The Angel

The clergyman was a Low Churchman, but of the worst type. There was nothing of the tolerant outlook and strong evangelical piety of a Robertson in Mr. St. John. He was as narrow as his creed, condemning all that he had not experienced, or could not understand, hating the devil more than he loved God. If he had been sent to the rack he could not have truthfully confessed to an original thought.

Joseph Bethune was sent to an English public school of good, though not of first, rank. Here he was unpopular, and made no friends. His nature was too strong, and, even as a boy, his personality too striking, for him to experience any actual physical discomfort from his unpopularity. He was never bullied, and no one interfered with him; but he remained utterly lonely.

In contradiction of the usual custom in the English public school of his day, Hamilton possessed splendid laboratories, and great attention was paid to modern science and mathematics.

Of these advantages Joseph Bethune availed himself to the full. His temper of mind was accurate and inquiring, and though his manner was dreamy and abstracted, it was the romance of science over which he pored; the cold, glacial heights of the higher mathematics among which his imagination roamed.

He gained a scholarship at Cambridge, lived a retired and monotonous life of work, shunning the natural and innocent amusements of youth while at the university, and was bracketed Third Wrangler as a result of his degree examination.

By this time his moderate patrimony was nearly exhausted, though, of course, his success in the schools had placed many lucrative posts within his reach. He had actually been offered a fellowship and a tutorial post at his own college, when he wrecked his university career by an extraordinary and quite unexpected proceeding.

At a great meeting in the Corn Exchange, convened by the Bishop of London for a discussion of certain vexed questions of the Christian faith, Joseph Bethune rose, and, in a speech of some fifteen minutes' duration, delivered an impassioned condemnation of Christianity, concluding with a fierce avowal of his disbelief in God, and in anything but the purely material.

We are tolerant enough nowadays. The red horror of the Inquisition has departed, and men are no longer "clothed in a shirt of living fire" for a chance word. A "Protestant" ruler no longer hangs the priests of the Italian Mission for saying the Mass. Any one is at liberty to believe what he pleases. But men about to occupy official positions must not bawl unadulterated atheism from the housetops.

The offence was too flagrant, the offer of the fellowship was withdrawn, and Joseph, so far as Cambridge was concerned, was ruined.

It is perfectly true that there were many people who believed exactly as he did. They sympathized with him, but in secret, and no word or hint of their sympathy ever reached him. He had done the unpardonable thing: he had dared to speak out his thoughts, and men of the world do not care to champion openly one who is publicly disgraced.

The news got about in many quarters. The man was not an "agnostic" – polite and windy word! But he was an atheist! Terrible word, recalling shuddering memories of Tom Paine and Bradlaugh even in the minds of men and women who themselves believed in nothing at all. Some men would have only been locally harmed by such an episode as this. But Bethune's case was peculiar, and it ruined him.

He had nothing to sell in any market but the academic. He was a born lecturer; demonstrator of scientific truth. But he had just overstepped the limit allowed in even these liberal times. Moreover, he was too young. Such a speech as he had made, had it been delivered at sixty, with a long and distinguished record behind the speaker, would have been regarded as a valuable and interesting contribution to modern thought. It might even have been taken as a sort of fifth Gospel – the Gospel according to St. Thomas the Doubter!

Joseph, however, was done for.

He disappeared from the university. His name was no more heard, and after the traditional nine days was utterly forgotten.

It is true that three or four men who saw further than their fellows realized that a force, a potential but very real force, had departed. Some one who, as they believed, was to have done extraordinary things was now crushed and robbed of his power. They perceived that virtue had departed from the intellectual garment that shelters the men who can!

Joseph tried, and tried in vain, to make such a living as his vast mental acquirements and achievements entitled him to. Obscure tutorships, ill-paid lecturing to coteries of cock-cure Socialists, who believed in nothing but their chances of getting a slice of the wealth of men who had worked, and not merely talked – these were his dismal and pitiful endeavours.

He came at last to the very lowest pitch of all. He, the high wrangler, the eminent young mathematician, earned a squalid and horribly precarious living by teaching elementary science to the sons of struggling East End shopkeepers who were ambitious of County Council scholarships for their progeny.

His health was impaired, but his spirit was as a reed bruised and shaken by the winds of adversity, yet not broken. He had known sorrow, was acquainted with grief.

He had plumbed the depths of poverty, and his body was a wreck. Want of food – the mean and squalid resting-places he had perforce to seek – the degradation and vileness of his surroundings, had sapped the life blood. He did not know the defiant trumpet words of a poet of our time, but had he done so, they would have well expressed his attitude —

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud;
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody but unbowed.

He turned off into a by-street, and walked on till he came to the docks. His progress was quite aimless. Once he stopped and wearily asked himself whither he was going; but the next moment he was lost in thought, and moved on again.

Once he stumbled over a steel hawser. He nearly lost his balance, and had his arm not shot out with an involuntary movement to clutch the bollard on his left, he would have fallen over the granite-bound edge of the wharf into the foul, black, slimy depths below.

Hardly giving a thought to the danger he had just escaped, he moved on and on.

Through open sheds – where freight was heaped up waiting the onslaught of stevedores and labourers – across jutting portions of cobbled space and shunting grounds, he came to a remote corner, far removed from the rattle of cranes and the shouts of the workmen.

Something drew him out of himself, and fixed his attention. It was a shadow. It caught his gaze, and his eyes became fixed on it. He knew that a shadow was only the phenomenon produced when streams of radiant energy are intercepted by an object which is unable to transmit them. His scientific training had taught him that even sound shadows may be produced, though to recognize the existence of them the ear must pass from the unshadowed to the shadowed part. Perhaps it was a symbol! He himself was in darkness and shadow. Would his ear ever catch those mysterious harmonies that come to those who suffer? – Hampson heard them…

A woman crept stealthily behind the wall, and the shadow disappeared.

The woman bore a burden; what it was he could not see. But she held it close to her breast with the tense clasp of some fierce emotion.

She had not noticed the dreamer. She stopped by some steps leading down to the waters of a small section of the dock.

Joseph sat down on a capstan and looked steadily at her.

The woman unclasped the burden she bore, drew aside a part of the covering, and kissed – a baby face. He knew at once what she was doing. She was bidding it good-bye. She was going to drown it.

"And they say that there is a God," Joseph thought. "A conscious Intelligence that directs human affairs. Even Lord Kelvin himself thought so! Yet God does nothing to save this woman from her sin – or rather crime!"

He gazed fiercely. Those eyes, through which his rebellious unconquerable soul shone out, caught the startled stare of the woman as she saw the strange man who watched her.

The man said nothing. The woman thought: "If he prevents me now, I shall – I must do it later. He can't change me. If he gives me in charge he can't prove it. I've done nothing yet."

Yet she looked again, and this time did not turn away.

A strange magnetism which seemed to run through her, projected from those eyes, was making even her finger-tips tingle as with a new sensation, and one she had never known before. Her purpose melted and dissolved in that flow of more than electric influence; it changed as fire changes a material thing. It melted like snow before the radiant energy of the sun.

Slowly she unwrapped the bundle. The paper, the cloth wrappings she threw into the black and oily water, but the child she clasped to her breast.

"My baby," she murmured, very quietly, but in tones that pierced the tense atmosphere and reached Joseph's ear. "I bore you in shame, and was about to kill you to save you from shame like mine; but I will bear my cross and love you for the sake of Jesus. Amen."

She stole away, trembling. There was a great fear and wonder at her heart, and the watcher saw no more.

Joseph smiled bitterly. His brain seemed some detached thing, a theatre upon the stage of which wild thoughts were the conflicting actors and his sub-conscious intelligence the spectator.

The simile of the shadow returned to him, and was it not all a shadow – this dark, unhappy life of his? The words "radiant energy," the words "God" "conscious force" danced before him. The whole sentient world was reeling – the blood that fed the grey matter of his brain was poor and thin – this was the reason.

Yet, was it the reason, after all? What had happened to him in the last few minutes? He felt as he had never in his whole life felt before. There was a sense of extraordinary impotence. Something had come into him; something had gone out of him.

No! – something had gone through him – that was the way to describe it to himself…

Oh for food, rich nourishing food, quiet and fresh air – then all this sickness would go…

Joseph left the docks, and was soon back in the teeming Commercial Road. He walked, lost in thought, unconscious of all his surroundings.

"Nah, then, Monkey Brand, 'oo y'r shovin'? I can see y'r gettin' a thick ear, young feller-my-lad. Owns the bloomin' pyvement – "

A string of obscene oaths and the above words brought Joseph the dreamer down to earth again – the world of the Commercial Road.