Returning from Sweden a short while ago, in the M.S. Volsung, a sumptuous ship, I experienced the utter peace which only sea-travel can provide. A few passengers, I among them, had made their way to the sun-lounge beyond the American bar. We wallowed in deep cushioned receptacles, rocked upon the gently heaving sea; a music programme of the Swedish radio crooned away at a suitable distance. Like all peace it was artificial, and no doubt a little sugary, but all of us were conditioned to appreciate any kind of peace. It was one of the appropriate amenities of a neutral vessel: we were going back to blood, sweat, and tears No. 3. Even the boastful growl of the alcoholic American which could be heard from within, nearer the bar where he crouched over a table, vainglorious but confidential, even this was soothing, like the rumbling of a volcano not in eruption. And upstairs three young Englishmen, innocent of vulgar emulation, hurled deck quoits or whatever they were called, and when their quoit was expelled from its transitory nest complimented the other fellow and obviously preferred to be the loser. Success is always a little beastly. It is less glorious to sit upon another fellow’s chest than to be sat on by another fellow—if he is a decent fellow. For this voyage at least we were all to be out of reach of human passions. Even the unseemly effort involved in the propulsion of this luxurious monster from one side of the North Sea to the other was only felt as a muffled throb, an agreeable subterranean tom-tom.

    For some reason I began to think just then of Rymer. Were Rymer on board, I said to myself, what a different ship this would be. He would be arguing with the American within, or with one of these peace-loving inmates of the all-glass sun-lounge, arguing that Soviet Russia was maligned by Press-magnates, and that the North Koreans were as a matter of fact in no way connected with the Kremlin: that the South Koreans (very corrupt and scheming puppets) had been the first to attack, and were of course the actual aggressors, though the Press unanimously asserted the opposite. Then on the upper deck, where the quoit players were, Rymer would have taken a quoit from one of the young Englishmen and proceeded to demonstrate how the game ought really to be played. There is little doubt that before we had reached Tilbury the captain would have received some valuable tips as to how to navigate his ship, and had Rymer got into the engine-room the chief engineer would soon have acquired a good deal more knowledge about the handling of marine engines than he had possessed twenty-four hours before. Finally, should this energetic friend of mine have happened to be crossing at a week-end with Sunday supervening, he would have insisted upon holding divine service anglo-catholicly for English passengers, with a parade of Roman formularies, which (few English tourists today belonging to classes susceptible to ritual) would not have been well received. But whatever the special circumstances, with Rymer on board the ship would have ceased to be at peace. Such pacific bliss as I have dwelt upon would have been out of the question: politics, religion, and the itch-to-teach would have combined, a trinity of irritants, to sow disquiet in the ship from one end to the other.

    Whether this is the best way to approach the subject of Rymer I hardly know, but there is this: you are introduced not to the man-in-the-flesh, with all his physical irrelevancies, but to disembodied action. You see only ideally what he does, what only he would do, like the action of a Poltergeist: an invisible something, with the famous Yorkshire name of Rymer. So, anyway we start with the functional essence of Rymer. Having begun with the effect I will turn to the cause; give an account of this unusual creature, whom you may judge to be a Christian pest, a dangerous busybody, or a saint in motley.

    We met in the following manner. It was not in fact a meeting but he had the next place to me in the Reading Room of the British Museum. This accident has no more significance than sitting next to somebody in a bus—it does not, happily, constitute a “meeting”: and if it is converted into a meeting by one of the parties, is properly resented. Not a Webb addict, I had on this occasion, by the purest chance, put in a slip for some Fabian tracts and this was the uppermost of a half-dozen books awaiting me on my return from lunch. I should perhaps add, for the benefit of those unacquainted with the B. M. Reading Room, that the official ticket protruding from each book brought by the attendant displays the name as well as the seat number of the reader for whom it is destined. This may be a relevant fact.

    I was preparing to begin work when a shadowy figure existing only in the corner of my eye, occupying the chair and desk-space to my right, unexpectedly thrust out a hand and gave the Fabian tracts an emphatic slap.

    “Splendid stuff, Mr. Wyndham Lewis!” was the unwelcome oral accompaniment of the pawing of my book. Then there was another vigorous pat. I looked fixedly and coldly at the intrusive hand, ignoring the shadow in the corner of my right eye to which it belonged and from which it had strayed uninvited into my reading territory. I turned to the left, presenting my back to so unduly extrovert an organism. This is all I remember, beyond the fact that when I had finished my reading and stood up to go, I noticed that the chair to my right was vacant.

    It was ten days later that a letter arrived, with a Midland postmark, at the foot of which I read Samuel Hartley Rymer (Rev). This was fairly carefully written: for these were the only words in the whole letter that I felt absolutely certain about. However, I thought I gathered that my correspondent—“if not”, as he feared, “quite beyond my means”—desired to purchase a work of mine: “a small painting? or a drawing which is probably all I could afford.” I disentangled these sentences from the shapeless jumble of his script. Finally, he was reminding me, it came to light, of the impertinent stranger who had spoken to me in the Reading Room of the Museum. “I am afraid that was me.” So! My neighbour who had smacked my pile of books was a parson? I saw at once how that might be.

    The Museum episode was not calculated to recommend me to Mr. Rymer but I thought I would see him. It was two hundred years since the Enlightenment and six centuries since the Age of Faith. And of course I knew that in its “dry” form the Rot was in the wood roof of the churches, in reredos, in pulpit, and in pew. It was my idea that this might be a good opportunity to learn whether the Rot has entered into the Cloth. Did it rage beneath the surplice and eat away the roots of faith, in the impalpable centres of belief. For though faith began to die in the flock half a millennium ago, I have always supposed that a priest must secrete a little of it.

    When I went to the door in answer to Rymer’s knock, a large passionate and weary and frustrated face was thrust up towards mine—a not unhandsome one I thought. (We are of the same height, but it was thrust up because of the clerical crouch, and there was the prayerful angle of the supplicant’s eyes.)

    To a Frenchman, in my place, a slovenly overgrown schoolboy would have been standing there on the doorstep: which would have been to overlook or ignore the English tradition of expressing superiority by means of shabby garments: and then the fact that it is not the Englishman’s idea to get mature. Maturity pertains to another ethos, continental and not insular. Let me add in this context, that irresponsible boyish “mischief” is a favourite alibi with the Anglo-Saxon.

    But to return from the general to the particular, my visitor was a hulking forty-something, hatless, spectacled. Not come as the well-heeled patron, surely. Just dropped up from a by-no-means fashionable watering-place to get a glass of milk, trying to look at once commanding and appealing as the farmer’s wife comes to the door.

    My first impressions I was obliged later very radically to scrap, to Rymer’s advantage, I mean. I am the possessor of a tough eye. It does not soften what it sees: it hands me everything like a photographer’s untouched photograph. In this case, it noted with a relentless acuity what had narrowly escaped being a lantern jaw, which it was only prevented from degenerating into by his masterful vitality. It registered the eloquent feminine mouth which pursed itself almost primly and then shot out its lips at right angles, the rest of the mouth not moving, to be a spout for speech to rabble-rouse or to exhort—as urchins do in their word-battles. He reads verse better than anyone I have ever heard: he was the quietest crooner, he was soft like a man talking to himself about something he had seen, at once matter-of-fact and unearthly. And he knew the weight in Heaven of every word in the dictionary.

    As I saw him for the first time I observed of course the eyes of a somewhat worried but stubbornly amused, big dog. I saw that the nose was shapely, the brow large. Those first impressions did not have to be modified: but in the end one would forget the ecclesiastical chin-line; one would assess at their proper value the disfigurements associated with eloquent verbal discharges—such as the spout-like propensities of the shooting-lips, the wildly wrinkled brow.

    There was no clerical collar on his large weather-beaten neck. It was framed instead with the gaping collar of a soft blue shirt. “Where is your collar?” I demanded. Minus his master’s name upon a brass-plate, collarless and unidentifiable, this big dog was at large in London. But, “Got it in my pocket!” came popping out the brisk rejoinder: “Do you want me to put it on?” He had produced it and held it in his hand. “Not before coming in,” I said. “Not at once,” he echoed, putting the collar back in the pocket.

    The collar had looked authentic. “Please come this way,” said I, leading my incognito man-of-god upstairs, into my work room. I looked narrowly at him of course. We were there under the vast sculptor’s window: he exposed his rugged worried countenance to the glare of the sky without an unbecoming diffidence, but quite simply as if to say, “Well here I am. Since you seem inclined to scrutinize my person, this is what I look like.” I was searching for signs of the Rot, of course.

    What he actually said was: “You must have thought it great cheek for me to write to you. I feel I am here under false pretences.” “You must not feel that,” I said. “Why should you?”

    “It is very good of you to say so.”

    “Please sit down,” I told him as I sat down myself. He followed suit, silently. Rather stiffly expectant he sat there as if awaiting my next move. I sat studying him, however, and he did not look at me.

    It was not that he really felt in a false position, I’m sure of that: and there is nothing shy about Rymer. At this first meeting, for a little while, I had a sense of a youthful manner: of an attempt rather curious in view of his massive maturity—to suggest the early years of manhood. This did not survive our first meeting. It was perhaps a manner he adopted, under certain circumstances, with strangers. I think he produces (however battered it may be) the undergraduate he once was. In any case, it was a very different approach to the aggressive book-slapping of the Museum.

    “You like pictures?” I enquired, as I saw him looking at a Rowlandson which hung near him.

    “I do very much. I have some. Two or three, perhaps you might like.”

    “I understand you wish to add to your collection?” I then said, for this patron would have to be brought to the point, if he was a patron. And if he was not, it was best to find out what his errand was. His response was satisfactorily prompt and clear.

    “Yes. I should like to acquire a work of yours, unless it is altogether beyond my means.”

    After I had produced two small canvases, and perhaps a dozen drawings, he stuck one of the drawings up against the back of a chair, returned to where he had been sitting and proceeded to examine it (from much too far off, as a matter of fact). It was a large, strongly coloured, gouache of a number of nude horsemen. Rigidly stylized, certainly; but with the black arcs of the horses’ legs against a shining lagoon, and so on, possessing enough romantic literary appeal to recommend it to an intelligent clergyman. I knew it would look far better on his walls than he could foresee.

    I left him in front of the drawing, and went downstairs to answer the telephone. When I returned he was standing up. He asked me whether I would sell the drawing—he liked it very much. I told him I was glad and the price of it was thirty pounds.

    He began making out a cheque, saying as he did so, “May I take it away with me?” There was no objection of course, and shortly he handed me that cheque and received the drawing wrapped in brown paper, with an arrow to show where it should be held. I pushed cigarettes over; he took a horrific pipe from his pocket and asked if he might be allowed to smoke. We neither of us wished to terminate the interview with the production of the cheque (I was quite prepared to find that it bounced). We talked for a short while about pictures—my hours of work, my training in Paris—the disadvantages of the naked overhead sky as a source of light. Then he had pipe-trouble, and when we were able to converse again I asked him about himself. What manner of life did he live at Bagwick Rectory and if he came up to London?

    No, he did not come to London often. He could not afford to: and very quickly I found we had passed into astonishingly uninhibited intercourse. Yielding to my discreet invitations he opened up, and I looked in, as if into a woman’s handbag. I must confess that what I saw there in the matter of hard cash embarrassed me for a moment. The thirty pounds in my pocket (in the form of a cheque) had left about tuppence three farthings; all mixed up with the bus-tickets and hair-pins and little girlish secrets. And far from being averse, I found, from laying bare economic secrets, he relished exposing them. Somewhat abashed, as I have said, by his unexpected exhibitions, I steered off on to more general subjects. I attempted to distract him with racontars and perhaps a few caustic indiscretions. In these early hours of our friendship, I recall, Rymer played the parson a little. For instance, in response to one of my exposures of a colleague’s vanity he exclaimed “You wicked man!” as parsons had in England in the heyday of the Cloth, over muffins and seed cake—the parsons the inimitable du Maurier, and Trollope, too, of course, were acquainted with.

    While these pleasantries were occurring I had time to think. My new patron’s annual income as Rector of Bagwick was, he disclosed, theoretically six pounds a week, but naturally it was not tax-free and neither he nor his wife had any means of their own. The pound sterling slides downhill all the time, but there is one thing that is stationary as a rock in England, namely the clergyman’s stipend. That does not rise correspondingly. Clergymen cannot strike so their wages are not adjustable to meet rises in the cost of living. Had I unaware got a dustman for a patron I should have been amused: as it was I said a little crossly, “So you are paying me a month’s salary?” “Yes,” with firm relish he assented—it amused him as much as if he had been a ragpicker: “Yes—about.”

    I privately examined the likelihood of his being a phoney. Of course I could have given him the thing. If he was really so poor a clergyman I would do that. I decided to be cautious. Then I enquired, “Why are you indulging, Mr. Rymer, in this absurd extravagance?” and something like the following dialogue ensued:

    Myself. “You have about five shillings a week pocket money?”

    Rev. Rymer. “Sometimes!”

    Myself. “Is not this drawing an absurd extravagance?”

    Rev. Rymer. “That’s what my daughter says!” (In a classy rhetorical whine—apt to terminate in a comic wail—to which he was sometimes addicted.)

    Myself. “You’re a wicked man!”

    Rev. Rymer. “Yes,” with unabated promptitude, “I’m a miserable sinner!”

    Myself (kindly). “Does not your conscience prick you?”

    Rev. Rymer. “Ought it to?” (Parsonically quizzical.)

    Myself. “I know mine ought to, if I accept money for that drawing, now I know your circumstances.”

    Rev. Rymer. “That is absurd. It was generous of you to let me have it so cheaply. I make a little money on the side.”

    Myself. “How?”

    Rev Rymer. “Oh, by coaching. Not very much, but it is a little. I only spend that, on my London trips—and this, of course.”

    Myself. “I have a special cheap rate for poor men of religion, ‘rich of holy thought and work’. You could have availed yourself of that. Had I known…”

    Rev. Rymer. “Have you a special fee?” (He gurgled merrily.) “Have you many of us as clients?”

    Myself. “Quite a few. But you can’t even afford… You would be straining your resources if you bought a picture-postcard Sunflower of Van Gogh!”

    Rev. Rymer. “Oh well, provided we can laugh at such embarrassments.”

    Myself. “Poverty is not a laughing matter—for an artist. For a priest it is the preordained condition and affluence is disgraceful. You can go on laughing.”

    Rev. Rymer. “But I am not really poor. I live in the country. You do not realize how inexpensive life is at Bagwick.”

    Myself. “You six-quid-a-week capitalist!”

    Rymer is an individual not without dignity. He is large and serious and worried. And he is quite exceptionally arrogant. If he heard this he would not like it, but he is the most aggressive dogmatist I know, as was indicated in my preamble. If your electric oven is a serious problem, or your studio painfully hot in summer, he will, with his invariable promptitude and patness, and with an affectation of salesmanship technique, propose a gadget to regulate the first, and install (in theory) a novel ventilation system to correct the second. There is no handicap he will not convert in the twinkling of an eye into a triumphant asset. Should you suffer from asthma he will be your doctor: if you are a philosopher assailed with doubt he will overhaul your system—or if you do not fancy a system, he will show you the best way to get on without one, as a light-hearted empiricist.

    It is easy to see how a village-priest is apt to develop into a wiseacre, and where this technique might be highly appropriate. Of course with me he has to behave himself up to a point, but he would be a bad man to have around if one were in a wordly position defenceless against this amateur lawgiver. Though a kind man, he could not resist the opportunity. He literally boils with the heat of his private absolute. Sometimes I have had to wrestle jovially for hours with this didactic dragon.

    If this is a fault which takes up a good deal of room here, out of proportion to its importance, his virtues are unusual. He is one of those men with whom one finds oneself conversing at once with the freedom of two tramps meeting at a dusty cross-road, open to one another in the freemasonry of the propertyless. He is touched with the heroism of the destitute, even if it is malgré lui that he is of that caste. He is not a throw-back to the religious mendicant, he is an advance copy (imperfect but authentic) of the hobo-holiness of Tomorrow. So actually we get on because both are poor, and a fastidious absence of dignity (the intelligent hall-mark of English education) neutralizes, in its operation, such faults as the relic of class-bossiness, in its parsonic form, which I have described. Oxford has cooked Rymer so successfully that whatever else he may be he is not raw. At times I have felt he is over-cooked, or perhaps it would be better to say overoxfordized.

    A clerical playboy he emphatically is not. But at times il en a l’air. Much is, as I have suggested, mannerism induced by métier. I hope the man of parts I write of is not disappearing beneath such elaboration: not this poor clergyman who forgets he has no money, who yearns for honour—who certainly has dreamt of fame, but who dreams incessantly now of social justice and a new, bright, bossy, fraternal world—a new Jerusalem. He comes from a part of England that has bred rebels like rabbits. His verse is of a wizard elegance, the song of a rather mechanically cheerful bird, on the highest and frostiest bough in a frost like the last frost of all, celebrating the winter of our discontent as though it were the morning of the world.

    With a brave curl of the chapped lip Rymer is ready to take on his cavernous jaw whatever buffet, in spite of his prayers, cruel Providence swings at him. This, if not mute, inglorious Rymer, eating his heart out in a remote rectory, risks going short of fuel or food every time he buys a ticket for King’s Cross for no strictly clerical purpose—just to come up for air: to spend a few days in London, go to hear Grosser preach, go to see a high-brow film at the Academy, or stare at paintings in the small Galleries.

    It took quite some time to digest Rymer. It was like overcoming the flamboyance of French prose in an author who by chance has something to say. His verse is the reverse of the personality however. If he conversationally bludgeons his way through the world, if that is the outer animal, within he is attentive and quiet. On top of all is social splashings, but beneath there abides in the Rymerian deeps something which is only seen in his verse, which has at times a submerged quality of great intensity. It might be the noiseless canticle of a cephalopod. I shall have to take back the wintry mechanical bird, this is a better image.

    How it was we came, at our first meeting, to be communicating with such rugged readiness immediately will be a little plainer presently perhaps. Rymer did not come in as a stranger you see—almost with a “hallo!” He refuses to be a stranger to anybody. He has the secret I think of his divine Master, he is no mere official of the Church. Within five minutes, with someone he had never seen before in his life, he would be telling him how to fix his lighter, the best way to get to sleep at night, or in what to invest his money.

    The talk about his status as a patron, to go back to that, died down. Further personal revelations however followed. His situation looked to me a very ugly one. At this point the actual field-work began. What he was telling me, now, concerned his position as Rector, and it was related to the new standing of all the rural clergy in England. The final ruin of the landed society was factor number one, though Heaven knows no traditional Squire would have tolerated Rymer—he himself representing a new brand of parson. However, before I proceed I ought to say that the information I am about to impart was not all acquired on the first day we met. Nor, of course, was Rymer the Rymer I now know yet. The process of progressive understanding by means of which density is acquired by the phantom stranger, even with such an extrovert as Rymer demands some little time. Again, the facts he divulged concerning his life at Bagwick I only fully grasped the meaning of when a little later I passed some time in the different parts of the post-war English countryside. I went where he lived and functioned too, and checked at first-hand. So what is the narrative proper will now begin, ending with the last news I have had of him—most disagreeable events which I fear will change his life for the worse.

    English village life until quite recently was, of course, dominated by the Squire: the old order, which had long ceased to have any meaning in the towns, clung on in the English villages. It was with the Squire that the Rector, or Vicar, had to deal. Often he owed his appointment to the local big landowner, and in any case he was apt to have the most say in questions relating to the Church. That is still the position in many places, certainly, though it is manifest that this last faint shadow of the feudal situation is about to disappear completely. From the fifteenth to the twentieth century has been an interminable fade-out. In what an American magazine described as “the Crippsean Ice Age” there is no room for the “country gentleman”; even a clergyman in the old sense must be an outrageous exotic.

    Those of the landowning class who have disposed of their “seats”, parks and estates, may even now not be the majority. Comedy to which they are not averse, lightens the lot of those who will not be frozen out of their seats, or who retain a toe-hold in some cumbersome seventeenth-century Renaissance palace. Some convert their country seats into apartment houses for local businessmen (I know of such cases in Wales for instance), themselves occupying a modest suite in one of the flanking towers—from which vantage-point they can keep an eye on their lodgers. One, I know, lived alone with a man-servant and his now decrepit nannie, in a house about the size of Wellington Barracks. The Park is now a golf-links, the Club-house a hundred yards or so from the Hall: tradesmen from the neighbouring city put and stibble all around the main entrance. Then I remember being told of a well-known Marquess and his Marchioness who dig and hoe side by side in the vegetable garden adjacent to their palace (which they would describe of course as a “country-house”), inhabiting the few rooms that can be kept clean with a vacuum cleaner wielded by an elderly domestic or by the not very robust Marchioness. Finally, there are those who live in a gardener’s house upon the estate and act as cicerone to sightseers come to visit the huge and ostentatious shell where one of the greatest lords of England used to live in state. There is one case of this sort in which a handsome young Countess, a former “school teacher”, married to the earl during the blitz, escorts parties around. It is reported that she levels some very caustic cracks at her husband’s ancestors, whose portraits snootily placard the towering walls of the rooms of state.

    Seeing how long ago the feudal age ended, it is remarkable how intense a sentiment of pleasurable inferiority still subsisted in the English countryside as late as the first years of the present century, from which the Church derived advantage, and which sentiment it encouraged. Anyone familiar with the countryside before the radio and the automobile, would be inclined to feel that the end of the Manor must mean the end of the Church. But Rymer has a quite different destiny for the Church. What he would really like, I believe, is that it should replace the Manor.

    However, a new power has come on the scene, most unexpectedly, in many parts of the country, and automatically has occupied the place left vacant by the Squire. I refer to the new-rich Farmer (rich partly owing to Government subsidies). The men who have the big farms, of a thousand acres up, are the new variety of big bug, once you get outside the town, for they are in fact the biggest thing in sight. Wherever a Squire, or other aristocratic authority, has dropped out, the force of circumstances, if not their own volition, pushes these other agricultural bosses in. The Farmer’s tenure of power will be brief: but there he is. He will remain until such time as this Government, or the next, as it must be, much more radical, collectivises his property. Who can say, without unwarrantable optimism, that he will not be shot as a Kulak?

    In the rural parish of which Rymer is the agent of salvation such a transference of power as I have indicated has taken place—much to his disgust. A farmer possessed of fifteen hundred acres, himself coming of a long line of yeomen farmers, but (odious complication) grammar-schooled at the school once attended as a day-boy by Rymer himself, and hovering between yeoman and gentleman, is the big man in the eyes of the village now. Most of his labourers in fact live there.

    The Squire is a highly intelligent man, not cut out to play that part at all. He has sold his farms and other property, is seldom down at Bagwick—which is a perfectly hideous place, though the Manor is a fine specimen of the Dutch Gable period proper in the manorial architecture of England. So he has little say in village affairs, and the fact that he is well-disposed to my friend does not alter the situation. It is Jack Cox, the young farmer, with whom Rymer for his sins is confronted. This little rustic capitalist is Samuel Hartley Rymer’s cross. For Jack Cox neither likes Rymer’s politics, nor his brand of religion (Anglo-Catholic), nor his big sweet worried argumentative face.

    For ten years Farmer and Rector have not spoken to one another: or if the latter has proffered a Christian greeting, the former—the farmer—had disdainfully declined to return it. Rather, this was the position until only the other day, to which I will come later on. The farmer’s aggressiveness has become much more marked since the war: he has addressed complaints personally to the Bishop; then he drew up a petition, for which he obtained a number of signatures in the neighbourhood, for Rymer’s removal. Several times my friend has been visited by the Archdeacon who acts as a one-man Gestapo, the Bishop’s emissary detailed to investigate any case of this kind and report. If a few vague and desultory enquiries can be called a cross-examination, Rymer underwent that at the hands of the Archdeacon. The Rural Dean has bent a puzzled eye upon him. So poor Rymer has been the object of too much attention to be comfortable, But the last time the meek envoy of the Cathedral showed up, with elaborate casualness he observed: “Let us see, Rymer, did I not hear it said that you wrote—er—articles? It seems to me I did.” When Rymer agreed that he had indeed done that, the Archdeacon added, smiling a little slyly and shyly, “And verse—or am I wrong?” Rymer made no difficulty about admitting that he was married to immortal verse. But the interpretation he put upon this interrogatory surprised me at first. He regarded it as a very favourable omen. His literary habits, he felt, would excuse a good deal, especially the writing of verse. The farmer’s indictment would melt away confronted with that fact, or at least would be blunted.

    The charges brought by the farmer, it seems, are multiple. First, there is the usual one with which all clergymen have to contend, namely that he is lazy, lies down on the job, keeps the church in a dirty condition, never visits the sick for fear of infection: that he just draws his pay and lazes around, except for an hour or two of very hot air on Sunday—which does not however warm the church and the children come home sneezing their heads off, and old people who were fond of going there had stopped doing so because it was too dangerous after October the first.

    Next come his papist habits: the stink of incense that one can smell half the way down the road, the flexing of the knees and other ungodliness. All farmers like a “broad churchman” and dislike and suspect a “high churchman”, and Jack Cox was no exception to the rule. But there was another charge that may have carried far more weight, if only because it is not often heard. Jack Cox accused the Rector of being a “red”—the farmer’s bane—of stirring up his labourers, of contaminating the parish with radical doctrine, of being a disturbing and immoral influence.

    When first Rymer disclosed this latter charge I stared at him. I said “A Red, too!” He gave his little short breathless laugh, his eyes never participating. “Yes. It is true,” he told me, “that I am in favour of telling the United States to keep its beastly dollars, and to trade with Russia instead.” He stirred about vigorously in his chair, I noticed. Any mention of the United States inflamed him, but because of his sacred calling he was obliged to smother the flames within, or to bottle them up. This engendered a physical uneasiness.

    “Is that being a red?” he asked. “If so I am one.”

    “But you advertise a desire for more social justice?”

    “Certainly!” he protested. “Don’t you?”

    “Well, you are a socialist.”

    “Call it that, if you like.”

    “Which of course would make Mr. Attlee ‘a red’.”

    “Exactly.”

    That was as far as I got upon that occasion. He did tell me a little later that he had “sat on the same platform” as the Red Dean (of Canterbury). I, of course, do not know everything. The farmer had a case, I suppose. He could be described as a “political priest”, no doubt, which is all, under certain circumstances, the farmer would need. But those circumstances did not exist as it happened.

    The Archdeacon, dispatched by the Cathedral the first time, unseen by Rymer, poked around the neighbourhood in his shabby clerical automobile, discussed with some the weather, with others the crops, learned that Rymer was a total abstainer, that he affected to smoke a pipe—but there was rarely any tobacco in it: that he had never been known to make passes at the maid at the rectory (there had never been any there). The Archdeacon had had some practice in mollifying parishioners on the score of the “redness” (or “liberalism”, as he had learned to call it) of their vicars. He had got rather to enjoy doing this, as people who play a game well welcome opportunities of displaying their skill.

    As for Anglo-Catholicism, that was apple-pie to the Archdeacon. One might almost say that he had been specially trained in the art of turning people’s minds away from the swinging of the censers in the churches of the diocese—and he had had reason to observe that a certain “redness” or “pinkness” was frequently associated with these liturgical eccentricities. The Bishop no one could accuse of a tendency to totalitarianism; on the other hand he was one of the “highest” bishops in the country. So of course this conjunction of the “pink” and the “high” was not invariable.

    As an ecclesiastical administrator the Bishop was no man of iron. A rather picturesque-looking aristocrat, he would listen, his eyes half-closed, the graceful silver-curling head bowed far more in sorrow than in anger, to the reports of his clerical watchdog—who was not a very fierce dog either. “Ah!” the Bishop would intone despondently as the Archdeacon uttered the dreadful word drink. “Mum!” the Bishop would softly ejaculate as the Archdeacon muttered young girls of fifteen (or choirboys in the Vestry) as he reported his findings in connection with some poison pen letter, or on some accusation levelled at a curate who was said to use scent.

    But it is probable that were Rymer discovered (to make use of an extreme illustration), when the teller’s back was turned, with his hand in the till of the local branch bank in the nearby market-town, the Bishop would only murmur, “Rymer is an extremely impetuous clergyman, defective in judgement, I think. He is apt, don’t you agree, to forget that he is now a weighty and responsible incumbent and acts as wild curates sometimes do. In the present case he would undoubtedly have returned the bundle of five-pound notes later: for I assume he was testing the vigilance of the bank clerk. It is most like him to interfere in what does not concern him. Poor Rymer! Always his actions rather resemble those of the practical joker.” And were it further alleged that Rymer, when discovered, had produced a gun, which he pointed at the teller, the Bishop would have observed: “A revolver? Rymer would be more likely to blow himself up with such a weapon than to harm anyone else. It was clearly some prank—everything points to that, I think. Poor Rymer! I have often thought Rymer missed his vocation, he should have been an actor. However, I regard him as the right man for Bagwick, quite the right man. The people like him. And… as a living Bagwick is not a very attractive proposition.” Were Rymer on the other hand to murder the gamekeeper of a neighbouring Coal Board executive, it would not be because the famished Rymer had been caught poaching—no. It would be because Rymer had mistaken the gamekeeper for a poacher. There was no imaginable crime of which a clergyman stood accused, which would not have received this treatment—been melted away in the mellow mildness of the Bishop’s mind.

    It was the Bishop of Storby’s invariable belief that clergymen in his diocese were popular. Then the anglican priesthood is the worst-paid calling in Great Britain today. This is a major fact that must be ever present to the mind of a high functionary of the Church. Indeed, should any man be so eccentric as to express a desire to join the greatly depleted ranks of the clergy, a warm welcome would be given to a ticket-of-leave man, an ex-Borstal boy, or a tubercular hunchback who could with difficulty sign his name. It is as bad as that: and in this particular diocese the position was exceptionally acute, because of the county’s marked absence of amenities. As it was, nearly half the clergy made themselves responsible for two churches. Should the pound sterling continue to lose its value, many churches would have to be closed down, clergymen seeking other work. Rural populations would have in their midst a large empty building, standing in a graveyard, symbolising the vacuum where once there was Faith. The ex-Anglican parishes would become the missionary field for the witch-doctors of a variety of cults.

    Accordingly anyone prepared to face the rigours involved in entering holy orders, is eligible—rigours which might make a holy calling of this again. In the rural diocese of which Rymer’s parish formed a part, one of the vicars was an ex-hairdresser. He made a first-rate clergyman and on Saturdays cut his parishioners’ hair free of charge. Though he lacked the equipment to give them a “perm”, he interviewed the local belles at the vicarage and advised them as to the style of dressing most suited to their hair and personality. So you can see that it really was not much use signing petitions to have a clergyman removed. And were Rymer removed the See would be obliged to find him another living—such, it seems, is the law of the Church. The rectory he vacated might quite well remain untenanted, its church padlocked, its bell unrung, a bad advertisement for Jesus. In view of all this Rymer (as he put it in his letters) “sat back”. Why should he worry? It was tails I win, heads you lose. He felt completely master of the situation—up to June 28. But he was a fretful, discontented man, his bubbling masterful surface-self, his big arrogant poker-face the bluff, as he recklessly played his hand, of a very pessimistic player.

    On my first visit to Bagwick I decided I would go unannounced. First I would spend a night at the cathedral city, then drive over to Bagwick, have a drink at the village pub, see what sort of flock Rymer’s was, and afterwards walk up to the Rectory. The eastering Midlands are the dullest part of England from the window of a train. Storby, my destination, does not impress: it has never been very important, has no charter, it is a county town no more. The county, I have always found, has not much identity, it has to be hunted for on the map: being on the small side; being a county that fits in, not that stands out; not upon the sea (and having a coastline always helps one to remember the position of a county): lastly, with a name which is too long, and one not written in large letters upon our palates, like Devonshire Cream, or Worcester Sauce, or Yorkshire Pudding, or Dundee Cake. Upon its eastern side, for half its length, it melts into a bleak-fen county, on the other side it is blackened by a forest of chimneys, where the furnaces of its big industrial neighbours are producing mechanical legs, taxi-cabs and toy-locomotives. Storby is on its eastern border, which is why it stands in so flat a landscape. Bagwick lies directly west of the city. Once you have crossed six miles or so of plain as flat as a billiard table the land begins to rise, but of course not very much. It is a county that never rises into the air more than the height of Box Hill.

    The spire of Storby’s Cathedral stuck up like a spike out of the perfectly flat collection of roofs. As there are no other steeples or buildings of any size, it causes on arrival one to feel that the Cathedral possessed of this unusually tapering horn is all that is outstanding in this cold and lonely community. In fact, once you are part of the flatness yourself, that is inside the city, it is found to be swarming with people on bicycles and others selling barrowsful of flowers, and a goodly amount of ribaldry can be heard passing between bicycle and flower-laden barrow. There is much vitality in the large market-place upon a river bank, and entire streets that are still mediaeval. The inhabitants get more out of them that way than if they demolished the open-timber houses bulging over the ancient cobbles, and erected prosaic contemporary abodes, touristically unprofitable. The aura of antiquity extends to the hotels, no good hotel being of later date than Queen Anne.

    Storby’s Cathedral dominated the market, as a Cathedral should. Fans of Perpendicular became delirious as they approached it, sticking up propped and buttressed as in the stone-age of building it must be. It is entirely deserted by the clergy—you would expect to see one corbeau from time to time. But like Rymer I suppose they all wear sports jackets and sports shirts. There seemed to be a lot of people about, it is true, obviously not enthusiasts of the Perpendicular: they may have been some of the staff off-duty. I saw no one anywhere in the city who showed any sign of being a clergyman. What might be described as the flight from the Cloth certainly makes the churches and cathedrals seem more derelict even than they are.

    When on the way to my hotel from the railway station, the taxi crossed a river. “What is the name of the river?” I enquired of the young taximan as we were moving over the bridge. He drove on in silence. “Is it perhaps the Stor?” I suggested. He muttered, and it appeared he actually did not know. He was a native of Storby. I suppose the war had come before he had got around to asking the name of anything, and once he got back (at about the age of twenty-three at a guess) he had other things to think about. However when I laughed understandingly he began speaking again, saying that for his part he could not see why people came to Storby (he thought English Perpendicular was my weakness of course), he could see nothing very exciting about Storby and in fact took every opportunity of getting out of it. Having got this off his chest, in Storby idiom and half-said to himself, he resumed his eloquent silence. I gave him a handsome tip, he was the sort of citizen I like.

    Next day, as I had planned to do, I was driven out to Bagwick in a hired car. If anyone is interested in fields, hundreds and hundreds of them, tilted up and all running the same way, with telegraph poles to give variety to the scene, it must be a lovely drive. After fourteen or fifteen miles of implacable farmland but no sign of man or beast we entered Bagwick. There was no one there either. It was a sizeable village, with a pub and a few shops. Its street was not straight, it kept bearing round to the left. As we moved forward we came in sight of a solitary figure, coming in our direction, followed by a barking dog. Towards this infuriated animal the solitary figure turned, appeasement visibly his policy, but it was the wrong dog, to judge from the disappointing results. Suddenly, as we drew nearer, I realized that it was none other than my reverend friend himself. I asked the driver to stop.

    Rymer in the metropolis is a dude compared with Rymer at Bagwick. As I walked towards him he was saluting me with raised arm and sending up a welcoming wail of astonishment, tinctured with embarrassment—the raised arm having a bad effect on the dog, at the same time exposing a gaping armpit, the tattered tweed suggestive of the coarsely hirsute.

    The Rector of Bagwick was the village “bum” it seemed. In sweet Auburn ugliest village of the Plain they had a scarecrow to preach to them! His attire was terrific. No mendicant friar ever hobbled down a street in a more tatterdemalion advertisement of poverty.

    A brownish tweed that was so obsolete that it necessitated a vertical patch the size of a folded newspaper in one place, the sleeves of which had to terminate in cuffs of leather three inches deep, and demanded to be reinforced with leather at the collar line and to have two pocket-tops bound with pigskin, was already qualified to serve the tramp-comedian in his act. Parti-coloured patches practically everywhere had plainly been selected for their effect. Only that could explain the mighty patch placarding his left side: for did it have to be black? It was a piece of “the Cloth” called into service—perhaps cut off what was left of the trousers he wore as a curate. Oh, Rymer—cabotin!—almighty clown! That was my first reaction to the Rector chez lui.

    The flabby and sagging droop dawdled nearer, with his high-pitched cry: “Why didn’t you telephone, you should have telephoned: I’d have fetched you.” Then his big smiling face, ruggedly handsome and anxiously sweet, came up. I took him by a small corduroy patch upon his sleeve and said “Greetings your reverence!” And he said “I am glad to see you!” But the reverend gentleman moved away to pick up a stone. He bent down and oh what a vast expanse he had for sitting purposes! which now presented itself—lingeringly while he picked his stone. A small fluffy hole half-way up the left posterior for which a darning needle would soon be imperative—was this a declaration of independence on the part of a proud parson, or had he not noticed when a nail had torn his trouser-seat? He stood up, and with placatory absence of passion he cast the stone (discovering a ragged elbow). The stone however struck the dog. “Oh, did I hit you, Jacko?” he called with patronizing contrition. “I am sorry, I’ll bring you a bone, honest injun. Tomorrow!” But the dog as was evident held strongish views on the throwing of stones. He had retired out of range to denounce Rymer with a deeper note of warning to whom it might concern.

    Reactions on my side continued to be uncomplimentary to such playing at the down-and-out as I regarded it in my short-sightedness. How would this big fat baby like to be homeless, his stipend what he could pick up on the street? He read my thoughts and flapped deliberately the black patch of obvious clerical origin, which seemed to be coming unstuck at the bottom. The dog interpreting this as an insult rushed towards us his teeth bared like a Hollywood glamour girl. Rymer flapped it again, and I expected to see one of his patches ripped off and with luck a bit of the flesh behind it. I thought Jacko would try for the big black one—or failing that go off with the blue strip on one of the knees. But the dog was petrified by a piercing cry as a gaunt villager flew out of a lane. “Jacko!” the woman shrieked, and the voice had the effect of the radar wave said to stop ducks in mid-flight. “Come here, do you hear me, Jacko!” She yapped as she flew and the dog fell to the ground as if he had been shot, his ears glued against his head and his belly scraping the street.

    The woman’s eyes as she ran darted at Rymer; where to her mind the blame lay was plain enough and she would have told him so I thought if I had not been there.

    “Ah, Mrs. Rossiter, thank you for saving my life!” In a high-pitched yell he musically greeted his saviour. “Very kind of you, Jacko is unusually naughty this morning. I must bring him another bone—a nice big bone!”

    Driving Jacko before her, his tail stuck tight between his legs, Mrs. Rossiter retired swiftly into the lane out of which she had come, with a rather dangerous growl followed by a spit.

    We looked at one another.

    “Exit Jacko. Quite a dog!” said I. Rymer, ruffled more by Mrs. Rossiter than by Jacko, agreed that the latter was just all dog.

    “Mrs. Rossiter’s a nice woman really,” he observed.

    “I thought she was nice,” I told him.

    “It’s very sad, she lost her husband a year ago, he was killed by one of Jack Cox’s bulls.”

    “Oh dear.”

    “Yes, it’s very sad. Jacko’s all she’s got.” He looked at me.

    “I see!” I said. “Of course…”

    “He does that every time I come this way. He never seems to get used to me.”

    “It must be difficult for you to come into Bagwick,” I observed. “Why don’t you carry a stick?”

    “I can’t do that,” he answered shortly.

    Then he gazed at me with polite enthusiasm, welcoming me to Bagwick.

    “Well, I am glad to see you,” he exclaimed, “but why didn’t you telephone? Shall we go up to the house? You must be hungry aren’t you? My wife will be delighted to see you—come along.”

    Pointing to the “Lord Salisbury” I enquired: “Can’t I get something at that pub?” I had to say something. “Will you come with me? A nice mousetrap sandwich and a glass of ale.” But he of course said “Nonsense”, so we drove to the Rectory, a few rat-like heads poking out of doors, watching us depart.

    “What a jolly little village,” I said.

    “Yes, it is rather nice,” he responded modestly.

    As we drove along I took back the terms cabotin and clown which naturally at first I had hurled at him sotto voce—at the tatterdemalion Rector of Bagwick doubtless on his morning tour of duty, showing himself to his parishioners. Then I recognized I had been quite wrong. First of all, at Oxford he had enough money no doubt to dress the part of a young gentleman, but, of course, bar the patches, he must have looked much as he does at present. For a fashion of stylistic shabbiness (which he would seek to outstrip if I know my Rymer) would have turned him away from what “a young gentleman ought to look like” to “what in practice he does look like”.

    Today, however, he really had not the means to buy new clothes. A good suit costs forty pounds odd, a bad one twenty. The Oxford training would lead him to make a great big comic virtue of necessity. That was the first, and negative, side of it.

    Next, what could he wear? In his circumstances, and with his beliefs, should he have adopted the overalls of the labourer? The Cathedral would have disapproved. To the petty, brushed-up-till-it-shone, shabby-genteel he objected. He preferred to satirize his poverty, to clown, rather than to conceal. Indeed there was protest in his get-up. He preferred to parade the streets of his parish in rags—to go up to London and buy a drawing costing as much as a new suit—I looked at the bobbling black patch with appreciation. I actually had his cheque in my pocket. Noticing my glance, he wobbled his patch at me. He had once said he would like to be the Bishop’s Fool, I remembered.

    We entered the Rectory drive, the car poked at by the wild overplus of vegetation which was certainly not that of a normal garden. Such coarse-tongued plants as put in their appearance where there is no finer life or competitive human culture, were visible out of the window of the car. The car described an arc around an island that was a miniature wilderness, a dusty jungle growing to a considerable height above the gravel, upon which it dropped unidentifiable vegetable matter. When I left the car, I found that the Rectory was hemmed in by the same nameless growths, swarming up its walls with an ugly vigour.

    “Polygonum,” said Rymer, giving a name to what I was looking at. “It’s rather nice stuff unless it gets out of hand.” He paused. “It has got out of hand.”

    “It does look slightly like a riot. Why don’t you grow roses?”

    “Why don’t I grow roses?” Rymer looked at the savage scene facing his front door. “Oh, I don’t know: snake-weed is just as good. This stuff is rather nice: when it doesn’t get out of hand.”

    The Rectory was unexpectedly tall, this was even apparent above the eruption of polygonum threatening it on all sides. A roomy house, it had been built to contain the bulging families which the Victorian clergy regularly produced between evening and morning prayers.

    The place had a big parched lonely look. Nothing grew upon its pale brick face. But since it is an Ark which obviously for a long time has ridden the wastes, no emblem of stability, like ivy, would be likely to attach itself to this mansion meant for the Deluge. So it is as bare as when it was built, except for dust, droppings, or the kind of warts that neglected houses have.

    Although, without, the scene was so savage, the Rectory within, excepting the hall which was a little wild, was otherwise like the popular idea of a rectory. Rymer had acquired a few other small pictures besides mine, the radio put the Rymers in touch with the intellectual giants of Britain on the Third Programme, and of course all programmes supplied buckets full of music. A piano enabled them to perform themselves. His wife is charming: he is for her a big wilful schoolboy. Thus he was peremptorily dispatched as soon as we arrived to put on his London suit. For his son, too, whom I met on another occasion, Rymer is a bit of a youthful terror. That very grave and severe young man is at Oxford, though how he got there Heaven knows. A scholarship I suppose from the local grammar school. Both Eleanor and son Robert love him, but are strangers to his exuberances. Therefore even in his home he is alone with his excess of imagination, his poet’s passion. All that is most serious to him seems like play to his family: his pastel, his politics, his pride in his poverty. This is not to say that his family are wanting in taste or vitality, only that he has too much—for a life passed on the poverty-line. Indeed he is like a domesticated troll who having fallen in love with Eleanor had consented to live as humans do—and I have seen Eleanor stare at him with puzzled affection and he waggle his black patch at her and give a merry clerical whinny. For of course he is not a goblin but a born clergyman.

    The living quarters are in the back of the house. Out of the drawing-room windows however it is the same as out of the front-door. Nature coarsely proliferates, and man does nothing to check her: she throws up her low-grade creations. No one in the house has the energy to go out and cut the stuff down and burn it up. Let it grow all over the building, let it do what it likes, so long as we can get in and out, so long as it is not inside!

    Such is the response I think of the inmates, exhausted by petty hardships, harassed with taxation, worn out with wars, threatened with expulsion—it was their answer to an existence to which they had not been born or bred, in the golden aftermath of the Victorian era. But gazing out of one of the windows, I dismally responded to the scene of squalid vegetable fecundity, the solid sea of snake-weed, polygonum, or whatever it was, nettles and dock leaves of course adding themselves to this chaos. An inglorious duck-pond appeared in the near distance—it is forced upon one whenever one looks out of one of the vicarage windows, how this man exists upon the frontiers of a vacuum of a new sort. The well-furnished room, with its gouache horsemen and its piano, is an advance-post: there is the no-man’s-land between our age and the darkness to come. He is the last of a species (to which we all belong) and in him in travail—and there are none of us do not experience the travail too—is another species.

    Dressed in garments literally dropping to pieces he moves around his parish, among people who dread and loathe poverty and want. And he stands in spite of himself for poverty and for want. He is one of the first English clergymen to stand for poverty and want. And as he moves around, from house to house, the doors quickly shut at his approach as if he were infected with some complaint which no one was particularly anxious to have; and out of rags tacked together his “Oxford accent” issues with incongruous patronage; his encyclopaedic affectations exasperate, his great-heartedness abashes—for there is no cash only credit in Heaven, the currency of religion, no longer legal tender. The majority of the shopkeepers and labourers’ wives of Bagwick have given up “the opiate of the People”, they are no longer addicts. Does Rymer at times wish he had another drug to peddle? I have often wondered. And as to Sundays, in patched surplice (it can hardly be whole, to judge from the remainder of his wardrobe) he goes through a majestic liturgy accompanied on a small harmonium, before a congregation usually of the odd villager plus the family.

    On this occasion it was that he took me over to see his church, situated a couple of hundred yards down the road. The building was not large but it was absurdly lofty, like a thin slice of a cathedral. The vault near the entrance, for it grew to its greatest height at the farthest point from the altar, would not have been out of place at Canterbury. The font was so high it was not possible to use it without placing blocks of wood against it. I had no difficulty in understanding, as soon as I saw it, what had happened when first Rymer took up his duties at Bagwick. He saw the towering arches; his imagination, to his undoing, got to work. He made the great original mistake out of which all his subsequent miseries issued.

    I had heard, almost in the first half-hour of our earliest intimacies, about the beautiful reredos purchased by him for Bagwick. The protests and intrigues it had brought down on his head were things, one saw, of obsessional dimensions, looming up behind his unemotional narrative, when he spoke of the days when he first went to Bagwick. The extravagance had revealed to the village, it was easy to understand, the order of man that had come among them. They glimpsed the big troll I have spoken of. Promptly they started to gang up. No ordinary sensible man would be so lacking in judgement as to import the side of a house into a small village church! Some distant cousin of Don Quixote was in their midst—soon he might mistake them for the Saracens and begin cutting them down. Their faces hardened, not soft at the best of times north of The Wash, their tongues wagged. There was a village cabal at “The Marquess of Salisbury”. Finally after years of bickering, the reredos had to be disposed of, sold at a crushing loss, and it was he who incurred it, not the village.

    Our luncheon, I am ashamed to say, was excellent. There was, I am sure, the week’s meat-ration, also the week’s bones in the nourishing well-peppered soup. More than half the week’s rations were accounted for in this chivalrous hospitality. From a small farmer Rymer received certain favours. But this big arrogant man in rags, who always knew everybody’s business better than they did themselves, would be a protégé that not everyone would choose. I can see some farmer giving him a half-dozen intact eggs and a few cracked ones once, but not making a habit of it. Much food for nothing, or at its market value, he would not get, and he has not the money to pay the black-market price for things, nor would it be wise to do so if he had.

    Soon all clergymen in this country will have vows of poverty thrust upon them as I have already suggested, and a new type of ministry will come into being. Quite probably it is the only way to secure a truly Christian Church. It may after all be God’s will. In His great wisdom it would not be likely to escape Him that a penniless clergyman is better than one who rides to hounds. Then the country people will have to bring gifts of food—a fowl, bread, pickles, a tin of sardines, pig’s-trotters, apricots and greengages in season, as the moujiks once would do to their holy men. Otherwise the clergy quite literally will die out. An unpleasant transition is at present in progress. But people have so little sense of the future. The majority are completely defective in this sense. They fail to realize the significance of a process until life is suddenly quite different to what it was. They then adjust themselves at a disadvantage. The clergy should prepare themselves for penury; else quite unprepared they will find themselves the poorest class of men. Fasts would not be amiss. And they should accustom their parishioners to the idea that their sacred calling must reduce them to great poverty.

    In the meantime we find Rymer, for a start, without clothes to his back, or only a travesty of clothes; and there is no other class of man that must go in rags, except the vagabond. I told him that I should come down in a year or so and discover him walking through Bagwick in a loin-cloth: what would Jacko say to that? How would Mrs. Rossiter react? It is one of those cracks that have an uncomfortably prophetic ring. Heaven avert the omen. Rymer still feels too much “the gentleman”, of course, as his forebears were fine parsons in plump livings. He is a master type, of his own accord he will never go the whole way to the new model, to the country-clergyman-in-the-loin-cloth: soliciting alms in the name of God, or sitting near the altar of his church as people lay their gifts on the steps—sleeping on a camp-bed in the vestry—I am not saying that will happen tomorrow: and Rymer was heroic, in the way a prophet is, as clothed in tatters he went poker-faced to meet his fate and that of all his kind. For the village dogs will not care much for the New Model man-of-God and the villagers not improbably may stone them.

    That Rymer has the seeds of heroism I hope by now is plain. If need be he would sit naked at the foot of the Cross (though it might be with the superior glint of the Have-not in his glazing eye) and die if he was not fed.

    During lunch food—or its absence—was not discussed as invariably it is at any mealtime in England today. One felt that something vaguely was the matter. Then one realized what it was: a certain topic was conspicuously absent.

    One soon discovered, however, that the difficulty of getting enough to eat was only one of a large class of topics under an interdict. Eleanor Rymer happened to refer to the difficulty of obtaining a proper supply of reading-matter—of books. But at the word difficulty Rymer blustered into action, with that inimitable imitation of automatism of his, which his large wooden poker-face facilitated.

    “Difficulty? Nonsense. There is no more difficulty today than five, ten, or fifteen, years ago.”

    “How about the petrol, in the first place?” Eleanor retorted with a show of fight, which of course was indispensable. “I cannot get books at Bagwick.”

    He pounced on petrol like a cat on an unwary tom-tit.

    “Petrol? There is all the petrol that I can use.” (He might have added can afford.) “There’s plenty of petrol.”

    “Excuse me…” his wife began, laughing.

    But he swiftly intervened.

    “I know what you are going to say,” he told her, “that you haven’t got all the petrol that you can use. Before the war you took out the car once a fortnight at the outside. Now you feel you want it every day. You never went to Cockridge unless you could help it. Now you are always thinking of things in Cockridge or in Storby that you must have this minute.” He turned to me. “Because there is a ration, a limit, people imagine they are short of something they never had so much of before, or perhaps never heard of before. To hear them talk you would think that formerly they covered hundreds of miles every day in their car, ate enormous porterhouse steaks daily, chain-smoked from the time they got out of bed to the time they got into it again, bought a box of chocolates every morning after breakfast and another just before tea.”

    “I know a number of people just like that,” Eleanor agreed. But I felt Rymer must not be allowed to get away with everything.

    “There are shortages,” I remarked.

    “Shortages,” he retorted, “yes, if you want the earth. People today have as much food as is good for them—some, more than is good for them. People are putting on fat. I am. They have as many cigarettes or as much tobacco, as much beer as is necessary.”

    “As many clothes?” I enquired.

    He stopped and eyed me blankly for a few seconds, as if holding a conference behind his poker-face.

    “Clothes,” he said slowly, “are not rationed.”

    Had he been dressed in the less formal of his two suits he would, I felt, at this point have stroked his black patch.

    His wife was intelligent as well as beautiful, and addressed herself to the consumption of her piece of offal. (Why should the butcher, or, rather, the Food Office, employ this ghastly word?) She was accustomed, it was obvious, to being halted, turned back, and admonished upon the threshold of certain topics. Rymer would allow no one to grumble. No criticism of conditions under socialism passed unchallenged. He did not demand the quality of the bacon to be extolled (just eat it, would be the idea, and think of something else, such as how happy our grandchildren would be in a world from which all capital—small as well as great, had been banished): he did not require ecstasies at the mention of the Purchase Tax (some day there won’t be much left to purchase, so there won’t be any tax)—no, all Rymer exacted was silence about conditions under socialism. The Government are at war with Capital, it is total war: war conditions naturally prevail. Therefore, silence! Shut that great gap! Enemy ears are listening! All criticism aids capitalism.

    Even Rymer would deny the existence of any obstacles in the path of socialism-in-our-time: his view of the socialist government’s prospects are blindingly sunny. When he is foretelling an unprecedented export-boom, if (in the interests of sanity) one should mention the fact that the United States can supply itself with everything it requires, which it manufactures far more efficiently than any other country is capable of doing (vide Mr. Lippmann), Rymer pooh-poohs such a statement. He describes it as ridiculous. American goods, he will assert, are of very poor quality: the Americans would be jolly glad to get ours if they had a chance. We market our stuff badly over there to begin with. “But believe me once our industry is on its feet again our exports will soar, you see if they don’t.” Rymer has never been to the United States and has not the remotest idea what American goods are like, so he is not cramped in these patriotic flights by first-hand knowledge. His boundless optimism is firmly based in the most blissful ignorance. Should you speak anxiously of Great Britain’s situation, living as she does upon a massive dole from the United States, he will say that that is our fault for having anything to do with the U.S., with Wall Street. Were we to arrange to receive a dole from Russia instead—say a billion or two, marrying the pound sterling to the rouble—we should soon be out of the wood! If we had the guts to cut ourselves loose from the Yankee capitalists, stopped spending money on an army which we didn’t need, and had a pact with Russia, we should be as right as rain.

    Eleanor now brusquely changed the subject. She selected one quite free of political entanglements. The unprecedented the sumptuous summer weather—that had nothing to do with a planned economy or the redistribution of wealth. No one was to blame if the weather was bad, no one had to be thanked except God if it was fine. And then she went on to say how perfect the weather had been up in London, where she had been on a visit to relatives. She thought nostalgically of London, and I asked her if she had been to any shows. No, she said, no: just shops. But she continued—with great inadvertence—to complain how difficult it had been to shop. There were such dense herds of people. Where on earth did they all come from!

    Rymer waited until she had finished, and then he struck:

    “Where do you come from, my dear, there is always that.” The slightly Johnsonian answer to her conundrum his wife received with a wry smile, having detected her faux pas too late. “Those people are the masses of women…”

    “They weren’t all women!” she laughed.

    “Women,” he said firmly. “They come in their millions from the suburbs and the slums and the slums and suburbs of other cities. The pavements are impassable. It is like cutting one’s way through a dense and rubbery undergrowth.”

    “What an excellent description!” his wife exclaimed.

    “I agree they are dense,” he went on. “Of course they are. For the first time in their lives they have sufficient time and money to go shopping in the most luxurious stores—where they could not go before.”

    Here I joined in with alacrity.

    “Could not go,” I said, “because of their class—without being followed around by store-detectives, stared out of countenance by shopgirls from behind counters, asked every minute by a shopwalker what articles they required. Any charlady now can go in, try on a mink coat or two, then fling them down and say she thinks she’ll wait till next season when they may have a better assortment. Harrods is jammed with charladies. The working-class throng Selfridges like Woolworths at Christmastime. That really is socialism. Observe that in Moscow the slums are barred from any but the slum shops.”

    We returned to the drawing-room after we had eaten and sat talking for a long time; it is a very peaceful spot, but in Rymer there is no peace. My hostess was washing up the dishes. She was absent at least and there was no one else in the house. The knuckly proliferation of the polygonum waved beyond the window-sill, the yellow leaves tumbled past from a tree, a wasp appeared on his way from the larder where he had been able to find no jam, no honey—nothing sweet, because the English had won the war and consequently are not allowed to grow sugar in their West Indian islands, and there is not enough beet sugar to go round. Also I noticed a sick-looking bird. The crumbs put out for it were, of course, full of bran and chalk. I suppose it was constipated. It should have pecked off as much corn as it wanted before it was cut, making a rule to touch no human food. The corn gone, why not fly off to some more sensible country? What are wings for?

    I think that politics and poetry are what interest Rymer almost exclusively. At that moment politics were uppermost in his mind because the question of communism (at his instigation) was coming up the following week at the diocesan conference, and he was of course to speak, or hoped he would be able to. Communism is with him something quite unreal, for he certainly is not a communist. He is of the generation of the great fellow-travellers of the ’twenties, who painted the universities pink. But it was a solemn rag, a generational badge, and meant no more than a painter’s stunt, painting for a little all red or all blue, to make a “period” with. Rymer like scores of thousands of others, had had his “pink period”. It shocked all the aunts of the time terribly, and scandalized his clergyman-father. It was revolt—it symbolized Youth—his most glamorous moments had been pink.

    Youth past, these redmen of the Oxford and Cambridge Colleges forgot all about it—real life began, dressing-up was at an end, the minarets of Moscow faded on the horizon. And in any case Soviet Russia had proved a somewhat tough and embarrassing comrade to “travel” with. On the other hand, because Rymer had been buried in the depths of the country ever since Oxford he lived in the past a lot, and continued to potter around with Karl Marx, like a mascot of his youth rather, and he still got a kick out of it. That was part of the story of Rymer and the Kremlin. The rest of it was traceable to professional religion: the frivolous sizar and the fakir must be mixed.

    When I asked him what he was going to say next week to the crowd of clergymen he said he would point out that in the contemporary world communism, or marxism, was, because of the huge development of Soviet Russia, too great a factor in world-affairs for the Church to ignore, as it had been disposed to do up to now. “Let us put aside our prejudices,” he would invite them, “let us examine this controversial theory of the state, and let us ask ourselves if there is anything in it which we as Christians should endorse.” He and Herbert Stoner the “red” Storby parson, had succeeded in “winning over” several of their colleagues. He named others who would have nothing to do with it—who asserted that the Church should set its face against “this atheistic creed” and all its works. These were he told me the “place-seekers”, clergymen on the climb, who dreamed of deaneries and bishoprics. The only imaginable consideration which would impel clergymen to feel other than sympathetic towards communism was self-interest. Such was his extraordinary view. As this was absurd I thought I would help him to dispel from his mind so foolish an error.

    “Ordinary people,” I explained to him, “find it difficult to reconcile with their conscience anything short of censure of the methods employed by the Russian leaders. I do for instance. I see what is good in the theory, but I cannot swallow the practice.”

    To this he made no reply. He could have argued, for instance (for even the worst cause is polemically defensible), that barbarity had marked the regimes which the revolutionary governments had supplanted, in Russia and elsewhere. He even could have instanced the cruelties still inflicted upon people daily by the operation of the capitalist economy, or any existing economy, or spoken of “poverty in the midst of plenty”: to which of course there are answers, too, for a good debater. There are plenty of answers to the criticism of any policy. He is not interested in being an advocate however. He just enjoys pushing under people’s noses something they detest. He does not want to find himself in the role of selling it to them, of being too serious about it. And, as I have said, he is genuinely no Red.

    Where politics are concerned Rymer is not, as I have also said, merely what-is-left of a ’twenties undergraduate fellow-traveller. What does conspicuously remain, it must be confessed, is the juvenile impulse to épater le bourgeois. But behind the exhibitionism is an authentic issue, that of the priest inheriting a rotted religion from his laodicean fox-hunting ancestors which he would naturally desire to reinvigorate. That he should borrow a little reality from politics and pump it into the decayed tissues of the Church is an obvious proceeding, more especially as his instinct must inform him that what he would be borrowing had, in the first instance, been stolen from his religion. That that instinct, alone, is involved was proved by Rymer’s reception of my subsequent identification of socialism with Christianity.

    Whatever is at work behind the mask has the character of a religious experience: i.e., he knows. With any cause that he embraced, it would not be a civil marriage. Meanwhile he is as tightly sealed-up as a clam. In his secretiveness (that of the priest, resembling the woman’s) he sees no point in exposing what he knows, or intuits, to the crude processes of the human reason. So he remains very reticent and his manner is aloof and also casual. “Here it is. What do you think of it?” That kind of thing. Then he will turn his back and saunter away: never get into a serious argument if he can help it, though he is willing enough to argue provided you do not show signs of pressing matters too far.

    If socialism, instead of Christianity, were an official cult, and he its bonze, he would teach from the absolutist angle—carelessly, almost disdainfully, without “proofs”. He would deal in mystical fiats, allowing of no argument. But socialism is not his religion. He probably regards it as a reflection, upon an inferior (a political) plane, of Christianity. Or he would so regard it if he were going to be rational and orderly about it, and come out of his muscular mist.

    Of course Rymer is quite explicit about a number of things. He asserted for instance on this occasion that “whenever Christianity and communism have been confronted, Christianity has won the day”. But his reason for making this assertion was not in order to arrive at some objective certainty, but in order to sway opinion. From this it would follow, if I interpret him correctly, that Christians need not fear to hobnob with communists, for the communists would all succumb to the superior medicine and become Christians—or, the only alternative, take to their heels. If communism, like any other form of socialism, were in fact only Christianity on a lower and mundane level, then (1) in close contact and association with Christianity it would naturally be elevated and in the end rise to the Christian level: and, further (2) there is an obligation to protect socialism against the wicked world. He did not push on into all these implications of what he said, though I have done so. His policy was to lead the mind in that direction—though I was never quite certain what he explicitly proposed.

    Russia, he observed, must be regarded as “a great missionary field”. “Ah, you mean to effect conversions, do you, among the reds?” I asked. “You propose to convert Stalin to Christianity?”

    He looked down, then said shortly and cheekily: “Yes—p’raps.”

    He knew he was talking nonsense, but he didn’t care.

    After this absurd conversation I felt discouraged. Sitting a little while in front of Rymer’s poker-face makes one feel that way as a matter of course. That socialism was something that needed defending against the wicked world was a proposition with which I was in agreement—provided it was the Western variety. But these were propositions existing in isolation from reality. For socialism could be taken over by the worldly, and then who or what was it required protecting? The worldly are never so dangerous as when they masquerade as idealists.

    I have been building up an inductive Rymer which has some coherence: but that is not at all what transpires on the outside. He was dishing out to me the kind of rigmarole he had prepared for the conference. The diocesan conference was going to be a grisly affair.

    But I then decided to see if I could break into this absurd reserve, by enlarging upon the whole question of Christianity and communism. I thought I would explain something about it, and see if I could tempt this cleric out of his shell. It was a passing énervement, no doubt, but at that moment the large, blank, harassed, formality of the mask in front of me was a challenge. The reserve struck me as insolent and stupid. Why is this silly fellow playing a part with me! is what I was disposed to ask. It is the way one is bound to react in the end, before a shut door. This is particularly the case, if from behind the shut door comes a constant stream of words, all vetted for public consumption. Anyhow—verbally—I charged at the shut door.

    “It has always been obvious to me,” I began, “that the Christianity of the Sermon on the Mount plays a major role in the history of socialism.”

    “Not the Sermon on the Mount,” Rymer, a little sullenly, but lazily, objected.

    “Oh, I see: not the Sermon on the Mount,” I said.

    “Well, why that?” he asked.

    “I understand perfectly, as a matter of fact, your objection to that. Contemporary socialism is so phenomenally tough that you would rather not have the Sermon on the Mount mentioned in connection with ‘purges’, faked trials, and labour camps.”

    Rymer said nothing.

    “The idea that socialism is unthinkable without Christianity does not appeal to you. Yet was it not fundamentally a Christian impulse that moved the Western intellectuals (even though no longer Christians) to champion the cause of the oppressed and ‘underprivileged’, the underdog?”

    He neglected the second member of this compound question, answering the first. “Socialism”, he said, “is not unthinkable without Christianity.”

    “In that case you differ entirely from the present socialist administration.”

    “Do I?” he sang, amusedly musical.

    “So it appears. One of their brain trusters is my authority.” And I produced a cutting from among some papers in my pocket. “Here is a cutting from the Paris Herald Tribune.”

    It would be impossible for Samuel Rymer to scowl, he is really too gentle in spite of his brutal dimensions but he made an effort to do so. At the mention of anything to do with the United States he reacted violently. The United States, in spite of its weaknesses, I like, so this is of his idiosyncrasies the one that appeals to me least. He drawled, in a bored and withering voice:

    “Do you read the Herald Tribune?”

    “Sometimes. But listen. The headline reads ‘Ex-Adviser of Attlee Attacks U.S. Capitalism as Immoral.’”

    “I’m glad Americans are being told what their capitalists are like,” he breathed guardedly. “That’s good.”

    “So you are prepared to accept a moral basis for the indictment?”

    He blinked and let that pass.

    “Well, listen now.” (I read.)

    “American capitalism was attacked as immoral and producing a neurosis with ‘the stature of a national disease’, in a long article in Fortune magazine by Francis Williams… former public relations adviser to Prime Minister Clement R. Attlee.

    “Mr. Williams called his article ‘The Moral Case for Socialism’…

    “‘I am a socialist,’ wrote Mr. Williams, ‘because I believe that only within a socialist society can human rights be assured…’

    “… Mr. Williams said it is no accident that many early leaders of British socialism were drawn from the churches and non-conformist chapels. ‘It was not personal economic interest but ethical compulsion that drove men like Attlee, Cripps and others to try to build a more moral society,’ he wrote…”

    (I stop reading.)

    “Finally we are told that Mr. Williams speaks of the ‘great American tradition of freedom and democracy’.”

    Rymer’s response was instantaneous. “Which is utter nonsense, the Americans have never known what freedom is. It is funny to hear freedom spoken of in the same breath with the lynchers and witch-hunters.”

    “You are interested in freedom now?”

    “Of course I am.” He was aggressively bland and blank.

    I sighed. “Freedom, reverend sir, is what socialism takes even less interest in than does monopoly-capital. A socialist sympathizer must learn to be very guarded where freedom is concerned. Alas, there are far more political prisoners and concentration-camps—far less freedom of movement, less freedom of speech, in the Soviet Union than in the United States. Socialist England is far more regimented already than is the United States.”

    Rymer muttered something about the “third degree” and “prohibition”. We were now approaching that invisible line, dividing the terms on which he was prepared to discuss something, from the terms on which he was not prepared to do so.

    “But once we begin to discuss freedom…! Cela n’en finirait plus. Let us say that Christianity and socialism is our subject. Would you object if, instead of leaving this question of the religious origins of socialism floating about in the clouds, I brought it down to earth and attached it to a few hard facts from which it could not escape?”

    “Why should I mind,” he smiled, “if you regard it as important?”

    “Our conscience must be clear. A muddy conscience is a bad conscience. But how can the conscience be clear unless we see clearly? Our conscience has no rest, nor has for years, it is being appealed to all the time by the contemporary politician. But before the conscience can function properly, or be of any service at all, we must see clearly. The politicians have a policy to sell us: let us get the clearest view of it we can—and of the politician! It may be a genuine moral article: or of course it may only be baited with a big moral appeal. No moral judgement is possible without a sharp image of the thing at issue.”