THE PROPHET IN HIS OWN HOME

Martin walked into the street with a confused sense of triumph and defeat, that confusion that comes to all sensitive men at the moment when they are stepping, against their will, from one set of conditions into another.  He had gone into that house, only half an hour ago, determined to leave Maggie for ever for his good and hers.  He came back into the street realising that he was now, perhaps for the first time, quite definitely involved in some relation with her good, bad, safe, dangerous he did not know but involved.  He had intended to tell her nothing of his marriage and he had told her.  He had intended to treat their whole meeting as something light, passing, inconsiderable he had instead treated it as something of the utmost gravity.  He had intended, above all, to prove to himself that he could do what he wished he had found that he had no power.

And so, as he stepped through the dim gold-dust of the evening light he was stirred with an immense sense of having stepped, definitely at last, across the threshold of new adventure and enterprise.  All kinds of problems were awaiting solution his relation to his father, his mother, his sister, his home, his past, his future, his sins and his weaknesses and he had meant to solve them all, as he had often solved them in the past, by simply cutting adrift.  But now, instead of that, he had decided to stay and face it all out, he had confessed at last that secret that he had hidden from all the world, and he had submitted to the will of a girl whom he scarcely knew and was not even sure that he liked.

He stopped at that for a moment and, standing in a little pool of purple light under the benignant friendliness of a golden moon new risen and solitary, he considered it.  No, he did not know whether he liked her it was interest rather that drew him, her strangeness, her strength and loneliness, young and solitary like the moon above him and yet also some feeling softer than interest so that he was suddenly touched as he thought of her and spoke out aloud:  “I’ll be good to her whatever happens, by God I’ll be good to her,” so that a chauffeur near him turned and looked with hard scornful eyes, and a girl somewhere laughed.  With all his conventional dislike of being in any way “odd” he walked hurriedly on, confused and wondering more than ever what it was that had happened to him.  Always before he had known his own mind now, in everything, he seemed to be pulled two ways.  It was as though some spell had been thrown over him.

It was a lovely evening and he walked slowly, not wishing to enter his house too quickly.  He realised that he had, during the last weeks, found nothing there but trouble.  And if Maggie wished, in spite of what he had told her, to go on with him?  And if his father, impatient at last, definitely asked him to stay at home altogether and insisted on an answer?  And if his gradually increasing estrangement with his sister broke into open quarrel?  And if, strangest of all, this religious business, that in such manifestations as the Chapel service of last night he hated with all his soul, held him after all?

He was in Garrick Street, outside the curiosity shop, his latchkey in his hand.  He stopped and stared down the street as he had done once before, weeks ago.  Was not the root of all his trouble simply this, that he was becoming against his will interested, drawn in?  That there were things going on that his common sense rejected as nonsense, but that nevertheless were throwing out feelers like the twisting threats of an octopus, touching him now, only faintly, here for a second, there for a second, but fascinating, holding him so that he could not run away?  Granted that Thurston was a charlatan, Miss Avies a humbug, his sister a fool, his father a dreamer, Crashaw a fanatic, did that mean that the power behind them all was sham?  Was that force that he had felt when he was a child simply eager superstition?  What was behind this street, this moon, these hurrying figures, his own daily life and thoughts?  Was there really a vast conspiracy, a huge involving plot moving under the cardboard surface of the world, a plot that he had by an accident of birth spied upon and discovered?

Always, every day now, thoughts, suspicions, speculations were coming upon him, uninvited, undesired, from somewhere, from some one.  He did not want them he wanted only the material physical life of the ordinary man.  It must be because he was idling.  He would get work at once, join with some one in the City, go abroad again ... but perhaps even then he would not escape.  Thoughts like those of the last weeks did not depend for their urgency on place or time.  And Maggie, she was mixed up in it all.  He was aware, as he hesitated before opening the door, of the strangest feeling of belonging to her, not love, nor passion, not sentiment even.  Only as though he had suddenly realised that with new perils he had received also new protection.

He went upstairs with a feeling that he was on the eve of events that would change his whole world.

As Martin climbed to the top of the black crooked staircase he was conscious, as though it had been shown him in a vision, that he was on the edge of some scene that might shape for him the whole course of his future life.  He had been aware, once or twice before, of such a premonition, and, as with most men, half of him had rejected and half of him received the warning.  To-day, however, there were reasons enough for thinking this no mere baseless superstition.  With Maggie, with his father, with his sister, with his own life the decision had got to be taken, and it was with an abrupt determination that he would end, at all costs, the fears and uncertainties of these last weeks that he pushed back the hall-door and entered.  He noticed at once strange garments hanging on the rack and a bright purple umbrella which belonged, as he knew, to a certain Mrs. Alweed, a friend of his mother’s and a faithful servant of the Chapel, stiff and assertive in the umbrella-stand.  There was a tea-party apparently.  Well, he could not face that immediately.  He would have to go in afterwards ... meanwhile ...

He turned down the passage, pushed back his father’s door and entered.  He paused abruptly in the doorway; there, standing in front of the window facing him, his pale chin in the air, his legs apart, supercilious and self-confident, stood Thurston.  His father’s desk was littered with papers, rustling and blowing a little in the breeze from the window that was never perfectly closed.

One candle, on the edge of the desk, its flame swaying in the air was the only light.  Martin’s first impulse was to turn abruptly back again and go up to his room.  He could not speak to that fellow now, he could not!  He half turned.  Then something stopped him: 

“Halloo!” he said.  “Where’s father?”

“Don’t know,” said Thurston, sucking the words through his teeth.  “I’ve been wanting him too.”

“Well, as he isn’t here ” said Martin fiercely.

“No use me waiting?  Quite so.  All the same I’m going to wait.”

The two figures were strangely contrasted, Martin red-brown with health, thick and square, Thurston pale with a spotted complexion, dim and watery eyes, legs and arms like sticks, his black clothes shabby and his boots dusty.

Nevertheless at that moment it was Thurston who had the power.  He moved forward from the window.  “Makes you fair sick to see me anywhere about the ’ouse, doesn’t it?  Oh, I know ...  You can’t kid me.  I’ve seen from the first.  You fair loathe the sight of me.”

“That’s nothing to do with it,” said Martin uneasily.  “Whether we like one another or not, there’s no need to discuss it.”

“Oh, isn’t there?” said Thurston, coming a little closer so that he was standing now directly under the light of the candle.  “Why not?  Why shouldn’t we?  What’s the ’arm?  I believe in discussing things myself.  I do really.  I’ve said to myself a long way back.  ’Well, now, the first time I get ’im alone I’ll ask him why ’e does dislike me.  I’ve always been civil to him,’ I says to myself, ’and yet I can’t please him so I’ll just ask him straight.’”

Martin shrugged his shoulders; he wanted to leave the room, but something in Thurston held him there.

“I suppose we aren’t the sort to get on together.  We haven’t got enough in common,” he said clumsily.

“I don’t know about that,” Thurston said in a friendly conversational tone.  “I shouldn’t wonder if we’ve got more in common than you’d fancy.  Now I’ll tell you right out, I like you.  I’ve always liked you, and what’s more I always shall.  Whatever you do ”

“I don’t care,” broke in Martin angrily, “whether you like me or not.”

“No, I know you don’t,” Thurston continued quietly.  “And I know what you think of me, too.  This is your idea of me, I reckon that I’m a pushing, uneducated common bounder that’s just using this religious business to shove himself along with; that’s kidding all these poor old ladies that ’e believes in their bunkum, and is altogether about as low-down a fellow as you’re likely to meet with.  That’s about the colour of it, isn’t it?”

Martin said nothing.  That was exactly “the colour of it.”

“Yes, well,” Thurston continued, a faint flush on his pale cheeks.  “Of course I know that all right.  And I’ll tell you the idea that I might ’ave of you only might ’ave, mind you.  Why, that you’re a stuck-up ignorant sort of feller, that’s been rolling up and down all over Europe, gets a bit of money, comes over and bullies his father, thinks ’e knows better than every one about things ’e knows nothing about whatever ”

“Look here, Thurston,” Martin interrupted, stepping forward.  “I tell you I don’t care a two-penny curse what a man like ”

“I only said might, mind you,” said Thurston, smiling.  “It’s only a short-sighted fool would think that of you really.  And I’m not a fool.  No, really, I’m not.  I’ve got quite another idea of you.  My idea is that you’re one of us whether you want to be or not, and that you always will be one of us.  That’s why I like you and will be a friend to you too.”

“I tell you I don’t want your damned friendship,” Martin cried.  “I don’t want to have anything to do with you or your opinion or your plans or anything else.”

“That’s all right,” said Thurston.  “I quite understand.  It’s natural enough to feel as you do.  But I’m afraid you’ll ’ave to ’ave something to do with me.  I’m not quite what you think me, and you’re not quite what you think yourself.  There’s two of each of us, that’s the truth of it.  I may be a sham and a charlatan, one part of me, I don’t know I’m sure.  I certainly don’t believe all your governor does.  I don’t believe all I say and I don’t say all I think.  But then ’oo does?  You don’t yourself.  I’ll even tell you straight out that when I just came into the business I laughed at the lot of ’em, your father and all.  ’A silly lot o’ softs they are,’ I said to myself, ’to believe all that nonsense.’  But now I don’t know.  When you’ve been at this game a bit you scarcely know what you do believe, that’s the truth of it.  There may be something in it after all.  Sometimes ... well, it ’ud surprise you if you’d seen all the things I have.  Oh, I don’t mean ghosts and spirits and all that kind of nonsense.  No, but the kind of thing that ’appens to people you’d never expect.  You’re getting caught into it yourself; I’ve watched you all along.  But that isn’t the point.  The point is that I’m not so bad as you think, nor so simple neither.  And life isn’t so simple, nor religion, nor love, nor anything as you think it.  You’re young yet, you know.  Very young.”

Martin turned back to the door.

“All very interesting, Thurston,” he said.  “You can think what you like, of course.  All the same, the less we see of one another ”

“Well,” said Thurston slowly, smiling.  “That’ll be a bit difficult to avoid one another, I mean.  You see, I’m going to marry your sister.”

Martin laughed.  Inside him something was saying:  “Now, look out.  This is all a trap.  He doesn’t mean what he says.  He’s trying to catch you.”

“Going to marry Amy?  Oh no, you’re not.”

Thurston did not appear to be interested in anything that Martin had to say.  He continued as though he were pursuing his own thoughts.  “Yes ... so it’ll be difficult.  I didn’t think you’d like it when you heard.  I said to Amy, ‘E won’t like it,’ I said.  She said you’d been too long away from the family to judge.  And so you have, you know.  Oh!  Amy and I’ll be right enough.  She’s a fine woman, your sister.”

Martin burst out: 

“Well, then, that settles it.  It simply settles it.  That finishes it.”

“Finishes what?” asked Thurston, smiling in a friendly way.

“Never you mind.  It’s nothing to do with you.  Has my father consented?”

“Yes ... said all ’e wanted was for Amy to be ’appy.  And so she will be.  I’ll look after her.  You’ll come round to it in time.”

“Father agrees ...  My God!  But it’s impossible!  Don’t you see?  Don’t you see?  I ...”

The sudden sense of his impotence called back his words.  He felt nothing but rage and indignation against the whole set of them, against the house they were in, the very table with the papers blowing upon it and the candle shining ...  Well, it made his own affair more simple that was certain.  He must be off right away from them all.  Stay in the house with that fellow for a brother-in-law?  Stay when ...

“It’s all right,” said Thurston, moistening his pale dry lips with his tongue.  “You’ll see it in time.  It’s the best thing that could ’appen.  And we’ve got more in common than you’d ever suppose.  We ’ave, really.  You’re a religious man, really can’t escape your destiny, you know.  There’s religious and non-religious and it doesn’t matter what your creed is, whether you’re a Christian or a ’Ottentot, there it is.  And if you’re religious, you’re religious.  I may be the greatest humbug on the market, but I’m religious.  It’s like ’aving a ’are lip you’ll be bothered with it all your life.”

But what more Thurston may have said Martin did not hear:  he had left the room, banging the door behind him.  On what was his indignation based?  Injured pride.  And was he really indignant?  Was not something within him elated, because by this he had been offered his freedom?  Thurston marry his sister? ...  He could go his own way now.  Even his father could not expect him to remain.

And he wanted Maggie urgently, passionately.  Standing for a moment there in the dark passage he wanted her.  He was lonely, disregarded, despised.

They did not care for him here, no one cared for him anywhere only Maggie who was clear-eyed and truthful and sure beyond any human being whom he had ever known.  Then, with a very youthful sense of challenging this world that had so grossly insulted him by admitting Thurston into the heart of it, he joined the tea-party.  There in the pink, close, sugar-smelling, soft atmosphere sat his mother, Amy, Mrs. Alweed and little Miss Pyncheon.  His mother, with her lace cap and white hair and soft plump hands, was pouring tea through a strainer as though it were a rite.  On her plate were three little frilly papers that had held sugary cakes, on her lips were fragments of sugar.  Amy, in an ugly grey dress, sat severely straight upon a hard chair and was apparently listening to Miss Pyncheon, but her eyes, suspicious and restless, moved like the eyes of a newly captured animal.  Mrs. Alweed, stout in pink with a large hat full of roses, smiled and smiled, waiting only for a moment when she could amble off once again into space safe on the old broad back of her family experiences, the only conversational steed to whose care she ever entrusted herself.  She had a son Hector, a husband, Mr. Alweed, and a sister-in-law, Miss Alweed; she had the greatest confidence in the absorbed attention of the slightest of her acquaintances.  “Hector, he’s my boy, you know although why I call him a boy I can’t think because he’s twenty-two and a half he’s at Cambridge, Christs College well, this morning I had a letter ...” she would begin.  She began now upon Martin.  His mind wandered.  He looked about the little room and thought of Thurston.  Why was he not more angry about it all?  He had pretended to be indignant, he had hated Thurston as he stood there ...  But had he?  Half of him hated him.  Then with a jerk Thurston’s words came back to him:  “There’s two of each of us, that’s the truth of it.”  “Two of each of us ...”  Sitting there, listening to Mrs. Alweed’s voice that flowed like a river behind him, he saw the two figures, saw them quite clearly and distinctly, flesh and blood, even clothes and voices and smile.  And he knew that all his life these two figures had been growing, waiting for the moment when he would recognise them.  One figure was the Martin whom he knew brown, healthy, strong and sane; a figure wearing his clothes, his own clothes, the tweeds and the cloths, the brogues and the heavy boots, the soft untidy hats; the figure was hard, definite, resolute, quarrelling, arguing, loving, joking, swearing all in the sensible way.  It was a figure that all the world had understood, that had been drunk often enough, lent other men money, been hard-up and extravagant and thoughtless.  “A good chap.”  “A sensible fellow.”  “A pal.”  “No flies on Warlock.”  That was the kind of figure.  And the life had been physical, had never asked questions, had never known morbidity, had lived on what it saw and could touch and could break ...  And the other figure!  That was, physically, less plainly seen.  No, there it was, standing a little away from the other, standing away, contemptuously, despising it, deriding it.  Fat, soft, white hanging cheeks, wearing anything to cover its body, but shining in some way through the clothes, so that it was body that you saw.  A soft body, hands soft and the colour of the flesh pale and unhealthy.  But it was the eyes that spoke:  the mouth trembled and was weak, the chin was fat and feeble, but the eyes lived, lived were eager, fighting, beseeching, longing, captive eyes!

And this figure, Martin knew, was a prey to every morbid desire, rushed to sensual excess and then crept back miserably to search for some spiritual flagellation.  Above all, it was restless, as some one presses round a dark room searching for the lock of the door, restless and lonely, cowardly and selfish, but searching and sensitive and even faithful, faithful to something or to some one ... pursued also by something or some one.  A figure to whom this world offered only opportunities for sin and failure and defeat, but a figure to whom this world was the merest shadow hiding, as a shade hides a lamp, the life within.  Wretched enough with its bad health, its growing corpulence, its weak mouth, its furtive desires, but despising, nevertheless, the strong, healthy figure beside it.  Thurston was right.  Men are not born to be free, but to fight, to the very death, for the imprisonment and destruction of all that is easiest and most physically active and most pleasant to the sight and touch ...

“And so Hector really hopes that he’ll be able to get down to us for Christmas, although he’s been asked to go on this reading party.  Of course, it’s simply a question as to whether he works better at home or with his friends.  If he were a weak character, I think Mr. Alweed would insist in his coming home, but Hector really cares for his work more than anything.  He’s never been very good at games; his short sight prevents him, poor boy, and as he very justly remarked, when he was home last holidays, ’I don’t see, mother, how I am going to do my duty as a solicitor (that’s what he hopes to be) if I don’t work now.  Many men regard Cambridge as a time for play.  Not so I.’”

“But I hope that if Hector comes home this Christmas he’ll attend the Chapel services.  The influence your father might have on such a boy as Hector, Mr. Warlock, a boy, sensitive and thoughtful ...  I was saying, Miss Pyncheon, that Hector ”

Miss Pyncheon was the soul of good-nature but she was much more than that.  She was by far the most sensible, genial, and worldly of the Inside Saints; it was, in fact, astonishing that she should be an Inside Saint at all.

Of them all she impressed Martin the most, because there was nothing of the crank about her.  She went to theatres, to the seaside in the summer, took in The Queen, and was a subscriber to Boots’ Circulating Library.  She dressed quietly and in excellent taste in grey or black and white.  She had jolly brown eyes and a dimple in the middle of her chin.  She was ready to discuss any question with any one, was marvellously broad-minded and tolerant, and although she was both poor and generous, always succeeded in making her little flat in Soho Square pretty and attractive.

Her chief fault, perhaps, was that she cared for no one especially she had neither lovers nor parents nor sisters nor brothers, and to all her friends she behaved with the same kind geniality, welcoming one as another.  She was thus aloof from them all and relied upon no one.  The centre of her life was, of course, her religion, but of this she never spoke, although strangely enough no one doubted the intensity of her belief and the reality of her devotion.

She was a determined follower of Mr. Warlock; what he said she believed, but here, too, there seemed to be no personal attachment.  She did not allow criticism of him in her own presence, but, on the other hand, she never spoke as though it would distress her very greatly to lose him.  He was a sign, a symbol ...  If one symbol went another could be found.

To Martin she was the one out-standing proof of the reality of the Chapel.  All the others his sister, Miss Avies, Thurston, Crashaw, the Miss Cardinals, yes, and his father too, were, in one way or another, eccentric, abnormal, but Miss Pyncheon was the sane every-day world, the worldly world, the world of drinks and dinners, and banks and tobacconists, and yet she believed as profoundly as any of them.  What did she believe?  She was an Inside Saint, therefore she must have accepted this whole story of the Second Coming and the rest of it.  Of course women would believe anything ...  Nevertheless ...

He scarcely listened to their chatter.  He was forcing himself not to look at his sister, and yet Thurston’s news seemed so extraordinary to him that his eye kept stealing round to her to see whether she were still the same.  Could she have accepted him, that bounder and cad and charlatan?  He felt a sudden cold chill of isolation as though in this world none of the ordinary laws were followed.  “By God, I am a stranger here,” he thought.  It was not until after dinner that night that he was alone with his father.  He had resolved on many fine things in the interval.  He was going to “have it out with him,” “to put his foot down,” “to tell him that such a thing as Thurston’s marriage to his sister was perfectly impossible.”  And then, for the thousandth time since his return to England he felt strangely weak and irresolute.  He did wish to be “firm” with his father, but it would have been so much easier to be firm had he not been so fond of him.  “Soft, sentimental weakness,” he called it to himself, but he knew that it was something deeper than that, something that he would never be able to deny.

He went into his father’s study that night with a strange dismal foreboding as though he were being drawn along upon some path that he did not want to follow.  What was his father mixed up with all this business for?  Why were such men as Thurston in existence?  Why couldn’t life be simple and straightforward with people like his father and himself and that girl Maggie alone somewhere with nothing to interfere?  Life was never just as you wanted it, always a little askew, a little twisted, cynically cocking its eye at you before it vanished round the corner?  He didn’t seem to be able to manage it.  Anyway, he wasn’t going to have that fellow Thurston marrying his sister.

He found his father lying back in his arm-chair fast asleep, looking like a dead man, his long thin face pale with fatigue, his eyelids a dull grey, his mouth tightly closed as though in a grim determination to pursue some battle.  And at the sight of him thus worn out and beaten Martin’s affection flooded his heart.  He stood opposite his father looking at him and loving him more deeply than he had ever done before.

“I will take him away from all this,” was his thought, “these Thurstons and all out of all this ...  We’ll go off abroad somewhere.  And I’ll make him fat and happy.”

Then his father suddenly woke up, with a start and a cry:  “Where am I?” ...  Then he suddenly saw Martin.  “Martin,” he said, smiling.

Martin smiled back and then began at once:  “Father, this isn’t true about Thurston, is it?”

He saw, as he had often done before, that his father had to call himself up from some world of vision before he could realise even his surroundings.  Martin he recognised intuitively with the recognition of the spirit, but he seemed to take in the details of the room slowly, one by one, as though blinded by the light.

“Ah I’ve been dreaming,” he said, still smiling at Martin helplessly and almost timidly.  “I’m so tired these days suddenly I usen’t to be ...”  He put his hand to his forehead, then laid it on Martin’s knee, and the strength and warmth of that seemed suddenly to fill him with vigour.

“You’re never tired, are you?” he asked as a child might ask an elder.

“Very seldom,” answered Martin, “I say, father, what is all this about Thurston?”

“Thurston ...  Why, what’s he been doing?”

“He says he’s engaged to Amy.”  The disgust of the idea made Martin’s words, against his will, sharp and angry.

“Does he? ...  Yes, I remember.  He spoke to me about it.”

“Of course it’s simply his infernal cheek ...”

Mr. Warlock sighed.  “I don’t know, I’m sure.  Amy seemed to wish it.”

Martin felt then more strongly than before the Something that drove him.  It said to him:  “Now, then ... here’s a thing for you to make a row about a big row.  And then you can go off with Maggie.”  But, on the other hand, there was Something that said:  “Don’t hurt him.  Don’t hurt him.  You may regret it all your life if ...”

If what?  He didn’t know.  He was always threatened with regretting things all his life.  The blow was always going to fall.  And that pleasant very British phrase came back to him, “He would put his foot down” however he was very angry very angry.

He burst out:  “Oh, but that’s absurd, father.  Impossible utterly.  Thurston in the family?  Why, you must see yourself how monstrous it would be.  Amy’s got some silly, sentimental whim and she’s got to be told that it won’t do.  If you ask me, I don’t think Amy’s improved much since I was away.  But that’s not the question.  The idea of Thurston’s disgusting.  You can’t seriously consider it for a minute...”

“Why is Thurston disgusting, my boy?”

Martin hated to be called “my boy” it made him feel so young and dependent.

“You’ve only got to look at him!” Martin jumped up, disregarding his father’s hand, and began to stamp about the room.  “He’s a cad he’s not your friend, father.  He isn’t, really.  He’d like to out you from the whole thing if he could.  He thinks you’re old-fashioned and behind the times, and all he thinks about is bringing in subscriptions and collecting new converts.  He’s like one of those men who beat drums outside tents in a fair ...  He’s a sickening man!  He doesn’t believe in his religion or anything else.  I should think he’s crooked about money, and immoral probably too.  You’re much too innocent, father.  You’re so good and trustful yourself that you don’t know how these fellows are doing you in.  There’s a regular plot against you and they’d be most awfully pleased if you were to retire.  They’re not genuine like you.  They simply use the Chapel for self-advertisement and making money.  Of course there are some genuine ones like the Miss Cardinals, but Thurston’s an absolute swindler ...”

He stopped short at that.  He had said more than he had intended and he was frightened suddenly.  He swung round on his heel and looked at his father.

“Come here, Martin.”  He came across the room.  “Closer.  Now, tell me.  We’re good friends, aren’t we?”

“Of course, father.”

He put his hand on his son’s shoulder.  “Do you know that I love you more than anything in the whole world?  More, I’m sometimes terribly afraid, than God Himself.  I can’t help myself.  I love you, Martin, so that it’s like hunger or thirst ...  It’s the only earthly passion that I’ve ever had.  And I’ll tell you another thing.  It’s the one terror of my earthly life that you’ll leave me.  Now that I’ve got you back I’m afraid every time you go out of the house that you’ll run away, round the corner, and never come back again.  I love you and I’m not going to let you go again. Not until until the Time has come ...  What does it matter to you and me what Thurston and Amy do?  God will come and He will find us both together you and I and He will take us up and keep us together and we shall never be separated any more ...  I love your strength, Martin, your happiness, your youth all the things I’ve never had.  And you’re not going to leave me, not though Amy married a hundred Thurstons ...”

Mr. Warlock’s grip on his son’s shoulder was iron.

Martin bent down and sat on the arm of his dusty leather chair to bring himself on to the same level.  He put his arm round his father and drew him close to him.  Maggie, Life, Money, Adventure everything seemed to draw away from him and he saw himself, a little boy, pattering on bare feet down the aisle towards the font just as though a spell had been cast over him.

They sat close together in silence.  Then slowly the thought of Thurston came back again.  Martin drew away a little.

“All the same, father,” he said, “Thurston mustn’t marry Amy.”

“They’re only engaged.  There’s no question of marriage yet.”

“Then they are engaged?” Martin drew right away, standing up again.

“Oh, yes, they’re engaged.”

“Then I’m not going to stand it.  I tell you I won’t stay here if Thurston marries Amy.”

Mr. Warlock sighed.  “Well then, let’s leave it, my boy.  I daresay they’ll never marry.”

“No.  I won’t have it.  It’s too serious to leave.”

His father’s voice was sharper suddenly.

“Well, we won’t talk about it just now, Martin, if you don’t mind.”

“But I must.  You can’t leave a thing like that.  Thurston will simply own the place ...”

“I tell you, Martin, to leave it alone.”  They were both angry now.

“And I tell you, father, that if you let Thurston marry Amy I leave the house and never come back again.”

“Isn’t that rather selfish of you?  You’ve been away all these years.  You’ve left us to ourselves.  You come back suddenly without seeing how we live or caring and then you dictate to us what we’re to do.  How can you expect us to listen?”

“And how can you expect me to stay?” Martin broke into a torrent of words:  “I’m miserable here and you know that I am.  Mother and Amy hate me and you’re always wrapped up in your religion.  What kind of a place is it for a fellow?  I came back meaning that you and I should be the best pals father and son have ever been, but you wouldn’t come out with me you only wanted to drag me in.  You tell me always to wait for something.  To wait for what?  I don’t know.  And nobody here does seem to know.  And I can’t wait for ever.  I’ve got to lead my own life and if you won’t come with me I must go off by myself ”

He was following his own ideas now not looking at his father at all.  “I’ve discovered since I’ve been home that I’m not the sort of fellow to settle down.  I suppose I shall go on wandering about all my days.  I’m not proud of myself, you know, father.  I don’t seem to be much good to any one, but the trouble is I don’t want to be much better.  I feel as though it wouldn’t be much good if I did try.  I can’t give up my own life for nobody not even for you and however rotten my own life is I’d rather lead it than some one else’s.”

He stopped and then went on quietly, as though he were arguing something out with himself:  “The strange thing is that I do feel this place has got a kind of a hold on me.  When you remind me of what I was like as a kid I go right back and feel helpless as though you could do anything with me you like.  All the same I don’t believe in this business, father all this Second Coming and the rest of it.  We’re in the Twentieth Century now, you know, and everybody knows that that kind of thing is simply impossible.  Only an old maid or two ...  Why, I don’t believe you believe in it really, father.  That’s why you’re so keen on making me believe.  But I don’t; it’s no use.  You can’t make me.  I don’t believe there’s any God at all.  If there were a God he’d let a fellow have more free will ...”

He was interrupted by an extraordinary cry.  He turned to see his father standing, one hand pressed back on the chair, his face white, his eyes black and empty, like sightless eyes.

“Martin!  That’s blasphemy! ...  Take care!  Take care! ...  Oh, my son, my son! ...”

Then he suddenly collapsed backwards, crouching on to the chair as though he were trying to flee from some danger.  Martin sprang towards him.  He caught him round the body, holding him to him something was leaping like a furious animal inside his father’s breast.

“What is it?” he cried, desperately frightened.

“It’s my heart,” Warlock answered in a voice very soft and distant.  “Bad ...  Excitement ...  Ring that bell ...  Amy ...”

A moment later Amy entered.  She came quickly into the room, she said nothing only gave Martin one look.

She gave her father something from a little bottle, kneeling in front of him.

At last she turned to her brother.  “You’d better go,” she said.  “You can do nothing here.”

Miserable, repentant, feeling as though he had no place in the world and yet eager too to defend himself, he left the room.