Conversations of the Youngman in Grey

When Sir Giles reached the station that morning he met a young man in grey just issuing from the booking-office. He stopped on the pavement and surveyed him. The stranger returned his gaze with a look of considerable interest.

“Are you running away, Sir Giles?” he said rather loudly.

“No,” Sir Giles said at once. “Are you Persimmons’s bugbear?”

“No,” the stranger answered; “yours, much more truly. I like to watch you running.”

“I am not running,” Sir Giles almost shouted. “I was going today anyhow, and I have told Persimmons a thousand times I won’t be dragged into his Boxing Day glee parties. And, anyhow, he’s getting a bore . . . Haven’t I met you before?”

“Once or twice,” the stranger said. “We shall meet again, no doubt. I like to watch your mind working. So long as you don’t make yourself too much of a nuisance.”

Sir Giles’s overpowering curiosity, freed from other desires, thrust him forward. “And who are you?”

“I will tell you, if you like,” the stranger said, smiling, “for at least you are really curious. I am Prester John, I am the Graal and the Keeper of the Graal. All enchantment has been stolen from me, and to me the Vessel itself shall return.”

Sir Giles stepped back. “Nonsense!” he said. “Prester John, indeed! However, it’s not my affair. You don’t seem to have kept the Graal very well.” He stepped towards the station, but paused as he heard the stranger’s voice behind him.

“This is the second time we have met, Giles Tumulty,” it said. “I warn you that one day when you meet me you shall find me too like yourself to please you. It is a joyous thing to study the movements of men as you study insects under a stone, but you shall run a weary race when I and the heavens watch you and laugh at you and tease you to go a way that you would not. Then you shall scrabble in the universe as an ant against the smoothness of the inner side of the Graal, and none shall pick you out or deliver you for ever. There is a place in the pit where I shall be found, but there is no place for you who do not enter the pit, though you thrust others in.”

During the high tones that had been used at the beginning of their conversation Sir Giles had glanced once or twice at a porter who was lounging near. But the porter had not seemed to take any notice, and even now, while this warning sounded through the bright morning air, he still leant idly against the station wall. Sir Giles, while the stranger was still speaking, went up to him. “What platform for the London train?” he said sharply, and the porter answered at once, “Over the bridge, sir.” Sir Giles looked at him hard, but there was no suggestion of anything unusual on the man’s face, though the stern voice still rang on. Tumulty shivered a little, and thought to himself, “I must be imagining it; Persimmons is wrecking my nerve.” An ant scrabbling in an empty chalice — a foul idea! He looked back as he entered the booking-office; the stranger was strolling away down the station entrance.

Prester John, if it was he indeed, passed on down the country roads till he came near the Rectory, having timed himself so well that he met Mr. Batesby emerging. The clergyman recognized at once his companion of the day before, and greeted him amiably. “Still staying here?” he said. “Well, you couldn’t do better. ‘Through pleasures and palaces though we may roam, there’s no place like home.’ Though, strictly speaking, I expect Fardles isn’t your home. But a church is our home everywhere — in England, of course I mean. I suppose you don’t find the churches abroad really homely.”

“It depends,” the young man said, “on one’s idea of a home. Not like an English home perhaps.”

“No,” Mr. Batesby said, “they haven’t, I gather, a proper sense of the family. Didn’t one of the poets say that Heaven lies about us in our family? And where else, indeed?”

“What then,” the stranger asked, “do you mean by the Kingdom of Heaven?”

“Well, we have to understand,” Mr. Batesby said. As Ludding had increased in brutality, and Gregory in hatred, so, in conversation with the stranger, Mr. Batesby’s superior protectiveness seemed to increase; he became more than ever a guide and guard to his fellows, and the Teaching Church seemed to walk, a little nervously and dragging its feet, in the dust behind him. “We have to understand. Of course, some take it to mean the Church — but that’s very narrow. I tell my young people in confirmation classes the Kingdom of Heaven is all good men — and women, of course . . . and women. Just that. Simple perhaps, but helpful.”

“And good men,” the other said, “are —?”

“Oh, well, good men, one knows good men,” Mr. Batesby said. “By their fruits, you know. They do not kill. They do not commit adultery. They are just kind and honest and thrifty and hard-working, and so on. Good — after all, one feels goodness.”

“The Kingdom of Heaven is to be felt among the honest and industrious?” the stranger asked. “And yet it’s true. The Church is indeed marvellously protected from error.”

“Yes,” Mr. Batesby agreed. “The Faith once delivered. We can’t go wrong if we stick to the old paths. What was good enough for St. Paul is good enough for me.”

“When he fell to the ground beyond Damascus and was blinded?” the stranger asked. “Or when he persecuted the Christians in Jerusalem? Or when he taught them in Macedonia?”

“Ah, it was the same Paul all the time,” Mr. Batesby rather triumphantly answered. “Just as it’s the same me. I can grow older, but I don’t change.”

“So that when the Son of Man cometh He shall find faith upon the earth? It was beyond His expectation,” the stranger said.

“The five righteous in Sodom,” Mr. Batesby reminded him.

“There were not five righteous in Sodom,” the young man said. “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem! . . . ”

“Well, not strictly perhaps,” Mr. Batesby allowed, a little hurt, but recovering himself. “But a parable has to be applied, hasn’t it? We mustn’t take it too literally, too much in the foot of the letter, as the French so wittily say. More witty than moral the French, I’m afraid.”

So conversing, they walked on till they came to the village, where, at the inn door, Inspector Colquhoun was regarding it pensively. He looked unrecognizingly at them as they approached. But the stranger stopped and smiled at him in greeting.

“Why, inspector,” he said, “what are you doing down here?”

The inspector looked at him critically. “I’ve no doubt it’s your business,” he said, “but I’m quite sure it’s mine. I don’t seem to remember your face.”

“Oh, many a time!” the stranger said lightly; “but I won’t ask you any questions. Mr. Batesby . . . do you know Inspector Colquhoun? Inspector, this is Mr. Batesby, who is looking after the parish for the time being.”

The two others murmured inaudibly, and the stranger went on, “You ought to have a kindness for one another, for on you two the universe reposes. Movement and stability, aspiration and order . . . ”

“Yes,” Mr. Batesby broke in, “I’ve often thought something like that. In fact, I remember once in one of my sermons I said that the police were as necessary for the Ten Commandments as the Church was. More so nowadays, when there’s so little respect for the law.”

“There never was much that I could ever hear of,” the inspector said, willing to spend a quarter of an hour chatting to the local clergyman. “No, I don’t think things are much worse.”

“No, not in one way,” Mr. Batesby said. “Man had fallen just as far twenty or thirty years ago as he has today. But the war made a great difference. Men nowadays don’t seem so willing to be taught.”

“Ah, there you have me, sir,” the inspector answered. “I don’t have much to do with teaching them, only with those who won’t be taught. And I’ve seen some of them look pretty white,” he added viciously.

“Ah, a guilty conscience,” Mr. Batesby said. “Yes — guilt makes the heavy head to bend, the saddened heart to sob, and happy they who ere their end can feel remorseful throb. Love castest out perfect fear. Nothing is sadder, I think, than to see a man or woman afraid.”

“It doesn’t do to trust to it.” The inspector shook his head. “It may drive them almost silly any moment, and make them dangerous. I’ve known a little whipper-snapper fairly gouge a policeman’s eyes out.”

“Really?” Mr. Batesby said. “Dear me, how sad! I don’t think I know what fear is — temperamentally. Of course, an accident . . . ”

“You have never been afraid of anyone?” the stranger said, his voice floating through the air as if issuing from it.

“Yes,” the inspector said, “and pretty often.”

“Not, I think, afraid of anyone,” Mr. Batesby said, mysteriously accentuating the preposition. “Of course, every priest has unpleasant experiences. Once, I remember, I was making a call on a farmer and a pig got into the room, and we couldn’t get it to go away. And there are callers.”

“Callers are the devil — I mean, the devil of a nuisance,” the inspector remarked.

“You see, you can get rid of them,” the clergyman said. “But we have to be patient. ‘Offend not one of these little ones, lest a millstone is hanged about his neck.’ Patience, sympathy, help. A word in season bringeth forth his fruit gladly.”

The air stirred about him to the question. “And do these cause you fear?”

“Oh, not fear! by no means fear!” Mr. Batesby said. “Though, of course, sometimes one has to be firm. To pull them together. To try and give them a backbone. I have known some poor specimens. I remember meeting one not far from here. He looked almost sick and yellow, and I did what I could to hearten him up.”

“Why was he looking so bad?” the inspector asked.

“Well, it was a funny story,” Mr. Batesby said, looking meditatively through the stranger, who was leaning against the inn wall, “and I didn’t quite understand it all. Of course, I saw what was wrong with him at once. Hysteria. I was very firm with him. I said, ‘Get a hold on yourself.’ He’d been talking to a Wesleyan.”

Mr. Batesby paused long enough for the inspector to say, with a slight frown, “I’m almost a Wesleyan myself,” gave him a pleasant smile as if he had been waiting for this, and went on: “Quite, quite, and very fine preachers many of them are. But a little unbalanced sometimes — emotional, you know. Too much emotion doesn’t do, does it? Like poetry and all that, not stern enough. Thought, intelligence, brain — that’s what helps. Well, this man had been saved — he called it saved, and there he was as nervous as could be.”

“What was he nervous about if he’d been saved?” the inspector asked idly.

Mr. Batesby smiled again. “It seems funny to say it in cold blood,” he said, “but, do you know, he was quite sure he was going to be killed? He didn’t know how, he didn’t know who, he didn’t know when. He’d just been saved at a Wesleyan mission hall and he was going to be killed by the devil. So I heartened him up.”

The inspector had come together with a jerk; the young stranger was less energetic and less observable than the flowers in the inn garden behind him.

“Who was this man?” the inspector said. “Did you hear any more of him?”

“Nothing much,” Mr. Batesby said. “I rather gathered that he’d been employed somewhere near here and was going to Canada, but he wasn’t very clear. It was over in my own church that I actually met him, not at Fardles. So I lent him a little book — two, as a matter of fact. One was called Present Helps and one was The Sand and the Rock. I must have given away hundreds of them. He sent them back to me a week or two after from London.”

“Did he write a letter with them?” the inspector asked.

“Well, he did, in fact,” Mr. Batesby said. “A touching little note — very touching. It shows how ideas get hold of people. I believe I’ve got it somewhere.” He felt in his pocket, and from a number of papers extracted a folded letter. “Here we are,” he said.

REVEREND SIR— I return you your books, which you very kindly lent me. I’ve no doubt they’re quite right, but they don’t seem to mean the precious Blood. They don’t help me when the devil comes. He’ll kill me one day, but my blessed Saviour will have me then, I know, but I daren’t think of it. I hope he won’t hurt me much. It’s quite right, I’m not grumbling. I’ve asked for it all. And Jesus will save me at last.

Thank you for the books, which I return herewith. I’ve not read them both all as I’m rather worried. I am,

Reverend Sir,

Yours faithfully,

JAMES MONTGOMERY PATTISON.

“A nice letter,” Mr. Batesby said. “But of course, the devil —!”

“Excuse me, sir,” the inspector said, “but is there any address on that letter?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Batesby, slightly surprised; “227 Thobblehurst Road, Victoria, S.W.”

“Thank you, sir; and the date?”

“May 27th,” Mr. Batesby said, staring.

“Humph,” the inspector said. “And to think it’s within two doors of my own house! A small man, you said, sir?”

“Rather small,” Mr. Batesby said. “Oh, decidedly rather small. Rather unintelligent-looking, you know. But did you know him, then?”

“I think I met him once or twice,” the inspector said. “If I should want to ask you any more questions, shall you be here?”

“I shall be at my own parish, over there: Ridings, at the Vicarage. The Duke’s house is in it you know, in the parish — Ridings Castle. I’m sorry he’s a Papist, though in a sense he was born blind.”

“Humph,” the inspector said again. “Well, I must get off. Good-bye, Sir.” He fled into the inn.

Against the grey wall Mr. Batesby saw the young stranger’s grey figure. “How silent you are,” he said. “Thinking, yes, thinking no doubt.”

“I was thinking that even a sparrow has its ghost,” the other said, “and that all things work together.”

“For good,” Mr. Batesby concluded.

“For God,” the other substituted, and moved away.

In Ridings Castle that afternoon the Duke and Kenneth endeavoured to t............