Nicky-Nan, Reservist Part 15

"The point is that, with all their thoroughness in plotting, they have no _savoir faire_; they are educated beyond the capacity of their breeding; and the older, lazier, civilised nations have--as the saying is--caught the barbarian stiff. It is--as you choose to look at it--a tragedy of tactlessness or a triumph of tact; and for our time, anyway, the last word upon the Church of Christ--call it Eastern or Western, Roman, Lutheran, or Anglican."

Mrs Steele looked at her husband earnestly. "If you believe that--"

"But I do believe it," he interrupted.

"If you believe that," she persisted, "I can understand your doubting, even despairing over a hundred things. . . . But below it all I feel that you are angry with something deeper."

"Eh?"

"With something in yourself."

"Yes, you're right," he answered savagely. "You shall know what it is," said he, on the instant correcting himself to tenderness, "when I've taken hat and stick and gone out and wrestled with it."

As luck would have it, on his way down the hill he encountered Mr Hambly, and delivered his message.

"The notion is that we form a small Emergency Committee. Here at home, in the next few weeks or months, many things will want doing.

For the most important, we must keep an eye on the wives and families whose breadwinners have gone off to fight; see that they get their allotments of pay and separation allowances; and administer as wisely as we can the relief funds that are already being started. Also the ladies will desire, no doubt, to form working-parties, make hospital shirts, knit socks, tear and roll lint for bandages. My wife even suggests an ambulance cla.s.s; and I have written to Mant, at St Martin's, who may be willing to come over (say) once a week and teach us the rudiments of 'First Aid' on the chance--a remote one, I own-- that one of these days we may get a boat-load of wounded at Polpier.

I'll admit, too, that all these preparations may well strike you as petty, and even futile. But they may be good, anyhow, for our own souls' health. They will give us a sense of helping."

Mr Hambly took off his spectacles and wiped them, for his eyes were moist. "Do you know," said he, smiling, "that I was on my way to visit you with a very similar proposal? . . . Now, as you are a good thirty years younger than I, and, moreover, have been springing downhill while I have been toiling laboriously up--" He glanced down at his club foot.

--"That I took duty for you and did the long-windedness," put in the Vicar with a laugh. "And I haven't quite finished yet. The idea is (I should add) that, as in politics, so with our religious differences, we all declare a truce of G.o.d. In Heaven's name let us all pull together for once and forget our separation of creeds!"

The Minister rubbed his eyes gently; for the trouble, after all, seemed to be with them and not with his spectacles.

"And I ought to add," said he, "that the first suggestion of such a Committee came from the ladies of my congregation. The only credit I can claim is for a certain obstinacy in resisting those who would have confined the effort to our Society. . . . Most happily I managed to prevail--and it was none the easier because I happen just now to be a little out of odour with some of the more influential members of what I suppose must be termed my 'flock.'"

"Yes: I heard that your sermon last Sunday had caused a scandal.

What was it you said? That, in a breakdown of Christianity like the present, we might leave talk of the public-houses and usefully consider Sunday closing of churches and chapels--or something of the sort."

"Was it in that form the report reached you?" the Minister asked with entire gravity. "There is an epigrammatist abroad in Polpier, and I have never been able to trace him--or her. But it is the truth--and it may well have leaked out in my discourse--that I feel our services to have lost their point and our ministrations their savour. . . .

I--I beg your pardon," he corrected himself: "I should have said '_my_ ministrations.'"

"Not at all. . . . Do you suppose I have not been feeling with you-- that all our business has suddenly turned flat, stale, unprofitable?"

"It is a natural discouragement. . . . Let us own it to none until we have found our hearts again. I see now that even that hint of it in my sermon was a momentary lapse of loyalty. Meanwhile I clutch on this proposal of yours. It will give us all what we most want--a sense of being useful."

The Vicar stepped back a pace and eyed him. Then, on an impulse--

"Hambly," he said, "you have to hear Confession. I am going to tell you something I have kept secret even from my wife. . . . I have written to the Bishop asking his permission to volunteer for service."

"May G.o.d bring you safely back, my friend! If I were younger. . . .

And the Army will want chaplains."

"But I am not offering myself as a chaplain."

"How, then?"

"I am asking leave to _fight_. . . . Don't stare, man; and don't answer me until you have heard my reasons. Well, you have read your newspaper and must have noted how, all over Britain, the bishops, clergy, and ministers of all denominations are turning themselves into recruiting sergeants and urging men to fight. You note how they preach this War as a War in defence of Law, in defence of Right against Might, a War for the cause of humanity, a War for an ideal.

In to-day's paper it has even become a War against War. . . .

Well, if all this be true, why should I as a priest be denied my share in the crusade? Why should I be forbidden to lay down my life in what is, to these people, so evidently my Master's service?

Why should it be admirable--nay, a fundamental of manhood--in Tom and d.i.c.k and Harry to play the Happy Warrior life-size, but reprehensible in _me?_ Or again, look at it in _this_ way.--You and I, as ministers of the Gospel, have gone about preaching it (pretty ineffectively, to be sure) for a Gospel of Peace. Well now, if these fellows are right, it turns out that we have been wrong all the time, and the sooner we make amends, by carrying a gun, the better.

Any way--priest or no priest--I have in me certain scruples which deter me from telling Tom or d.i.c.k or Harry to take a gun and kill a man, and from scolding him if he is not quick about it, while I myself am not proposing to take the risk or earn the undying honour-- or the guilt--whichever it may be."

"My mind moves slowly," said the Minister after a pause, during which the Vicar drew breath. "And often, when confronted in a hurry with an argument which I dislike but see no present way to controvert, I fall back for moral support on the tone of the disputant. . . . I have a feeling at this moment that you are in the wrong, somewhere and somehow, because you are talking like an angry man."

"So my wife a.s.sured me, half an hour ago. . . . Then let me put it differently and with a sweet reasonableness. If this War be a Holy War, why may I not share actively in it? Or on what principle, if the military use of weapons be right for a layman, should it be wrong for a clergyman? What differentiates us?"

"In a vague way," said the Minister, "I see that a great deal may differentiate you. Suppose, now, I were to ask what separates you from a layman, that you should have a right, which you deny him, to p.r.o.nounce the Absolution. You will answer me, and in firm faith, that by a laying-on of hands you have inherited--in direct succession from the Apostles--a certain particular virtue. You know me well enough by this time to be sure that, while doubting your claim, I respect its sincerity. . . . It is a claim, at least, which has silently endured through some hundreds of generations of men, to rea.s.sert itself quietly, times and again, after many hundreds of accesses of human madness. . . . I do not press the validity of my mission, which derives what sanction it may merely from a general spiritual tradition of the race. But yours is special, you say; by it _you_ are consecrated, separated, reserved. Then if you are reserved to absolve men of their sins, may you not be rightly reserved against sharing in their combats?"

"I am hot," the Vicar acknowledged; "and in my heat the most I can manage is sarcasm. But I have the grace to hope that in process of time I shall acquire the sweeter temper of irony."

A dull thud shook the atmosphere overhead, and was followed some four seconds later by another and louder reverberation. The two men, startled for a moment, smiled as they collected their thoughts.

"That means security, not danger."

"Gun-practice. We were warned of it by advertis.e.m.e.nt in this morning's paper. A 9.4-inch gun, by the sound of it--and there goes another! A battle-cruiser at least!--Shall we walk out to the cliffs for a sight of her?"

CHAPTER XI.

THE THREE PILCHARDS.

"Boo-oom!" echoed Un' Benny Rowett on the Quay, mocking the noise of the cannonade. "War--b.l.o.o.d.y war, my hearties! There goes a hundred pound o' taxpayers' money; an' there go all our pilchards for this season, the most promisin' in my recollection."

"He'll be tellin' us," suggested a humourist, "that the British Navy is firin' on pilchards, in the hope there may be a submarine somewhere amongst 'em."

"I never rose to the height o' puttin' myself into the enemy's mind,"

retorted Un' Benny; "which they tell me, in the newspapers, is the greatest art o' warfare. I be a modest man, content with understandin' pilchards; and if you'd ever taken that trouble, Zack Mennear--Boo-oom! there it goes again!--you'd know that, soon as they hear gunfire, or feel it--for their senses don't tally with mine, or even with yours--plumb deep the fish sink. Th' Old Doctor used to preach that, when sunk, they headed back for Americy; but seein' as they sunk, and out o' reach o' net, I never could see the matter was worth pursooin'. The point is, you an' me'll find ourselves poorer men by Christmas. And that's War, and it hits us men o' peace both ways. Boo-oom!--plunk goes one hundred pounds o' money to the bottom o' the sea; an' close after it goes the fish! You may take my word-- 'tis first throwin' away the helve and then the hatchet. I could never see any sense in War, for my part; an' I remember bein' very much impressed, back at the bye-election, by a little man who came down uninvited in a check ulster and a straw hat. The Liberal Committee disowned him, and he was afterwards taken up an' give three months at Quarter Sessions for payin' his board an' lodgin' somewhere with a fancy cheque. But he was most impressive, even convincing while he lasted; and I remember to this day what he told us about the South African War. 'That War, my friends,' he said, 'has cost us, first an' last, two hundred an' fifty millions of money--and 'oo _paid_ for it? You an' me.' Boo-oom! once more! That's the way the money goes,--an', more by token, here comes Pamphlett to know what the row's about, an' with the loose cash, I'se wage, fairly skipping in his trouser-pockets."

Sure enough, Mr Pamphlett, as the cannonade shook the plate-gla.s.s windows of his bank, had started up in some alarm, and was sallying forth to seek rea.s.surance. For again the inner sheet of the newspaper, with its reports of the mobilisation of armies and of emba.s.sies taking flight from various European capitals, had engaged all his attention, and he had missed the advertis.e.m.e.nt columns.

On his way to ask news of the group of fishermen at the Quay-head he hurried--and almost without observing him--past Nicky-Nan; who likewise had hobbled forth to discover the meaning of the uproar, and, having discovered it, had retired to seat himself on the bollard outside the "Three Pilchards" and nurse his leg. "What's this firing about?" asked Mr Pamphlett, arriving in a high state of perspiration.

"I--I gather, from the cool way you men are taking it, that there's no cause for alarm?"

Now Un' Benny, who found it hard as a rule to bear ill-will toward any living creature, very cordially disliked Mr Pamphlett--as indeed did most of the men on the Quay. But whereas the dislike of nine-tenths of Polpier was helpless as the toad's resentment of the harrow--since the banker held the strings of sundry Fishing Companies, and was a hard taskmaster--Un' Benny, with a few chosen kinsmen, had preserved his independence.

"The kings o' the earth rise up together, sir," answered Un' Benny very deliberately; "an' by consikence the little fishes take hidin'.

'Tis a poor look-out for our callin'--a wisht poor job altogether!

Fishers and apostles always stood in together, an' War's the ruination o' both. What with the Gospel gone scat, an' no dividends this side o' Christmas--"

"I asked you," interrupted Mr Pamphlett, "what that firing means, out there? It's friendly, of course? A British battleship?"

"As to that," replied Un' Benny, slowly ruminating, "I wouldn' call it _friendly_ in any man to let off a big-inch gun at anything.

That's not the word I'd choose. And I don't grant 'ee that there's no danger because we men, as you call us"--here Un' Benny distributed the emphasis delicately--"happen to be takin' it cool. But if you ask my opinion, she's a first-cla.s.s cruiser; an' you hit it off when you asked, 'What's this firin' about?' 'Firin' about,' that's _of_ it, as I reckon; and aboard of her, belike, the boys that left us o'

Sunday, takin' a little practice to get their hands in. But there!

A guess is a guess; and if you're anxious about it, and'll step into my boat, sir, we'll put out and make sure."