CHAPTER THE SEVENTH

It is a dreadful thing to live in the same town as an Atheist! I had no idea that a house in Yardley Parva would ever be occupied by such an one. I fancied that I was leaving them all behind me in London, where I could not avoid getting into touch with several; no one can unless one refuses to have anything to say to the intellectual or artistic classes. People in London are so callous that they do not seem to mind having atheists to dinner or talking with them without hostility at a club. That is all very well for London, but it doesn't do in Yardley Parva, thank God! Atheism is very properly regarded as a distinct social disqualification—almost as bad as being a Nonconformist.

Friswell is the name of our atheist. What brought him here I cannot guess. But he bought a house that had once been the rectory of a clergyman (when I mention the Clergy in this book it must be taken for granted that I mean a priest of the Church of England) and the predecessor of that clergyman had been a Rural Dean. How on earth the agent could sell him the house is a mystery that has not yet been solved, though many honest attempts in this direction have been made. The agent was blamed for not making such inquiries as would have led to the detection of the fellow. He was held responsible for Friswell's incorporation as a burgess, just as Graham the greengrocer was held responsible for the epidemic of mumps which it is known he brought into the town in a basket of apples from Baston.

But the agent's friends make excuses for him. While admitting that he may have been culpably careless in order to secure a purchaser for a house that nobody seemed to want in spite of its hallowed associations, they are ready to affirm that these atheists have all the guile of their Master so that even if the agent had been alert in making the essential inquiries, the man would not hesitate to give the most plausible answers in order to accomplish his object—the object of the wolf that has his eye on a sheepfold.

This may be so—I decline to express an opinion one way or another. All I know is that Friswell has written some books that are known in every part of the civilised world and in Germany as well, and that we find him when he comes here quite interesting and amusing. But needless to say we do not permit him to go too far. We do not allow ourselves to be interested in him to the jeopardising of our principles or our position in Yardley Parva. We do not allow ourselves to be amused at the reflection that he is going in the wrong direction; on the contrary, we shudder when it strikes us. But so insidious are his ways that—Heaven forgive me—I feel that he tells me much that I do not know about what is true and what is false, and that if he were to leave the neighbourhood I should miss him.

It is strange that he should be married to a charming woman, who is a daughter of probably the most orthodox vicarage in the Midlands—a home where every Sunday is given over to such accessories of orthodoxy as an Early Service, Morning Church, Sirloin of Beef with Yorkshire Pudding, Fruit Tart and Real Egg Custard, Sunday School, the Solution of Acrostics, Evening-song, and Cold Chicken with Salad.

And yet she could ally herself with a man who does not hesitate to express the opinion that if a child dies before it is baptized it should not be assumed that anything particular happens to it, and that it was a great pity that the Church was upheld by three murderers, the first being Moses, who promulgated the Ten Commandments, the second Paul, who promulgated the Christianity accepted by the Church, and the third Constantine, who promulgated the Nicene Creed. I have heard him say this, and much more, and yet beyond a doubt his wife still adores him. laughs at him, says he is the most religious man she ever knew, and goes to church regularly!

One cannot understand such a thing as this. In her own vicarage home every breath that Mrs. Fris-well breathed was an inspiration of the Orthodox—and yet she told me that her father, who was for twenty-seven years Vicar of the parish and the Bishop's Surrogate, thought very highly of Mr. Friswell and his scholarship!

That is another thing to puzzle over. Of course we know that scholarship has got nothing to do with Orthodoxy—it is the weak things of the world that have been chosen to confound the wise—-but for a vicar of the Church of England to remain on friendly terms with an atheist, and to approve of his daughter's marriage with such an one, is surely not to be understood by ordinary people.

I do not know whether or not I neglected my duty in refraining from forbidding Friswell my garden when I heard him say that the God worshipped by the Hebrews with bushels of incense must have been regarded by them as occupying a position something like that of the chairman of the smoking concert; and that the High Church parson here was like a revue artist, whose ambition is to have as many changes of costume as was possible in every performance; but though I was at the point of telling him that even my toleration had its limits, yet somehow I did not like to go to such a length without Dorothy's permission; and I know that Dorothy likes him.

She says the children are fond of him, and she herself is fond of Mrs. Friswell.

“Yes,” I told her, “you would not have me kill a viper because Rosamund had taken a fancy to its markings and its graceful action before darting on its prey.”

“Don't be a goose,” said she. “Do you suggest that Mr. Friswell is a viper?'

“Well, if a viper may be looked on as a type of all——”

“Well, if he is a viper, didn't St. Paul shake one off his hand into the fire before any harm was done? I think we would do well to leave Mr. Friswell to be dealt with by St. Paul.”

“Meaning that——”

“That if the exponent of the Christianity of the Churches cannot be so interpreted in the pulpits that Mr. Friswell's sayings are rendered harmless, well, so much the worse for che Churches.”

“There's such a thing as being too liberal-minded, Dorothy,” said I solemnly.

“I suppose there is,” said she; “but you will never suffer from it, my beloved, except in regard to the clematis which you will spare every autumn until we shall shortly have no blooms on it at all.”

That was all very well; but I was uncertain about Rosamund. She is quite old enough to understand the difference between what Mr. Friswell says in the garden and what the Reverend Thomas Brown-Browne says in the pulpit. I asked her what she had been talking about to Mr. Friswell when he was here last week.

“I believe it was about Elisha,” she replied. “Oh, yes; I remember I asked him if he did not think Elisha a horrid vain old man.”

“You asked him that?”

“Yes; it was in the first lesson last Sunday—that about the bears he brought out of the wood to eat the poor children who had made fun of him—horrid old man!”

“Rosamund, he was a great prophet—one of the greatest,” said I.

“All the same he was horrid! He must have been the vainest as well as the most spiteful old man that ever lived. What a shame to curse the poor children because they acted like children! You know that if that story were told in any other book than the Bible you would be the first to be down on Elisha. If I were to say to you, Daddy, 'Go up, thou bald head!'—you know there's a little bald place on the top there that you try to brush your hair over—if I were to say that to you, what would you do?”

“I suppose I should go at you bald-headed, my dear,” said I incautiously.

“I don't like the Bible made fun of,” said Dorothy, who overheard what I did not mean for any but the sympathetic ears of her eldest daughter.

“I'm not making fun of it, Mammy,” said the daughter. “Just the opposite. Just think of it—forty-two children—only it sounds much more when put the other way, and that makes it all the worse—forty and two poor children cruelly killed because a nasty old prophet was vain and ill-tempered!”

“It doesn't say that he had any hand in it, does it?” I suggested in defence of the Man of God.

“Well, not—directly,” replied Rosamund. “But it was meant to make out that he had a hand in it. It says that he cursed them in the name of the Lord.”

“And what did Mr. Friswell say about the story?” inquired Dorothy.

“Oh, he said that, being a prophet, Elisha wasn't thinking about the present, but the future—the time we're living in—the Russian Bear or the Bolsheviks or some of the—the—what's the thing that they kill Jews with in Russia, Mammy?”

“I don't know—anything that's handy, I fancy, and not too expensive,” replied the mother.

“He gave it a name—was it programme?” asked the child.

“Oh, a pogrom—a pogrom; though I fancy a programme of Russian music would have been equally effective,” I put in. “Well, Mr. Friswell may be right about the bears. I suppose it's the business of a prophet to prophesy. But I should rather fancy, looking at the transaction from the standpoint of a flutter in futures, and also that the prophet had the instincts of Israel, that his bears had something to do with the Stock Exchange.”

“Mr. Friswell said nothing about that,” said Rosamund. “But he explained about Naaman and his leprosy and how he was cured.”

“It tells us that in the Bible, my dear,” said Dorothy, “so of course it is true. He washed seven times in the Jordan.”

“Yes, Mr. Friswell says that it is now known that half a dozen of the complaints translated leprosy in the Bible were not the real leprosy, and it was from one of these that Naaman was suffering, and what Elisha did was simply to prescribe for him a course of seven baths in the Jordan which he knew contained sulphur or something that is good for people with that complaint. He believes in all the miracles. He says that what was looked on as a miracle a few years ago is an everyday thing now.”

“He's quite right, darling,” said Dorothy approvingly. Then turning to me, “You see, Mr. Friswell has really been doing his best to keep the children right, though you were afraid that he would have a bad effect upon them.”

“I see,” said I. “I was too hasty in my judgment. He is a man of uncompromising orthodoxy. We shall see him holding a class in Sunday-school next, or solving acrostics instead of sleeping after the Sunday Sirloin. Did he explain the Gehazi business, Rosamund?”

“He said that he was at first staggered when he heard that Elisha had refused the suits of clothes; but if Elisha did so, he is sure that his descendants have been making up for his self-denial ever since.”

“But about Gehazi catching the leprosy or whatever it was?”

“I said I thought it was too awful a punishment for so small a thing, though, of course, it was dreadfully mean of Gehazi. But Mr. Friswell laughed and said that I had forgotten that all Gehazi had to do to make himself all right again was to fellow the prescription given to Naamun; so he wasn't so hard on the man after all.”

“There, you see!” cried Dorothy triumphantly. “You talk to me about the bad influence Mr. Friswell may have upon the children, and now you find that he has been doing his best to make the difficult parts of the Bible credible! For my own part, I feel that a flood of new light has been shed by him over some incidents with which I was not in sympathy before.”

“All right, have it your own way,” said I.

“You old goose!” said she. “Don't I know that why you have your knife in poor Friswell is simply because he thought your scheme of treillage was too elaborate.”

“Anyhow I'm going to carry it out 'according to plan,' to make use of a classic phrase,” said I.

And then I hurried off to the tool-house; and it was only when I had been there for some time that I remembered that the phrase which I had fancied I was quoting very aptly, was the explanation of a retreat.

I hoped that it would not strike Dorothy in that way, and induce her to remind me that it was much apter than I had desired it to be.

But there is no doubt that Friswell was right about Gehazi carrying out the prescription given to Naaman, for he remained in the service of the prophet, and he would not have been allowed to do that if he had been a leper.