IV
The pageant proceeded merrily; these were merry days. And because it was rumoured that men who fought hard also drank hard, the brethren of the blue ribbon at last perceived their opportunity and seized upon it with all the vigour and tenacity which belong to those reared upon a cocoa diet. Denying the divinity of the grape, they concealed their treason against Bacchus beneath a cloak of national necessity, and denied others that which they did not want themselves. They remained personally immune because no one thought of imposing a tax upon temperance-meetings, hot-water bottles and air-raid shelters. “Avoid a man who neither drinks nor smokes,” was one of Don’s adages. “He has other amusements.”
Paul continued his pursuit of the elusive thread interwoven in modern literature, and made several notable discoveries. “Contemplation of the mountainous toils of Balzac and Dumas fills me with a kind of physical terror,” he said to Don on one occasion. “It is an odd reflection that they would have achieved immortality just the same if they had contented themselves respectively with the creation of Madame Marnefle and the girl with the golden eyes, D’Artagnan and Chicot. The memory of Dumas is enshrined in his good men, that of Balzac in his bad women. One represents the active Male principle, the Sun, the other the passive Feminine, or the Moon. I have decided that Dumas was the immediate reincarnation of a musketeer, and Balzac of a public prosecutor.”
“Pursuing this interesting form of criticism,” said Don, “at once so trenchant and so unobjectionable, to what earlier phase should you ascribe the wit of G. K. Chesterton for example?”
“To the personal influence of Dr. Johnson and his contemporaries. H. G. Wells would seem to have had no earthly experiences since he was a priest of Bel, or if he had they were comparatively colourless. Rudyard Kipling knew and loved the spacious times of Elizabeth. How clearly we can trace the Roman exquisite in Walter Pater and the bravo in George Moore. Stevenson was a buccaneer in whom repentance came too late, and who suffered the extreme penalty probably under Charles II. The author of The Golden Bough was conceivably a Chaldean librarian, and from the writings of Anatole France steps forth shadowy a literary religieux of the sixteenth century; but it is when we come to consider such cases as those of Spencer and Darwin that we meet with insurmountable obstacles. The patientiotype process of Victor Hugo defies this system of analysis also, as does the glorious humanity of Mark Twain, and although Pinero proclaims himself a wit of the Regency, Bernard Shaw’s spiritual pedigree is obscure. Nevertheless, all are weavers of the holy carpet, and our lives are drawn into the loom. All began weaving in the childhood of the world and each has taken up the thread again at his appointed hour.”
Paul spent a great part of his time in Jules Thessaly’s company. Thessaly had closed his town house, and was living in chambers adjoining Victoria Street. His windows commanded a view of an entrance to Westminster Cathedral, “from whence upward to my profane dwelling,” he declared, “arises an odour of sanctity.” From Thessaly’s flat they set out upon many a strange excursion, one night visiting a private gaming-house whose patrons figured in the pages of Debrett, and, perhaps on the following evening, Thessaly’s car would take them to a point in the West India Dock Road, from whence, roughly attired, they would plunge into the Asiatic underworld which lies hidden beneath the names of Three Colt Street and Pennyfields. They visited a foul den in Limehouse where a crook-backed Chinaman sat rocking to and fro before a dilapidated wooden joss in the light of a tin paraffin lamp, listened to the rats squealing under the dirty floor and watched men smoke opium. They patronised “revue” East and West, that concession to the demand of youth long exiled from feminine society which had superseded the legitimate drama. “There are three ingredients essential to the success of such an entertainment,” Thessaly pronounced: “fat legs, thin legs, and legs.” They witnessed a knuckle-fight in Whitechapel between a sailorman and a Jewish pugilist. The referee was a member of a famous sporting club, and the purse was put up by a young peer on leave from the bloody shambles before Ypres. “Our trans-Tiber evenings,” Paul termed these adventures.
He had seized upon a clue to the ills of the world and he pursued it feverishly. “If men realised, as they realise that physical illness follows physical excess, that for every moment of pain unnecessarily inflicted upon any living creature—a horse, a dog, a cage-bird—they must suffer themselves a worse pang, would not the world be a better place?” he asked. “That fighting peer is accounted a fine fellow by his companions, and in an earlier life, when the unshaped destinies of men were being rough-hewn with sword and axe, he was a fine fellow. But that earlier influence now is checking his development. If he could realise that he will probably be reborn a weakling doomed to suffer the buffets of the physically strong, he would doubtless reconsider his philosophy. He has lost track of himself. Our childish love of animals, which corresponds to a psychic pre-natal phase, is a memory which becomes obscured as the fleshly veil grows denser—which the many neglect, but which the wise man cherishes.”
“Heredity plays its part, too,” said Thessaly.
“Quite so. It is difficult, sometimes almost impossible, to distinguish between the influences of heredity and those of pre-existence.”
“More especially since few of us know our own fathers, and none of us our grandfathers. If our family tree record a line of abstemious forbears, and we mysteriously develop a partiality for neat rum and loose company, we hesitate whether to reproach ourselves for the vices of a previous existence or to disparage the morality of our grandmother.”
Strange stories won currency at this time, too. Arising as he had done out of a cataclysm, Paul Mario by many was accepted as the harbinger of a second Coming. His claims were based upon no mere reiteration of ancient theories, but upon a comprehensible system which required no prayer-won faith from its followers, but which logically explained life, death, and those parts of the Word of Jesus Christ which orthodoxy persisted in regarding as “divine mysteries.” Paul’s concept of God and the Creation was substantially identical with that of Jacob Boehme and the Hermetic Philosophers. He showed the Universe to be the outcome of a Thought. Unexpressed Will desired to find expression, to become manifest. Such was the birth of Desire. Since in the beginning this Will was an Eye which beheld nothing because nothing outside Itself existed, It fashioned a Mirror and therein saw all things in Itself. This Mirror was the Eternal Mother, the Will the Eternal Father. The Eternal Father, beholding Himself and His wonders mirrored in the Eternal Mother, willed that being passive they should become active. Thought became materialised, force and space begot Motion and the Universe was. As illustrating the seven qualities through which the Divine energy operated, Paul quoted the following lines:—
“There are seven degrees in the holy sphere
That girdles the outer skies;
There are seven hues in the atmosphere
Of the Spirit Paradise;
And the seven lamps burn bright and clear
In the mind, the heart, and the eyes
Of the angel-spirits from every world
That ever and ever arise.
There are seven ages the angels know
In the courts of the Spirit Heaven:
And seven joys through the spirit flow
From the morn of the heart till even;
Seven curtains of light wave to and fro
Where the seven great trumpets the angels blow,
And the throne of God hath a seven-fold glow,
And the angel hosts are seven.
And a spiral winds from the worlds to the suns,
And every star that shines
In the path of degrees for ever runs,
And the spiral octave climbs;
And a seven-fold heaven round every one
In the spiral order twines.
There are seven links from God to man,
There are seven links and a threefold span;
And seven spheres in the great degree
Of one created immensity.
There are seven octaves of spirit love
In the heart, the mind, and the heavens above:
And seven degrees in the frailest thing,
Though it hath but a day for its blossoming.”
It seemed as though all mysticism had culminated in Paul Mario, and so immense was his influence that the English Church was forced into action. Such heterodox views had been expressed from the pulpit since The Gates had cast its challenge at the feet of orthodoxy that the bishops unanimously pronounced its teachings to be heretical, and forbade their adoption under divers pains and penalties. A certain brilliant and fashionable preacher resigned his living, and financed by a society established for the purpose, prepared to build a great church upon a site adjoining the Strand, to be called the New Temple. A definite schism thereupon was created, and so insistent became the demand for more light, for a personal message, that Paul was urged by a committee, including some of the foremost thinkers of the day, to deliver a series of addresses at the Albert Hall. He had lighted a veritable bonfire, and its flames were spreading to the four points of the compass. Even Islâm, that fanatic rock against which reform dashes itself in vain, was stirred at last, and the Sherîf of Mecca issued a firmân to the mosques within his province authorising an intensive campaign against the Korân Inglîsi—for Paul had embraced the tenets of the Moslem faith within his new Catholic creed.
At one of his clubs, which he visited rarely, he met one evening a bishop famed as a religious educationalist, a large red cleric having bristling eyebrows resembling shrimps and the calculating glance of a judge of good port. This astute man of the world attacked him along peculiar lines. “There must always be a hierarchy, Mr. Mario,” he said. “Buddha—if such a personage ever existed—endeavoured to dispense with a priesthood and a ritual, but his followers have been unable to do so. You aver that the Kingdom of God is within ourselves, but if every man were able to find the Kingdom of God within himself he would have no occasion to pay others to find it for him. What would become of the poor churchman?”
“I have not proposed the abolition of the old priesthood,” Paul replied. “I have proposed the establishment of a new. Only by appreciation of the fact that Man is the supreme Mystery can man solve the Riddle of the Universe, and what is there of mystery about your tennis-playing curate? The gossiper whom we have seen nibbling buttered scones at five o’clock tea mounts the pulpit and addresses us upon the subject of the Holy Trinity. On this subject naturally he has nothing to tell us, and naturally we are bored. Rather than abolish ritual I would embellish it, calling to my aid all the resources of art and music. I would invest my ritual with awe and majesty, and my priests should be a class apart.”
“Such an appeal is not for every man, Mr. Mario. Your New Temple would be designed to inculcate the truth upon minds which have already received it; a thankless task. We seek the good of the greatest number, and you must bring your gods to earth if you would raise your worshippers to heaven. After all, simplicity rather than knowledge is the keynote of happiness.”
“You would trick your penitents into paradise?”
“Perhaps I am obtuse, but it seems to me that this is your design, not mine.”
“What does the Church offer,” said Paul, “that the human mind can grasp? What hope do you extend to the sorrowing widow of a man who has died unrepentant and full of sin? Eternal loss. Is this to be her reward for years of faithful love? If, upon her death-bed, the woman of atrocious life can be bullied into uttering words of penitence she is ‘saved.’ If she die as she lived, if a shot, a knife, a street accident cut her off in the midst of her sinning, she is ‘lost.’ A moment of panic wins salvation for the one; a life-time of self-denial counts for nothing in the case of another. If I go out into the street and strike down a bawd—a thing lower than the lowest animal and more noxious—I hang. If I don the King’s uniform and accept the orders of an officer, I may slay good men and bad, come who may, and die assured of heaven. It is war. Why is it war? Simply because it is slaughter as opposed to slaying. Our cause, you will say, is just. So is my cause against the pander.”
“You are, then, a novel sort of conscientious objector?”
“Not at all. If at the price of my life I could exterminate every living thing that is Prussian I should do it. But I know why I should do it, and why I should be justified. If one troubled with doubts upon such a score were to ask your cloth to resolve them, he would be told that he fought for King and Country, or something equally beside the point. Patriotism, my lord, becomes impossible when we realise that in turn we have inhabited many countries. You were once perhaps an Austrian, and may yet be a Turk.”
“The theory of re-incarnation, Mr. Mario, helps to people our lunatic asylums. I was assured recently by a well-known brain specialist that the claimants to the soul of Cleopatra would out-number the Hippodrome ‘Beauty Chorus.’”
“You speak of the ‘theory’ of re-incarnation, yet it was taught by Christ.”
“There we arrive at a definite point of divergence, Mr. Mario,” said his lordship. “Let us agree to differ, for I perceive that no other form of agreement is possible between us.”
“There is something frightfully unsatisfactory about bishops,” declared Thessaly, when Paul spoke of this conversation to him. “Many vicars and deans are quite romantic people, but immediately they are presented with a mitre they become uninteresting and often begin to write to the Times. Besides, no one but Forbes Robertson could hope to look impressive in a mitre. It is most unsuitable headgear for an elderly gentleman.”