been god? 
 
 And through it all, Europe rumbled. 
 
XXXVIII 
 
 THE PASSING OF FINN 
 
 It was evening in the House of Dreams. The westerning sun 
 had been sinking in golden shadows behind the ash-grove, 
 throwing them into the house where a blue haze, luminous, 
 hung, impalpable. The turf fire sent its blue smoke upwards, 
 with sometimes the falling of a morsel sending a stream of 
 sparks slanting thinly up the chimney. 
 
 The doors stood open, to show the cobbles of the courtyard, 
 and through it, along the shafts of smoky light that filtered 
 through the trees across the yard, there seemed to Deirdre, sit- 
 ting there, to be an invisible thronging, whilst through the win- 
 dow, on the other side, the stems of the ash trees hung motion- 
 less, expectant, in the evening haze. 
 
 Amongst the shadows, Mrs. O'Hara, bent, moved a figure 
 of gloom, her silver hair shining beatific in the luminous haze 
 as she passed unquietly from room to room. Finn's form 
 darkened the doorways as he moved restlessly from place to 
 place. Patsey sat with his head in the chimney corner in the 
 old way, sometimes moving to the door to look through the 
 door of the verandah at the shadows across the courtyard. 
 
 Only Deirdre was motionless, bending over the little crib in 
 the corner under the window to look at the light of her life, 
 lying there to gaze upwards at her through the great eyes, 
 now so transparent that she seemed to see through them into 
 the world invisible. 
 
 Little Finn was passing out. 
 
 He had lain there throughout the day, had not wanted any 
 more to play with the shadows on the grass, and had begged 
 them silently to take him to his crib the crib he loved so 
 well the little crib to which, by looking at it dumbly, he al- 
 ways asked to go when he was tired and the world was too 
 much for him. 
 
 Little Finn was very tired. 
 
 331 
 
332 GODS 
 
 She hung over him, watching his lips to catch a movement 
 those movements she knew so well. And still little Finn 
 gazed up at her in that burning way, as though he would give 
 her that message tell them his secret. 
 
 Little Finn was not crooning this evening of shadows. He 
 did not moan with joy in the way that he had when the 
 shadows stole across his bed. 
 
 The little arms hung listless beside him, no longer reaching 
 out to love and life. The little mouth no longer drooped in 
 sadness; no more he whimpered his joy or his love. He lay 
 there, only his eyes speaking, looking upwards as though to 
 draw his mother down to him with that absorbing love. 
 
 It seemed to her that if he would but speak once to her, she 
 could let him pass from her in peace. But little Finn was 
 silent. 
 
 A thrush burst into song in the purple shadows outside, and 
 looking up she saw behind the tracery of the ashes the sky 
 flushed with rose, and above, one long cloud slanting black 
 across the heavens, its edges touched with gold as though the 
 gates had been opened and the golden floor were shining there 
 behind. 
 
 And still little Finn seemed to be trying to speak trying 
 to tell her something. She longed for the message that did 
 not come. 
 
 Once, his father coming in to bend over him, he turned his 
 eyes to him to show him that he was not forgotten but his 
 business was with his mother the mother under whose heart 
 he had lain. 
 
 From outside came the lowing of a cow, the sound that al- 
 ways made his eyes laugh but they did not laugh this night. 
 Nothing for him now had existence save his mother, and the 
 message he waited to give. 
 
 A lump of peat fell into the fire and a stream of sparks shot 
 upwards into the void of the chimney. But little Finn did not 
 turn his head. 
 
 His mother tried to give him to drink, but the tiny lips 
 crisped themselves into that gesture of negation. Drink was 
 finished for him. Everything was finished except the message. 
 
 The shadows were heavy in the room. 
 
 From outside came the cry of a wild bird as it flew home- 
 wards through the upper air. And now Deirdre could see the 
 
THE PASSING OF FINN 333 
 
 eyes gazing at her in two liquid pools of flame, the light shining 
 through them. The hair lay in lambent waves on the blue 
 silken pillow that he loved. 
 
 But now the eyes seemed to be fading into the shadow gath- 
 ering over the tiny face, as though something were bending 
 over him. And looking, Deirdre saw that they had closed them- 
 selves, the eyes behind seeming to look through the veils of the 
 eyelids. 
 
 The breath was very low now. She could scarcely see the 
 movement of the tiny breast. Sudden terror seized her as she 
 bent lower, fearing. 
 
 She bent lower still, looking eagerly into the face, now so 
 tiny. Bent to catch the breath as it flickered back and forth 
 and then, terrified, because she could not feel its warmth 
 upon her face. 
 
 And then, in the extremity of her fear, when she had reached 
 her hand up to Finn, stading behind, the eyes had opened, 
 the lips had moved once, twice, and then there came low, 
 distinct: 
 
 "Mama." 
 
 Little tired Finn had closed his eyes. 
 
XXXIX 
 
 THE UNKNOWN GOAL 
 
 It was there over the cot with little Finn, the lips drooping 
 with that smile, lying at last asleep as though tired out with 
 life, that Finn and Deirdre knew now that death was but 
 an incident of life that there was no death and with thq 
 knowledge found the hope that draws its stuff from the looms 
 of immortality and faith. Faith had come to them there, beat- 
 ing upon them in great waves, the faith that is born of death 
 and love. 
 
 They laid the tiny coffin up there under the shadow of the 
 chapel, amongst the dead of a thousand years. Over the tiny 
 mound they placed only a bunch of shamrocks and a little Irish 
 cross of grey limestone, on it the two words: 
 
 Little Finn. 
 
 All those who had loved him in life came to follow him up 
 there under the chapel. The child, whose loving eyes had 
 drawn to him all those men and women. And with them the 
 little children who had liked to come to him to look upon him 
 and, as they said, "to get Finn's blessing," came and laid 
 flowers upon him and watered the tiny mound with their tears. 
 And so they had left him up there to the winds of God and 
 the bounty of the July heavens. 
 
 Finn and Deirdre had returned to London on the eve of the 
 Great War. The volcano of Europe was rumbling and was 
 even beginning to send upwards the first of those pillars of 
 smoke and fire that were to be the forerunners of the burning 
 death. But democracy, with its blind hopeless faith, began 
 to gather itself together in the path of Fate, to turn her from 
 her goal the Fate which could not be turned. 
 
 And now the common people were gathering themselves 
 
 334 
 
THE UNKNOWN GOAL 335 
 
 over there in London, where the leaders of democracy had come 
 from the four corners of the world this August afternoon to 
 stem the lava of war. Every nation in Europe had sent her 
 men and women and there, in the great square, under the 
 brassy August heavens, they had collected themselves, the 
 common people, about the plinth, as a last forlorn hope gathers 
 itself before the final charge that leads to annihilation. 
 
 Forlornly the leaders stood under their red banners, cling- 
 ing to the foot of the column and looking out over the faces 
 turned whitely upwards from under the grinning lions, crouch- 
 ing to spring. 
 
 There they ran in pallid eagerness to the farthest confines 
 of the square, a welter of humanity, soundless, unprotesting 
 humanity, gathered together like cattle preparing for the 
 slaughter. Dumbly they stood, looking upwards to the swarthy 
 bearded faces of the Latins and the fairer heads of Teuton and 
 Englishman gazed upwards at the red banners that dyed the 
 altar of the plinth a bloody crimson under the glowing sun, as 
 men who waited for a miracle. 
 
 Finn and Deirdre, climbing upon the plinth, saw stretching 
 out before them that great dumb cattleyard; heard the whis- 
 per of voices sulking across the mass as the wind sulks through 
 the trees; saw them standing in that light as though they 
 stood 'twixt hell and heaven with the glare of furnaces blending 
 with the golden light above. 
 
 Finn looked at them, standing with his hand in that of 
 Deirdre, who had clung to him. He stood there to read the 
 message of this great crowd of every nation upon earth, drawn 
 together as for the last judgment, waiting only the trumpet of 
 Gabriel. And still the sun beat down in torrid waves, from 
 which came blasts as from the mouths of open furnaces. 
 
 He looked upwards into the brazen heavens, into which black 
 clouds were coming, fighting, eating, their way into the heart 
 of the sun, as though they would extinguish it saw the hands 
 of the clock upon the church on the other side of the square 
 as the fingers of fate, and caught in the passing of the seconds 
 the hush that even then was spreading over Europe. The silence 
 that was so soon to be shattered. 
 
 As he looked, there came to him a great pity. These white- 
 faced dumb creatures seemed to be awaiting something, no 
 more able to help themselves than the ox under the sledge 
 
336 GODS 
 
 waiting for fate to do her will on them. And looking, there 
 came to him a vision of the millions beyond those waiting 
 millions throughout the world playing their parts unconscious, 
 waiting blindly like animals in the slaughter house of Europe. 
 
 There came to him the sweating nerveless millions who had 
 preceded them those millions who, like them, had died un- 
 complaining theirs also the bloody sweat, the helplessness, the 
 impotence of the unconscious. He thought of the unborn fecun- 
 dating generations, also blind, unconscious. He saw them 
 like their forefathers looking for a saviour looking for one 
 who should save them from fate. 
 
 And still the sun beat sweltering down through the heavy 
 dust-laden air. 
 
 He thought of the men who had preached at them of the 
 men who had written for them of the message that the chosen 
 ones of the earth had brought, that had fallen upon ears un- 
 heeding of the message that even now they were trying to 
 bring as little Finn had tried to bring his. He thought of the 
 blood and of the tears that such men and women had shed ; how 
 they had brought out life upon the earth in labour and tears 
 how they lived in tears how they would die tearless. 
 
 There they stood, white-faced, staring upwards at the fig- 
 ures on the plinth that light of neither earth nor sky beating 
 down upon them in fiery baptism. 
 
 He thought of how these men had fought like beasts when 
 man first roamed the earth how they had been trampled on 
 as slaves had given their daughters and sons as flesh to their 
 masters, as prey to that greedy Moloch that even now seemed 
 to gape in brassy fire above them demanding sacrifice unending. 
 
 He saw them as one of those countless waves of beings clam- 
 bering up from the waters that threatened to engulf them 
 wave on wave in line unending. He saw them falling as they 
 climbed, the others passing over their naked bodies, all press- 
 ing on to the unknown goal. 
 
 He saw them staring upwards to a Figure above them to 
 that fate which seemed to beckon them to something to life 
 everlasting through present death. He saw them pressing in 
 the ages to come, ceaseless, resistless under the Urge Behind, 
 under that urge which could not be stifled. Climbing to the 
 Unknown Goal. 
 
 Dumbly they stared at the figures on the plinth dumbly. 
 
THE UNKNOWN GOAL 337 
 
 And there was a terrible silence as of death, with life beating 
 deep within, like a great heart. 
 
 From the tower of the church came four clanging strokes 
 like the sound of hammer on anvil. 
 
 At the sound, a woman had sunk upon her knees on the 
 plinth to pray a poor, ill-dressed woman. Her voice came 
 thinly over the multitude. Something ran through the mass 
 beneath. 
 
 Again the voice came, thinly. 
 
 And then, with the light beating redly upon them as upon 
 some sacrifice made ready, the multitude had begun to stir un- 
 easily. The heads were moving in tremulous swathes as when 
 the wind runs over the harvest corn, shivering under the sickle 
 of the reaper. 
 
 And now the heart of the mass was moaning as some living 
 suffering thing. And then all the face of Jew and Gentile, 
 bond and free, those about to sacrifice and be sacrificed, had 
 lifted up there towards that high altar lifted up there with 
 new staunchless hope shining. Shining to the prayer of the 
 woman. 
 
 "Love," she said. "Love, oh dear God! love! Let there be 
 love." 
 
 Murmurous came the answering litany from beneath, as 
 though all the tongues of earth were speaking blending in one 
 great voice. 
 
 And now the mass was swaying under the dusk-red light, 
 as though wave upon wave were running athwart them. The 
 murmur, rising and falling, was the pulsing of some mighty 
 sea, instinct with power and life, dumb fate cradling the 
 whole. 
 
 To Finn and Deirdre standing there, it came as a sort of 
 voiceless chorus, all-pervading but noiseless came as the 
 scourge of countless feet upon the beaten roads of life, the foot- 
 steps of humanity shuffling onwards to the one, unknown goal. 
 
THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE 
 STAMPED BELOW 
 
 AN INITIAL FINE OF 25 CENTS 
 
 WILL BE ASSESSED FOR FAILURE TO RETURN 
 THIS BOOK ON THE DATE DUE. THE PENALTY 
 WILL INCREASE TO SO CENTS ON THE FOURTH 
 DAY AND TO $1.OO ON THE SEVENTH DAY 
 OVERDUE. 
 
 OCT 11 1932 
 
 
 LD 21-50m-8,-32 
 
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY