“An almost cartesian desire for clarity!” Rymer smiled tolerantly.

    “Appeals to the conscience seldom fail especially with the English. The fact that it is the conscience to which appeal has been made is so reassuring, too! A political party so appealing must be a peculiarly moral party! One takes for granted that a man appealing to one’s good feeling, to one’s humanity, must surely himself be a good humane man—the majority at least are apt to draw this conclusion.”

    “You are saying I suppose that socialists are attempting to secure power disguised as men engaged in a moral mission?”

    “I am saying nothing of the sort. Nothing should be taken for granted. It is advisable to gain a clear idea of what is actually proposed, lest the conscience, working in the dark, mislead one. That is all.”

    “Are you saying,” Rymer enquired, “that a stupid person cannot possess a conscience?”

    “Obviously not so good a one as a wise man.”

    “Oh!” howled Rymer.

    “When a matter is beyond their understanding people cannot judge it morally any more than in any other way. But that is what I wanted to discuss. I am not as clear as I would like to be myself upon a number of points. But this is really a side-issue.”

    “No it isn’t,” he interrupted. “Your case stands or falls upon that.”

    “My own conscience feels clear, as I am quite sure yours does. I would like to check up on its functioning however. The way to do that is to test the validity of one or more of the main beliefs responsible for the clear feeling. I always suspect a clear conscience, don’t you?”

    “Yes.”

    “In giving my own conscience this overhaul I may assist you to discover whether your conscience is as sound and as clear as you think.”

    “Speak for your own conscience. Mine is all right.”

    “You think so. You may be mistaken. People often buy things in a shop and when they get them home find they do not like them at all.”

    “Short-sighted people usually.”

    “Why, exactly. What they thought they saw in the shop has changed into something else: into its real self. They have bought something they did not bargain for. Now the kind of socialism which people, in their woolly and hazy way, have fastened on their back, may be one of those things that look very different later on to what at first it seemed. As an indication of what I have in mind, there have been many things to cause misgivings in socialist behaviour (especially in the official class) since the Welfare State took over from free enterprise. In a word, those who have come to rescue us from Power have themselves displayed too patent an appetite for power. The old bosses are being economically liquidated. Too often it seems that Bossiness has come in their place. As this state-power grows more absolute, will not these disquieting symptoms develop? English socialism as we know it today is complex: in it what is desirable and what is undesirable do battle.”

    “Because a few officials misbehave…” Rymer waved his hand to dismiss such insignificant blemishes.

    “There should be an extremely searching debate upon the type of new society—‘collective’, as it is called—being thrust upon everyone in England with practically no debate—such as a parliamentary Opposition is supposed to provide. I am not against that new society: I am against the way it is being adopted. To confer such unheard-of powers (such as no feudal king in England has ever possessed) upon a group of politicians just because they say they are ‘socialist’, is absurd. In the mind of the majority ‘socialist’ signifies a selfless person dedicated to the welfare of mankind. Somebody may not like socialists, because he thinks they are too good and moral to suit him. But the moral status is taken for granted.”

    “Are you disputing the bonafides of socialism?” he asked me.

    “No,” I answered. “It is frightfully important that that moral essence of socialism should be a reality, that is all, and even more that it should stop a reality. I believe that some machinery should be invented to make certain that it does so stop. Finally there should be no blank cheque.”

    “You are too distrustful.”

    “You are too authoritarian. Are we for Authority, however corrupt or callous it may become? My conscience cries out for checks.”

    “That conscience of yours is dreadfully over-developed, isn’t it. I don’t remember ever hearing of one like it.” His face was furrowed in mock-concern.

    “I think it is yours that is under-developed,” I told him. “If it is as modest in size as I suspect, mine must, of course, seem enormous.”

    “An enlarged conscience is pathologic,” was how that bout ended, he nodding his head admonitorily as he spoke. “It is nothing to be proud of; I should keep it quiet if I were you.”

    We laughed humourlessly.

    In this talk we were having it was my idea to say just enough to oblige him to forsake some of his romantic conventions and to adopt a more realistic attitude: or come out and defend his obscurantist absolute. “I have been speaking,” I went on, “of socialism by consent. It is an odd phenomenon to occur in a country like England. But the English voted themselves into ‘Labour’ (which promptly transformed itself into ‘socialism’, of the toughest, the ‘total’, type). They would have voted themselves into anything that promised speedy demobilization. Six years of Churchillean Tory heroics had been too much. They knew Labour would turn them back into civilians much quicker than Churchill would. That was Aneurin Bevan’s explanation of the Labour landslide. It was, I think, the right one, in the main.”

    “You think that is all—an over-long war?” Rymer breathed a little crossly and sleepily.

    “Something the long war precipitated. The background was a hundred years of Liberalism. A hundred years rushed down in the 1945 landslide. The history of the nineteenth century in Great Britain recalls the thousand small steps of a Mayan pyramid, each step a liberation for some depressed class. So Britain mounted to the present pinnacle, a real live working-class Government, with teeth in it like an alligator. From Chartism to the Steel Bill is a long purposeful moral ascent. It is the moral foundation, deriving directly from the teaching of the Gospels, of this monumental progress culminating, in 1945, in the mass acceptance of ethical politics—it is this which is to be my theme.”

    “You will be preaching to the converted,” Rymer threw in.

    “The nature of the dynamism is obvious. That the working class played a part is a political fairy tale of course.”

    “Oh!”

    “The British working class is the reverse of socially ambitious. Always it has been the despair of the agitator, a mass as difficult to ignite as a rain-soaked mackintosh. It has been content to be an animal, fond of beer and of football, not envious of the well-to-do because it could only be envious in terms of beer and football, and Château-Yquem and golf fails to stir its pulse. It has been terribly easy to exploit and to ‘keep in its place’. It is unnecessary to add that ethics is not its strong point. The moral ascent in question was a middle-class phenomenon. The progressive levitation of the mass of manual workers is one of the miracles of Christ. It is on a spectacular scale the Raising of Lazarus.”

    Rymer was tying up his shoe. “Rot” was all he said.

    “The mere mass, the numbers, of the working class could have produced no such result. To argue that it could is like saying that a mountain must merely, because it is so large, submerge a village at its foot. And so it might if someone placed so tremendous an atomic charge within it as to blow it up.”

    “The working class is not inanimate,” Rymer growled.

    “You must have something more than mass, than numbers. The way workers have extricated themselves from underneath the middle-class is often likened to the manner in which the latter supplanted the aristocracy. There is in fact no analogy whatever. The vast colonial expansion of Great Britain and temporary industrial monopoly enriched and expanded so much the class of bankers, merchants, industrialists, that that class wrested the leadership from the landed society. What was responsible for this revolution was something with an action equivalent to atomic fission, namely money.”

    “The aristocracy were only business men. Money was nothing to do with it,” Rymer heckled automatically.

    “Now strangely enough the rise to power of the working class was only made possible by money too: not its own money, for it has none, nor for its thirst for power, for it was not interested in power. It was a purely middle-class money which has caused the artificial elevation of the working class at the expense of the middle class.”

    “How on earth do you make that out!” Rymer expostulated, lazily.

    “You see, even all the agitators, from the creator of Marxian socialism onwards, belong to the middle class. Lenin, for instance. Our Fabians, the Webbs, Shaw, or Cripps, have been typically of the middle class. H. G. Wells, who came from the working class, protested at the revolutionary zeal of his ‘betters’.”

    “Where does the money come in?”

    “Have you ever thought of the immense sum involved, in this century alone, on socialist propaganda? Money has always been forthcoming—millions and millions of it—to advertise the beauties of the Left Wing. It all came out of bourgeois bank accounts, where it was not straight political subsidy.”

    “Why should the middle class or any section of it spend so much money in order to have the middle class supplanted by the working class. Was it economic suicide?” Rymer was wearily withering.

    “Various explanations of this curious fact have been advanced. There may, of course, be several secondary interests involved. I am concerned exclusively with the major and essential impulse.”

    “Good! Gooood!” sang Rymer with bantering patronage.

    “The complete emergence of the working class from underneath the possessing class (which it abolishes—or which is abolished for it) is perhaps meaningless. Fifty, or a hundred million people cannot rule. What would they rule? They can only be told that they are ruling, which is another matter; and meanwhile of course they go on labouring just the same as before. The people who tell them they are ruling, those people are in fact the rulers. As we see in Russia, the majority must always toil. It is an age in which paper takes the place of bullion, and the verbal of the physical.”

    “It is a different thing working for yourself and being exploited by some boss,” Rymer interjected. “That is solid enough.”

    “There is always a boss. They have a different line of talk, that is all. And the abolition of the middle class is a disservice to the working class, it seems to me. The classless society has been proved a myth. If class we must have, then a trinity of classes is preferable to two classes. The natural class-arrangement is to have a middle class, involving the perpetual individual emergence and ascent of manual workers, passing into the middle sphere, the reverse constantly occurring too, duds dropping out of the middle class into the working class. This individual emergence should be facilitated. Complete ‘emancipation’ would signify everybody being relieved of the necessity to work, when they could divide their time between the football-field, the dog-track, and the cinema: which is absurd. In the last analysis, for one man to be slaving down in a coal-mine, and another man to be passing his time between august Downing Street and luxurious Checquers, is unjust: which is emotionally true but otherwise absurd.

    The present theoretic eminence of the working class is a piece of illusionism. It is pure Maskelyne and Devant. The situation today speaks for itself. Workers’ wages, after spectacular rises, are frozen in order to enable the devalued pound to push up the cost of living, so that the workers will be economically where they started, before the honeymoon. In the end all they will have gained is millions of free dental plates and pairs of spectacles. Even these retrospectively they will be made to pay for.”

    Rymer cleared his throat, and the new National Health Service dental plate stirred indignantly about. “The working class is no better off than it ever was then?” said he with mild derision.

    “I did not say that. The Socialists have not improved upon the Liberal achievement, that is the point.”

    “Give them time. And besides the advance has in fact been enormous. Ask them!”

    “A bogus inflationary advance, and a supply of ideologic stimulants. But the idea of a Glorious Working Class World has to be paid for and it costs billions of pounds. The actual workman has to pay for the advertisement of his imaginary self.”

    “The view of most people of course,” said Rymer, “is that the working man is over-privileged, is spoilt.”

    “Everybody, not only the manual worker, is taken in by the advertising, that is all. His prestige but not his pocket has benefited. It is the same as with Culture and the Arts. So much money is spent in advertising how artistic and cultivated we are that there is no money left for artists or for real culture. All the money goes in the salaries of officials, public relations men, promoters, and in official publications, large buildings, educational activities, entertainment, and so on. There are now millions of political administrative parasites on the back of the working class, and their numbers multiply hourly. Every working man has a petit bourgeois appointee on his back.”

    “How about the parasites that were there before?” came from Rymer in a sardonic shout.

    “The Liberal dream of ‘the just’ and the ‘fair’ and the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, people will live to regret in the rigours of the ‘total’ society.”

    “I thought utilitarian thinking had been sufficiently discredited,” Rymer broke in again. “Men are great idealists. That is what you forget. The negative satisfactions of ‘peace and plenty’ do not appeal to them.”

    “Etcetera!” I answered him a little sharply. “Every power-thirsty Führer endorses those arguments and is clamorously in favour of ‘heroism’, ‘living dangerously’, plain living (a little ‘mousetrap’ cheese and a glass of watery bitter beer). That shows a splendid spirit, they think. That people should be prepared to endure hardships makes them ever so enthusiastic—those who aspire to be their tyrants.”

    Rymer began tearing up a piece of paper into smaller and smaller fragments.

    “Then think—war after war: what could be more utterly unutilitarian than that—and the consequent debt that is heaped upon the unprotesting nations—more crushing debts at each fresh massacre. No greatest happiness of the greatest number there! England is finished, tomorrow America will be finished, riddled with war debts, rotted with inflation. All this accepted without a murmur! What heroes we are! What idealists! The wars of our time are the means by which men are being pushed towards total servitude.”

    “Or towards a free world.”

    “Certainly not that. Such freedom as man may enjoy is perhaps all in the past.”

    “Freedom to exploit!” heckled Rymer.

    “In any event, historians—unless such irresponsible snoopers into the past have to shut up shop—will marvel at the twelve decades in which the ‘liberal’ ferment was at work in English life. From such early steps up as the Cotton Factory Regulation Act they will see it at work, through thousands of measures of Christian legislation, up to such a climax as Lloyd George’s National Insurance Act. The present socialist government is, then, the most spectacular achievement of a truly idealizing cult—and it will be its last. The moralist politics of Protestant Christianity was violently anti-authoritarian, in contrast with the Catholic philosophy. This is its last Protest, as it were.”

    “Why its last?” asked Rymer dully.

    “Because it has given birth, now, to its opposite: to something tough and authoritarian. It must mean it is exhausted. Or perhaps, after all, it has achieved its end. Jesus said, you may recall, ‘The first shall be last, and the last shall be first’.”

    “I remember that.”

    “Nietzsche who described Christianity as a ‘slave religion’…”

    “That I remember too!”

    “… could have opened his argument by quoting those words. Today the first are becoming the last and the last are loudly advertised as being the First. Liberalism has done its work? What do you say?”

    “What are your politics?” he enquired.

    “Liberal, really,” I laughed. “Liberal, yes.”

    “Oh. I never would have thought of you as a liberal.”

    “No? I experience some anxiety as to whither my idealism may lead us. It is my conscience. My liberal conscience.”

    He sighed. “That conscience again! How long have you suffered from conscience? However, it does not obtrude in every day life; in fact, no one would know you had one.”

    “You are less fortunate,” I told him. “It’s absence is all too apparent with you.”

    A cat at this point appeared from somewhere and rubbed itself against my leg. It was a thin cat, I could feel its ribs as it pressed its body against my trousers.

    “Fond of cats?” I asked.

    Rymer shook his head.

    “Not very. Pussy is anti-social.”

    I am not fond of cats, either, but I scratched its bony, independent head.

    “Having,” I said, “put my hand to the plough, I will just finish the furrow. The evidence is abundant and conclusive. That the sentimental conditioning of the English public by constant injections of a Christian ethical-political preparation is responsible for all we see. Without having soaked themselves (or been soaked, which shall we say?) as no other nation has, in burning sympathy for the oppressed, no surrender of India or Egypt—no sentimental enthusiasm for the ‘great Russian experiment’ (we should have noticed long ago it was an ugly despotism)—no conservative Opposition so full of trimmers as to make it appear merely a socialist right-wing. No mythical British ‘kindliness’, therefore, but Reformation Christianity in its Victorian and Edwardian swan-song laid the foundations of the Welfare State.

    “The tough institutionalism of Rome has naturally seen to it that the Latin countries are provided with a class that has some resistance to set a limit to professional indiscipline or red excesses. In France or in Italy communism is more open, not ‘crypto’ as with the English. The declared communist is easy to check. It is instructive to speculate what a purely Catholic Europe would be like at this time. In all likelihood a practical and orderly society would be there, instead of a feverish ideological patchwork, the rabid indiscipline of parties. With the fearful deterrents to revolt, or even to criticism, at the disposal of a twentieth century ruler, where there was any real authority the agitator would not exist. In Russia today he would be instantly liquidated, as we know in any non-Christian society that is what would happen.”

    “You believe in bumping off everyone who disagrees with you?” was my listener’s comment: comments usually made in the form of a question, but hardly anticipating an answer, though on this occasion receiving one.

    “No. I am in fact conducting a polemic, among other things, against absolutist methods.”

    “Stupid of me. Sorry.”

    “In my last remarks, for I have been indecently long and must finish, there is the evidence I must not omit, of how the rich have taken their squeezing to death by the State.”

    “They had no choice. They had no option.”

    “The average coarse illiterate tycoon, banker, or manufacturer one might expect to defend his property with savage desperation. But he does not do that, in these islands at least. He hands it over like an apologetic sheep, who has taken more than his share and knows it.”

    “Not in this county!”

    “No, they are as if spellbound, ‘like somnambulic cattle’. This is the result of the long conditioning. It is, otherwise, undeniably our nature as men to put up a fight to protect our property. I should myself defend, with gun if necessary, my typewriter, let us say, against a nocturnal intruder. I have no right to such a possession, except for that nine-tenths of the law possession takes with it. I just have it, have worked for it, and should defend it. If a man entered my flat, laid his hand upon my typewriter crying, ‘Property is a theft,’ I should answer, ‘Get out, you thief!’ If he did not leave, I should take steps (however violent) to prevent my typewriter from being removed and passing into his hands.”

    “Oh, wouldn’t you let him have it? I should.” Rymer pretended to look astonished at my possessiveness.

    “But you haven’t got anything!” I indignantly pointed out. “It’s easy for you to talk. You haven’t got a typewriter. I am speaking of normal property-owning people, who perhaps have a nice overcoat they do not want to lose: and of course the normal possessing class in a free enterprise society, with whom it would be, only greatly magnified, the case of my typewriter.”

    “Yes, I see the sort of people you are talking about—whose mobile police would machine-gun strikers and jail their leaders.”

    “That, more or less, is the normal behaviour. Our life is animal. What I mean is that we have the most house-trained set of magnates here on record.”

    “They had no choice,” said Rymer dully.

    “The Russian communists, to return to that, deal with dissent as a Bengal tiger would. This—once more—is because they have rooted Christianity out of their system. They are ‘sincere’: they are an idealogic tiger. They are dangerous, unless you feel like joining them.”

    “But what are you driving at?” There was a new note. Rymer, my Chorus, was showing signs of returning to personal life, and ceasing to be a mere heckler. “I see what you want to prove. But what then? Supposing I say, ‘Very well. Socialism is a product of Christianity.’ What happens next? Why should you wish to convince me of that?”

    “I can clear that up for you at once,” I told him. “The way things have gone has involved for us a terrible dilemma—for us ex-Christian liberals. The Third War approaches. That deepens the dilemma; since it will be a war between a liberal principle, and an anti-liberal principle.”

    “What war is this? What war are you talking about?”

    “Soviet Russia has never been socialist according to Western ideas (and Western connotes Liberal). In the same way the communists misuse the term democracy, as we understand it. But the twentieth century Left Wingers repudiated the Western norm: totalitarian socialism they regarded as just an up-to-date model—extreme perhaps but authentic. The Left Wing, of course, shades off into Liberalism where Mr. Attlee stands. And much muddy thinking develops: terms originating in the West, implicit in them the backgrounds of the Western mind with its roots in Aristotle or in Plato, come to be used to describe their opposite. Terms like Democracy and Liberty are stood on their head, or turned inside out. Verhovenski, and William Morris or Mr. Herbert Morrison, are supposed to stand for the same thing. Meanwhile the old men at present in control in England are good if confused men. All are hospital cases, however. Bevin’s doctor accompanied him everywhere: Bevin has dropped out. Cripps, the strongest of the Christian-socialist leaders, has dropped out too, though still alive. Attlee was in hospital for some time and it was believed he would have to lay down the premiership. Morrison was many months in hospital, his complaint phlebitis. None of them can survive the wear and tear of office for more than a few years. Who will it be then? How long will our rulers go to Church? How long will they understand, like Mr. Attlee, that socialism was born out of Christianity? The natural twentieth century drift must be towards the eventual repudiation of Christianity, or its sentimental political puritan hang-over. We see that occurring everywhere, do we not? In a word, the danger is that in its hour of triumph socialism will forget, ignore, or violently discard, the ethics by means of which it was able to gain acceptance and to mount to power: indeed that it may strip away all our civilized Christian freedoms and thrust us back into a system of villeinage and worse. Socialism without ethics is a terrible thing.”

    Stopping as if it were a book I had finished reading and was now closing with a snap, I looked over at Rymer. I saw that he was deeply upset. It might take him a half-hour to recover. I have explained how his is the religious approach: what he enjoys teaching he wishes to see treated as a sacred text. A hint that this fabric of salvation could have a fatal flaw was highly distasteful to him: the view that the very basis of socialism in Christian ethics might be its weak spot must have distressed him deeply. For when Christianity vanished, all socialism’s angelic credentials, as being so obviously unselfish that the power of Ghenghis Khan might be entrusted to it with absolute safety, would vanish too.

    That all such credentials would become worthless, was an odious suggestion to a man who would not even allow his wife to discuss the No-Food Minister’s Monkey Nut Scheme. So poor Rymer was miserable, had been sealing himself up with sealing-wax for fear he might burst, and I should have to break the wax.

    But I thought I would round off my discourse; so bending a stern eye upon him, I said:

    “As a priest yours is a great responsibility.”

    “Oh, really?”

    “Yes. To advocate socialism, as you do, is perhaps natural for a Protestant clergyman. It is good Christianity. But surely it is your duty to be critical and if necessary to denounce tendencies on the part of political extremists, to transform a basically Western theory into its illiberal opposite, substituting a violent caricature of the Hegelian State for the City of God.”

    “Well, no one can say,” said Rymer, with his brashest smile, “if I neglect to do my duty, that I did not know what it was.”

    Unexpectedly the tension relaxed. He shook himself and smiled sweetly. “Very interesting,” he told me in a most affable way, “although supposing you decided that socialism is too dangerous to go on with I do not see what you would do about it.”

    I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders.

    “That was not the point. I neither wish, nor should I be able, of course, to take any action. We were talking about you—about official Christianity. Your natural enthusiasm for the triumph of the Christian ethic in the triumph of socialism should be tempered by the thought that the political expression of the Christian ethic is administered by ambitious men who might betray it. The Church, a rejuvenated Church, should be on the bandwaggon and seek to function as the conscience of the politician. It is surely the Church’s privilege to do this: it is after all its ethic that has been used.”

    “The Church consists largely of ambitious men also,” Rymer pointed out sedately.

    “You must get a new Church for the new socialist society,” was my answer to that.

    “Are you a socialist, would you say?” he asked, sitting up.

    This was the counter-attack.

    “I belong to no party, seeing that, if you do, the only truth you are allowed is a partisan truth. Your judgement then must function only pragmatically. I prefer to concern myself with a non-pragmatical truth. A literature at the service of propaganda ceases to be an art: it becomes an agent of intoxication and of deception.”

    “Not a socialist,” he summed up laconically. “He says he’s not a socialist,” as it were to himself.

    “That’s not quite true, either,” I objected. “You have assured me, Rymer, that it is not necessary for your parishioners to come to church on Sunday. They can be equally good Christians by stopping at home: is that correct?”

    “Yes,” he answered with a shade of defiance.

    “Well, as a good non-church-going Christian man I cannot help being, to some degree, a socialist. Socialism is lay-Christianity. I am what a good socialist ought to be.”

    Getting up, I went over and looked out at the waving jungle. “My conscience compels me—unofficially and not as a party-man—to approve of the idea of socialism, which I understand as an attempt to realize the brotherhood of man.”

    The savage vegetation waved hysterically as a gust from the sky blew on it. “‘Socialism’ is a term that covers very different state-forms. Some are like primitive communism, some like highly-organized capitalism. ‘If there were dreams to sell, which would you buy’?”

    I returned from the window. Rymer is physically a slothful man. He was still huddled in his chair.

    “Please show me,” I said, “those new poems of yours. Those epigrams and things you spoke about in your letter. Let us forget the Sermon on the Mount and turn to the Song of Solomon.”

    “Would you really like to see them?”

    He had them wedged in a book at his side. So we passed over into the other compartment of his mind. I took one after the other verses of half a dozen lines perhaps, each emptied of anything possessing weight. Most feelings had to be excluded, ideas were his enemies.

    His lines drifted across the mind like a shadow of a bird. Some were deliberately concrete: say a feather out of a white cloud. But it was visibly dissolving as you held the paper. What he set out to fashion were words that melted as the eye rested on them. His heaviest words had come to rest on the page like the whispering leaf of a canary bush falling like a shadow upon the emerald lawn of a Persian miniature. He did not always succeed. Several were far heavier than air, and one contained an idea: it had slipped in somehow. Then he had written quite different verses, but now they were apparently always like this. As he drifted heavily through Bagwick in the costume of the Bishop’s Fool, he was, I expect, lightening a line, or looking for a word that would fall like a snowflake, a silent self-effacing word.

    I picked up the last of these pieces; even the paper on which he got the schoolmistress in Cockridge to type his verses, was the flimsiest available. He sat in a shapeless huddle in his chair, as though there were no bones inside his clothes, but a great jellyfish. His face was as careworn as that of a Chinese sage, umber-faced, umber-eyed, every furrow at its sharpest and with the expression of a miserable malefactor—one who knew that he had murdered a violet or been guilty of weighting with too ponderous a dew the rose upon the grave of his friend.

    As I lifted the sheet of paper there was a thumping in the hall and a ringing: immediately Eleanor came in to announce the Storby car. It was a little windy outside. As Rymer drooped like a dejected porpoise over the sash of the car-window I warmly shook the poet’s hand. He cheered up as I shook him and as I drove off he was singing his good-byes. I heard Eleanor’s firmer note and agitated my hat out of the window.

    I never had such a good visit again to Bagwick. Either there were young people there or Rymer was preoccupied by the worries of his cure, connected mainly with the hostile activities of the young farmer. But when he came up to London he was in better spirits. He returned to the excitements of his youth: he would have been to see a new Italian film which reminded him of the early Russian ones when he was an undergraduate. Another time he would have been to see a socialist curate in an East End parish who reported packed churches of slum-dwellers, to listen to a sensational mixture of inflammatory social doctrine and tawdry mysticism.

    Two months or more after my visit I sent him a post-card message as follows:

    “Recalling my discourse socialism and Christianity. Have just seen something written or said by David Low, the famous Cartoonist. Here it is.

    “‘If any man come to you from the Right or the Left and promise you economic security on condition that you first surrender your personal and political liberty, kick him downstairs. You won’t get the security and what is more having surrendered your liberty, you will then be in no position whatever to argue about it.’

    “I fear that Low will have lost an admirer in Bagwick.”

    Whenever I saw Rymer I made a point of enquiring if any new moves had been made, by his enemies in the parish, to have his living taken away from him. I got the impression that they had given it up as a bad job. He did not say so, but that is what I gathered was his view.

    Then one day in January, while a young Italian workman was “hacking out and reglazing” one of our hall windows, the icy wind from Siberia still blowing in, there was a knock at the front door. The young Italian went on hacking. Mr. Rushbottom, my old man of errands, my washer-up and guardian of the street-door key was standing hat in hand, counting with difficulty his silver. “Shall I see who it is, sir?” he enquired. I asked him to do so, and he went out into the hall. A moment later he returned, practically walking backwards with his customary exaggerated deference. He was followed by the massive form of Rymer, limping, and with a large black patch over his left eye. The Rymer that looked at me out of the other eye was a stranger.

    “Rymer, of all unexpected visitors!”

    “I’m sorry,” the stranger said.

    “Aren’t you cold? Come over here and sit by the fire.”

    “I’m not cold,” said the stranger.

    “Sit down,” I repeated. “Have you hurt yourself?”

    “No. I have not hurt myself.”

    “No? And you are limping, too. Bad luck. One moment, I will settle with Mr. Rushbottom.”

    I accelerated Mr. Rushbottom’s ritual of the-change-out-of-a-pound, dismissed him with old-world courtesy on both sides—a bow from Mr. Rushbottom at the door towards the ominous vault of Rymer’s back. That finished, I returned to the fire, facing my visitor.

    “You look as if you had been fighting,” I observed.

    “I have,” said the stranger.

    Gradually I grew accustomed to the lonely eye, staring at me with a new expression. It was not the eye of the Bishop’s Fool. Samuel Hartley Rymer was there, as he had begun: the parson that was underneath the rags and patches—which he was not wearing today: the man who played the Bishop’s Fool for my entertainment. Even the poet had deserted this forlorn figure.

    All those attributes removed, the personality was as it were undressed. However, this sort of psychological nudity was presented to me with dramatic satisfaction, so the old Rymer was there after all, peering at me dully out of his one eye.

    There was a long silence. Rymer looked down at the floor. The “hacking and glazing” the other side of the door filled the room with violent sound. Rymer turned towards the door.

    “Who is that?” he enquired.

    “Why, that is an Italian workman,” I told him, “putting in a new pane of glass. He cannot speak, nor can he understand, the English language.”

    A silence ensued.

    “See this?” He pointed to the black patch obscuring his left eye.

    “I do,” I nodded.

    “The farmer did that,” he told me, panting a little.

    “I am sorry, Rymer. How disgusting.”

    “Yes, I’ve come up to see a lawyer. And a doctor.”

    There was a short deep silence.

    Several deep groans broke from him like successive belches. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his uninjured eye.

    “Will this lead to anything tiresome?” I asked him.

    “Lead to anything! I have been told to pack. I am to move into rooms in Storby. The Archdeacon came over last night. I was still in bed, he came into the room and told me no other course was open to them, I must go at once. I asked him what I had done. I have done nothing, people have done things to me. It is not I who should move away from the neighbourhood, it is Jack Cox. But they are such liars, a lot of people have come forward to testify that I… was drunk.”

    “You drunk!”

    “Drunk. They say that I stank of whisky. I never drink anything at all; even if I have people to lunch or to dinner and buy a bottle of wine for them at the grocer’s in Cockridge I never have any myself.”

    This I was able to confirm.

    “I noticed,” I said, “when you brought a bottle of claret back for lunch one day, that you drank nothing yourself. Here, I have offered you everything from beer to burgundy—certainly you do not drink. You’re the driest man I ever met.”

    “No, I don’t drink. But they say I do and that’s all that matters.”

    “A beastly situation! How did it all come to pass? You seem to have a lovely black eye.”

    He told me then how he had been trapped. Knowing him as I do it was not difficult to reconstruct the scene. I could see him as clearly as if I had been there, attempting to extricate himself. But a clergyman is a very easy prey, and this one perhaps especially so. He was a most unpractical man and at the same time over-confident in himself. His was so subjective a temperament that he was disposed to feel he could subdue to his will the most resistant fact. He behaved often as though the objective world were clay to be fashioned—not rock to negotiate. If a solid fact came into collision with him, as in this case for instance with his eye, he would be nonplussed.

    How things began was as follows. A married woman in the village in whom his wife and he had taken an interest (I suppose because she was a bad hat) had got herself in a fix. She had stolen something in a shop in Storby, and the presence of the stolen article in the house had led to difficulties—the details are immaterial. He wanted to ask his wife to come down and see this woman, and he went into “The Marquess of Salisbury” to telephone to the Rectory.

    The public telephone was situated at the far end of a passage, and in order to reach it one passed the two doors leading into, first, the public bar, and, next, the saloon bar. It was Saturday afternoon about two o’clock and there were people in both bars. As he passed the second door, which was open, he saw Jack Cox at the bar with two other farmers. He telephoned, and, having done so, as he turned around he found Jack Cox was standing there in the narrow passage looking at him.

    “Ah, hallo, Jack. I thought I saw you inside with Joliffe.”

    But Cox did not speak. What was more, he did not move and there was no room to pass him.

    Rymer is the most pacific and friendly of men, for all his arrogance, and I honour him for it, I cannot imagine him speaking roughly to anybody. Cox was plainly barring his way out and it might be assumed that he had been drinking enough for his ego to have swollen. There was probably nothing to be done but to push him out of the way. But English clergymen are not supposed to push human obstacles out of the way.

    “Well, Jack,” said Rymer, as if addressing an awkward child. He rested his shoulder against the wall and crossed one leg over the other, as though settling down for a chat. “How is the farm? I must run up there and pay you a visit. I’ve been intending to for some time.”

    “I shouldn’t,” said Cox.

    “Oh, why not, Jack?” he sang musically, with a teasing note, as if Jack was being a little silly.

    “Because I’ll kick you out of it on your bloody neck. That’s why.”

    “But why? That’s nonsense, Jack. Aren’t we friends?”

    At this point the most pacific clergyman should have taken steps to bring this colloquy to an end. Not so Rymer. No, he would charm this enraged animal into docility.

    “Jack,” he coaxed, “you’ve got this all wrong you know. You are not pleased with me, of course I know that, but you’ve got the wrong idea about me. Let’s talk it over, Jack! Shall I come up and see you tomorrow?”

    “Yes, come and convert me to communism. You’ve tried it on all the men who work for me. Come up and try it on me. But first of all take that.”

    With which he hit Rymer, the blow breaking two of the new set of Health teeth. Rymer straightened himself in a bound, putting his arms up in front of him—not pugilistically but to create an obstacle, and advancing at the same time: but Cox sprang to one side and shot in a second blow which brought the blood out of his nose.

    Jack Cox, whom I have seen, is half Rymer’s size, a little legginged English yeoman with a reddish bullet head. Although much older, I should suppose the larger could have annihilated the smaller had he wanted to. In this case the annihilation took a different form. With a great roar of “Jaaack!” which echoed all over “The Marquess of Salisbury”, the Man of God, as if in an access of love, flung himself upon Jack Cox and folded him in an ardent maternal embrace. Dropping blood all over Jack’s face and shoulders—when they caught sight of them people got the impression that Cox had been half murdered—Rymer practically carried him out of the public house.

    “Now, Jack Cox! Will you behave yourself,” he croaked huskily and breathlessly in Jack’s ear, as he hugged him under the inn sign of a bearded man, ostentatiously plastered with stars and medals.

    Those in the bars had come out into the street and people had come out of their houses, men, women and children, so that by now most of Bagwick was watching him. They did not watch in silence. The greater part of the men were Cox’s labourers. Rymer was surprised at the hostility towards himself. He had always believed himself popular and several of the hostile faces he could see as he struggled with his foully cursing prisoner belonged to men with whom only recently he had had most friendly conversations about labour conditions. But apparently they hated him! He thought inevitably of Christ and the Jewish populace.

    His tattered suit, under the strain of this violent encounter, was showing signs of disintegrating. Several patches had been torn off by Cox and he could hear a man derisively shouting: “Hi, sir, ye ’comin’ onstuck! Why don’t ee get t’misses to sew ee together!” But voices on all sides gave him very little comfort—the great tattered bleeding clergyman, hugging and heaving this way and that the little farmer, who was spitting insults up into his face like a little geyser of wrath, was not the sort of man to appeal to Hodge. He heard them cry: “Let him go! You coward, stand up to him!” “Trip him up, Jack! Kick him, Jack, he’ll drop yer then!” “Murder! Parson’s murdering Jack Cox!” There were no counter-cries to these. All were against him.

    Then Bill Crockett, the village “red”, arrived on the scene. Rymer could hear him coming and his heart sank. It only needed Bill Crockett to consummate the scandal. It would become a political issue, that man could be guaranteed to make political capital out of a dogfight. The “red’s” voice could be heard in raucous argument not far away, though there was so much noise he could not hear what he was saying. Rymer for the first time began to despair—this was just what Cox wanted. “Go away, Bill Crockett!” he called. But he had loosened his hold a little in order to expand his chest to shout, and Cox managed to jab him under the rib. Suddenly Crockett was shouting in his ear, “Squeeze the life out of the dirty little exploiter, Mr. Rymer. Teach him to soak the poor!” “Go away, Bill, for Heaven’s sake!” Rymer panted. But Crockett was kicking Cox on the shin-bone in his ideological enthusiasm. There was an indignant roar from Cox’s chorus, and out of the corner of his eye Rymer could see Bill Crockett exchanging blows with one of Cox’s men.

    Rymer became more depressed, confused and obsessed with the dread of the consequences every minute. “This is a bad dream. It cannot be happening!” was the semi-comforting idea that helped to sustain him.

    Releasing Jack Cox, and stepping back, he said:

    “Jack, let us put a stop to this disgraceful scene. You see what is going on. It does credit to neither of us. Do be sensible, Jack, and stop striking me. I am a clergyman, you know I cannot strike you back. It is cowardly to attack me.”

    Cox’s little eyes shone with malice as he stood listening and his little fists were tightly clenched. One of his little fists flew up into Rymer’s face. That is how he got his “shiner”. This nearly sent him to the ground; it also made him angry. He sprang at his enemy before the little fists could be used again and this time pinned him to the wall of the inn—holding him as before in his arms but up against the brick wall. That way it was less hard work, the wall assisting. Not of course that Cox remained just a bundle in his arms; he kicked, jerked this way and that, and stamped on Rymer’s toes. Nor, of course, did the people round them give him any peace and they might suddenly intervene in favour of their boss. Bleeding, perspiring, panting, he rode his little nightmare in a chaos of shouts, oaths, kicks, and chatter. The shrill voices of women pierced the murky fever of his mind. Mrs. Rossiter’s voice was the nearest and shrillest. His left eye was closing up now, so what happened to the right of him (the brick wall being in front) was less in his field of vision and less distinct.

    He could see no issue to this but, as a final absurdity, a stand-up fight with the farmer—for as he struggled in a hot blur his mind darted about seeking a means of escape. He saw the headlines in the Storby papers, “Fighting Parson. Riot in Bagwick. Farmer Cox’s story.” For more than a decade this man had been his enemy and it was most unlikely that he would let him off with anything short of the extremity of humiliation and scandal. His appeals to “Jack” he saw had been absurd. There was always Providence—it even passed through his mind that the Archdeacon might pass that way. He ran through all the most unlikely visitants before reaching his wife. But Eleanor had said on the telephone that she would run down in the car almost at once, so it was after all in her that the best hope of intervention lay. He would hold this little rat pinioned to the wall until Eleanor stopped the car a few yards away, jumped out and hurried over to “The Marquess of Salisbury”. She would of course be horrified. “My poor darling!” she would cry when she saw his face, which was in a bit of a mess. And when she noticed Jack Cox was unmarked wouldn’t she just give Jack a piece of her mind which he richly deserved—and these brutes too, standing around here and allowing their Rector… well, he was their Rector!

    So in a sense he became numbed to outer sensations, he no longer heard the invective directed at him by his captive, he prosecuted the locking up of the little fists of Cox as an automaton. His mind supplied a feverish daydream to distract him as he rocked about on top of Cox. It ran on like a clockwork producing consoling images.

    But Jack Cox began to wriggle and to sink—he was slipping down all the time. Rymer tried to pull him up, but he had got down almost on his knees. Rymer at last was obliged to slip after him until he was on his knees too. It was impossible to hold him like that. He had to throw him over on his back, an operation he found none too easy. He did at last get him over, receiving a nasty punch or two in the process, and he then lay on top of him. Perhaps the earth would help him to hold Jack Cox better than the wall had.

    Meanwhile this was psychologically a less satisfactory position. He would have looked, to anyone suddenly arriving on the scene, more like an aggressor—lying there on top of a man as if he were a victorious wrestler, than he would have while they were both on their feet, and he obviously pinioning Cox’s arms, in the way a quite gentle police constable might. That, Heaven knows, was not a pretty picture: but this was a worse picture—should the Bishop happen at that moment to drive through Bagwick. He shuddered as he thought of the Bishop’s reaction on finding one of his clergymen lying on top of a man in the street, surrounded by a jeering crowd.

    He panted on top of Cox and it was much more difficult in this position to immobilize him. Their bodies lay parallel to the houses so he looked up at the road before him, the direction of the Rectory. Eleanor was taking her time!—or had something made it difficult for her to get away? (He refused to say impossible: difficult, perhaps.) Then, with a howl of pain, he leapt off Cox as if suddenly a bar of red-hot iron was there in place of Farmer Cox. He rushed away doubled up, in a crouching run. There was no longer any question of holding Cox. Without thinking, a wounded animal scuttling blindly for safety, he bolted from Cox as if that harmless-looking little countryman were possessed of some malignant property, fatal to life. He did not look back; he looked nowhere, heard nothing. Crouching and scuttling up the road he made for the Rectory.

    Jeering laughter followed him. Everyone was laughing and chattering, great hilarity prevailed in Bagwick as their Rector ran away from it screaming with pain. “Take it to y’missus, parson, she ’ull fix it for ’ee,” one of them called after him, a gust of fresh laughter beginning before the jeer ended. But the malice of Bagwick took a more tangible form. Mrs. Rossiter’s Jacko, from the start at his heels, now ran level with him, and, to round off the whole performance, plunged his teeth into Rymer’s calf. “First Jack—then Jacko!” as I said when he told me of the payment of that long-outstanding debt—pulling up his trousers and pants and showing me the relevant bandage.

    Eleanor appeared almost at once, he saw her red tam-o’-shanter. As she drew near to the crouching figure, smeared with blood, dishevelled, his patches gaping and fluttering, she could scarcely believe her eyes. As she stopped the car and sprang out she exclaimed “My poor darling!” just as she had done in his fevered daydream upon Cox’s breast. But the villagers began to move back into their houses as they saw her approaching, and Jack Cox had already gone back into “The Marquess of Salisbury”, so it was too late for the telling-off even had he not been suffering such atrocious pain. In the middle of the road was the inanimate form of Bill Crockett—who at first Eleanor had supposed must have been her husband’s victim.

    But Rymer was, it seems, practically inarticulate and she helped him tenderly into the car, saying “My poor darling!” again as she did so. One of the many thuggish tricks included in commando-training had been utilized by the farmer (who had been exempted from military service because of his farm but who had learnt a few of the best thug-tricks for use in civil life). All the facts were sorted out afterwards; Eleanor saw it was no time to ask questions. She turned the car round and with all speed made for home.

    His story greatly shocked me. I felt sorry about him as I should with a child. The majority of men are so cunning and practical, such little strategists. They would have known exactly what to do. They would in any case never have found themselves with a drunken farmer in their arms outside a public house.

    Rymer’s departure from my flat was rather sudden. He recalled the hospital hours: I offered to go with him but he would not allow me to do that. He hobbled past the Italian workman who was still glazing though he had stopped hacking. Rymer’s back went slowly along the corridor; that was more than six months ago and it is the last I have seen or heard of him. I have written several times but received no reply. I am beginning to wonder whether Rymer exists or whether he is not, rather, a figment of my imagination.