Lord Alistair's Rebellion

During the next few days a thing happened that surprised everyone. Sir Bernard Vanbrugh and Lord Alistair became great friends.

Alistair had motives that were plain enough to three members of the little party for his goodwill towards Hero’s father. But it puzzled the two women to account for the pleasure which Sir Bernard evidently found in the society of the young man.

To the Duchess the development did not bring unmixed satisfaction. Her own acquaintance with the scientist had begun with some secret trepidation on her part. She knew that Vanbrugh held opinions which she had been accustomed to hear described in the venomous language of her creed as infidelity, and which she had been taught to attribute to moral perversity rather than to mental aberration. Such a man was not the father-in-law she would have chosen for her son, though she had resigned herself to the relationship as an inevitable evil, the flaw inseparable from all human arrangements. While it pleased her to see that he liked Alistair, she watched with secret uneasiness Alistair’s unaffected liking for him.

To Vanbrugh the young man presented himself as an intelligent companion, a rare exception among the crowd of contemporary youths with minds ranging from bridge to polo, and from horses to ballet-girls. It could not have occurred to him in any case that the Duke of Trent’s brother was a probable aspirant to the prize which the Duke had failed to gain, and, in fact, his mind was so thoroughly armed against the possibility of Lord Alistair as a son-in-law that he never thought of him in any such connection.

He spoke of him freely to Hero, as he might have spoken of a character in some play which they had both seen.

“I like that scapegrace because he is so sincere,” he confided to her one evening after Stuart had left them. “He never seems to have acquired the habit of hypocrisy. I suppose it is because he has always had the world at his feet. If he had ever had to earn his living he would have had to pretend like the rest.”

Vanbrugh’s brow contracted as he added:

“The Queen said to me once: ‘I like you, Sir Bernard, because you always tell me the exact truth.’ I replied to her: ‘That is the reason, Madam, why it has taken me forty years to come into your presence.’”

The physician’s long and stern fight with society, as represented by his own profession, had qualified him to sympathize with another Ishmael, though one of a very different order. His indulgence for Lord Alistair did not spring from any flexibility in his own standard of conduct; but for the shams of European morality, for the decorum which consists in keeping one’s wife in London, and one’s concubines in Paris, he had as strong a contempt as Alistair’s own. The proprieties of the cupboard-door were equally loathsome to both; the hackneyed dance of society, for ever whirling giddily round on the skirts of the Divorce Court maelstrom, was equally repellent.

The attitude of the scientist contained an enigma for Alistair, whose intellect, wavering and searching like a flame in the wind, contrasted with Vanbrugh’s as the strength of fire contrasts with the strength of steel. To him there appeared something stubborn and unreasonable in the scientist’s morality, which substituted collective Teutonic instinct for the voice of God. The Haeckelian vision of a world of Unitarian ministers and their wives leading uniform lives in a Prussian barrack struck cold on his imagination. In the new ethics he found the Puritan prison-house without the window.

There was one difference, however, for which he could only be grateful. His new friend appeared to reverse the common practice, and to be strict with himself only that he might be merciful with others. His programme did not include the conversion of the sinner, and for the first time in his life Alistair found himself associating with a righteous man who did not want to do him good.

This unique toleration would have refreshed him under any other circumstances. But at such a moment, and in such a quarter, it disconcerted him. When, with some idea of softening the judgment of Hero’s father, Alistair attempted a plea that he had sown his wild oats, he was taken aback by the answer:

“The evil is sometimes not in sowing wild oats, but in sowing tame oats among them. Mixed oatmeal is good for neither horse nor man.”

“I am not sure that I understand you,” Stuart faltered.

“I mean that it is a dangerous idea that the really diseased can become good members of society. In my experience a man who tries to change his nature often changes it for the worse. The reformed drunkard is apt to become an insane teetotaller, and the reformed rake makes the worst possible father.”

Alistair dared not pursue the subject. He had some ground for hoping that Sir Bernard’s practice might be less inexorable than his principles.

Soon after their meeting, the Duchess, overcoming her dread of the scientist for Alistair’s sake, ventured to ask him what he thought of her boy. Vanbrugh, with his habitual bluntness, had terrified her by responding:

“I think he drinks too much. You ought to try to stop him.”

The poor mother had already noticed, and tried to shut her eyes to, this weakness of Alistair’s, new in her experience of him. It was due, she told herself, to the influence of Molly Finucane, and would pass away now that he had escaped from that evil atmosphere.

Something of this she tried to plead to Sir Bernard.

“He never used to take too much,” she said. “But he is easily influenced by his companions. He needs someone to watch over and strengthen him.”

“Yes.” Even Vanbrugh shrank from speaking his whole mind about Lord Alistair to the trembling mother. “If you can persuade him to stay with you it may check him.”

The Duchess was afraid to carry her soundings further. For the first time it dawned upon her that Sir Bernard was capable of taking a critical view of such a son-in-law.

She had conveyed the physician’s judgment to Alistair, and Alistair had rejoiced her by a promise of amendment which had so far been kept. To help him, the Duchess had insisted on sacrificing her own glass of wine, and as both the Vanbrughs were water-drinkers, all intoxicants had silently disappeared from the tables of both households.

Alistair was touched by his mother’s self-denial on his behalf, and cheered by Hero’s delicate sympathy. In the first flush of his new resolution, amid the distractions of his changed life, and buoyed up by the inspiration of his love, the path of reformation was made smooth for him. The gloomy feelings that had haunted him in London returned into the remote recesses of consciousness. The bright constellation of Ormuzd rose beckoning before him, and the dark Sign of the Suffering One sank below the horizon of life.

The only reminders he had of the past were the letters that reached him from Molly Finucane.

At first the letters had come every day, passionate, reproachful, entreating him to return to her. Molly protested that she had seen no more of Mendes; that she was selling everything in the house at Chelsea; that they would still have enough to go on with till Alistair’s allowance from his brother became due; that she would follow him and live with him where and how he would. When Alistair wrote back what he intended for a final farewell, and sent a banknote given him by his mother, Molly returned the note torn into a dozen pieces. Then the letters became fewer and more pleading and pitiful. At last there came one telling him that Molly had taken refuge with her brother, whose address she gave him, in some Lambeth slum. After that there were no more letters. The little woman had sunk in despair.

Alistair tried hard to forget Molly Finucane, and for a time it seemed to him that he had succeeded. His love, if the passion she had aroused in him deserved that name, had died out of itself, his compassion had been put to sleep by the influences brought to bear upon him. If these good women, if one so filled with the spirit of Christian charity as his mother, could see nothing blameworthy in his desertion of Molly—indeed, nothing that was not wholly praiseworthy—surely it was absurd for him, the prodigal and the bankrupt, the unbeliever and the misanthrope, to let himself be tormented by misgivings. To ruin what was left of his own life for the sake of one whom no human sacrifice could redeem—surely this were madness rather than heroism.

In this mood he became a ready listener to the philosophy of Sir Bernard Vanbrugh; and Sir Bernard expounded his philosophy with some of that proselytizing zeal which marked the last generation of scientists, the Huxleys and the Tyndalls, before Science had laid down her arms at the feet of the great Sphynx, and confessed that she had found no better symbol to replace the old.

It would have surprised and alarmed the Duchess if she had been told that the topic most frequently discussed between Sir Bernard Vanbrugh and her son was religion. It would have more than surprised her, it would have found her utterly incredulous, if anyone had told her that Alistair had an intensely religious nature.

To her unnaturally stunted mind the word “religion” had only one meaning, and unbelief only one excuse. Alistair had heard the Gospel. In his boyhood he had shown signs of yielding to its influence; it followed, therefore, that his later rejection of it was a deliberate surrender to Satan. Everything in his troubled life that had resulted from his having been violently robbed of his own religion she attributed to his wilful and wicked refusal to embrace hers.

In reality, ever since the evangelical tutors employed by the Duchess had succeeded in convincing Alistair that the Catholic creed was false, without convincing him that their own creed was true, he had been groping in a spiritual twilight. The religious instinct, though wounded and defaced, was not dead.

He still cherished a more kindly feeling for the Roman Church than for any other, as the one which he had found most indulgent to the sinner, or, at all events, most intelligent and tactful in dealing with himself. To his intellect the language of both creeds sounded incredible. But whereas the teachers of his mother’s confession seemed to share the darkness of their most ignorant disciples, he had found among the priests of Rome some whom he could listen to without impatience.

“Our Church,” they declared, “has never claimed that her formulas should be taken literally like mathematical propositions. The Catholic word for ‘creed’ is ‘symbol.’ We offer our dogma, not as the truth itself, but as a symbol of the truth—an allegory, if you will. It is the best statement of the relations between the Unseen and man that the human mind is capable of receiving, and we offer it as nothing more.”

This comfortable language would have gone far to satisfy Alistair if he had not observed on the part of his Catholic friends a certain reticence and subservience to authority which alarmed his liberty-loving instincts.

The answer to his demand for freedom was the answer of all priesthoods.

“Only a few minds are strong enough to stand alone. Our Church does not forbid inquiry. She does not punish freethought. What she forbids and punishes is the attempt to disturb the ignorant, to rob them of the faith which is the best for them, without giving them anything in exchange. You may persuade the peasant-woman to give up her Christian Catechism, but you will not persuade her to replace it by the Synthetical Philosophy.”

Alistair felt that this was still the old situation. He was to be silenced lest others might be shocked. He was to be bound that they might be free—to suffer that they might be strong.

While he thus found himself cut off from the communion of the orthodox, the Christian religion continued to fascinate him. His spirit felt the presence of a living truth concealed in these formulas which his mind could not accommodate, like a beautiful face hidden beneath an ugly mask.

Sir Bernard Vanbrugh’s theology was of the new scientific kind which calls itself anthropology. The analysis of myths and the genesis of beliefs had formed his favourite study, outside the range of his profession, and he found a missionary’s satisfaction in imparting his lore to Alistair Stuart.

“Christianity,” Vanbrugh proclaimed, “is a synthesis of all the ancient beliefs of the Mediterranean, some of them comparatively enlightened, others purely barbarous. We are now able to trace every one of its rites and dogmas to an origin in some older state of society. Its evolution has been as entirely natural as that of man himself.”

“Is not that rather in its favour than against it?” Alistair suggested. “Is it not possible to view the primitive beliefs as the gradual unfolding of a great truth?”

Vanbrugh frowned. This was not language that he liked to hear.

“That is what the orthodox would say, no doubt. But I am not concerned with apologetics. No serious thinker will ever again waste his time in controversy with that class of person.”

“I am afraid the orthodox would not think one view any better than the other,” replied Alistair, thinking of his mother. “Isn’t it the orthodox view that all the resemblances to Christianity found in other religions are blasphemous parodies contrived by the devil in order to discredit the true faith?”

Sir Bernard smiled, reassured of his pupil.

“Yes, I suppose that is the sound explanation. But there is a school of reconcilers abroad, men who want to retain positions in the Church without wholly forfeiting the respect of educated men, and their favourite cry just now is the evolution of religion.”

“But the religious instinct itself? How do you account for that?”

“In the beginning it was nothing but the savage’s fear of Nature, as Lucretius observed. In our days it is an atavistic survival—practically a disease.”

Alistair trembled.

“Is it a disease that can be cured?”

“Every disease can be cured as soon as it is understood, or if not cured in the individual it can be eliminated in the race. Where religion is due to a mere obstruction in the brain, we shall in time be able to remove it by trepanning; but where it is a hysterical symptom, the only remedy will be to isolate the sufferers, as we now isolate the insane, and allow them to die out.”

A strange light broke on Alistair.

“Is not that what the Catholic Church does?” he said eagerly. “Her monks and nuns—are they not really hysterical patients who are voluntarily adopting the very course that science would prescribe for them?”

The scientist grudgingly conceded that this was so.

“Unfortunately the convents soon became mere refuges for the idle,” he observed. “And healthy girls were forced into them by selfish parents in order to save their dower. Still, no doubt the Protestants made a mistake in shutting up the monasteries altogether and condemning celibacy as a vice. There are plenty of cases in which it ought to be compulsory.”

“Why compulsory?” Alistair pleaded. “Surely it is far better that they should take a vow of their own accord, inspired by the thought that they are helping to save the race?”

The scientist shrugged his shoulders.

“All that is sentiment,” he said—“one of the things for which the healthy have no use.”

Alistair sighed.

“How monotonous the world will be when everyone is perfect! You will have to preserve a few criminals as curiosities, like the lions and tigers in the Zoological Gardens.”

Sir Bernard smiled good-humouredly.

“That won’t be necessary. We shall preserve some of the savage tribes instead. They are documents of priceless value to the anthropologist.”

“When does a man cease to be a priceless document, and become a criminal?” Stuart asked, with secret bitterness.

The other reflected for a moment.

“I suppose the answer is given by Johnson’s definition of dirt: When he is in the wrong place.”

It was the answer which Alistair had given to himself that night on Westminster Bridge. He was in the wrong place. But was there any right place in the world for him?

He lifted his eyes and looked away. They were sitting on the verandah of Vanbrugh’s house in the Malounine, facing eastward. The sun was just leaving the sky, and the red glow of the western horizon, caught full on the white walls and windows of St. Malo, bathed the city in fire. Alistair’s heart beat painfully as he strained his eyes on the flaming town. There was his world, there the vision that called to his soul. O, not in dingy lanes, not on the cold, grey pavements of reality, but amid those vermilion glories, his spirit should have dwelt and burned itself away.

He was an exile. Not from the Island of Oig, nor any other island of an earthly sea, but from that far-off sphere of which the sunset-smitten town reminded him. He was an exile from some world of which love, and not hate, was the keynote, banished for what fault he could not tell, condemned to mortal life as to a penance, but tormented and consoled by intimations from that happier state.

The soul has her imperial moments when she exercises a prerogative that reason cannot take away; when the toilsome knowledge gathered together by the senses falls into shards under her feet, and she enters into possession of herself, freed from the bonds and trammels cast about her by the material brain. In that moment Alistair did not think—he knew, knew well, more surely than if a voice from the beyond had spoken it in his ear, that he was an immortal spirit inhabiting eternity.

When his attention returned to the voice beside him, he found that the agnostic was expounding the folklore of the crucifixion.

“The whole subject has been illuminated by Dr. Frazer’s book ‘The Golden Bough,’” he was saying. “The sacrifice of a human victim in the spring, at the time of the seed-sowing, is one of the oldest rites in the world. The victim was originally conceived of as the corn-god, and was put to death in order that his spirit might enter into the seed. His body was buried in the field, and he was supposed to rise again in the form of the harvest. In that way the dogma of Transubstantiation had once a reasonable meaning—the bread was the flesh of the slain god in his new avatar.”

Alistair listened like one awakening from sleep who has not yet caught the sense of what is going on around him.

“Christianity, in short, is the old Adonis worship, adapted according to Jewish ideas. The Old Testament is full of allusions to this cult—‘women weeping for Tammuz,’ and so on.”

“You were speaking of a human victim,” murmured Alistair.

“Yes; it was customary to select a man at Easter, usually in later times a condemned criminal, who was sacrificed as a scapegoat for the sins of the people. The Jewish mob appear to have claimed a victim in accordance with this custom. Two were released, in fact, one to be sacrificed, and the other to be honoured as the representative of spring.”

Alistair felt there was some confusion in this statement.

“For the sins of the people,” he repeated thoughtfully. “You say the victim was sacrificed for the sins of the people?”

“That was one form of the cult,” the scientist assented. “The idea of the sin-bearer is a very ancient superstition. Even the details of the New Testament narrative follow the lines of what we know to have been the customary ceremonial in Babylon and elsewhere. The scourging and the crown of thorns were both familiar practices. They are alluded to in Isaiah—‘He was wounded for our transgressions.’”

“‘With his stripes we are healed.’” Alistair finished the sentence with a start of surprise. They were the words he had tried and failed to remember on the night of his disgrace.

“At an earlier stage in the history of the cult the king of the tribe had been sacrificed,” Vanbrugh went on, “So, when a criminal was substituted, he was still called the king for the occasion.”

“It was a fine end for the criminal,” was Alistair’s comment.

His mind presented him with two contrasted pictures—the felon of civilization, in his dreadful garb, numbered and branded like a chattel, drudging in the stone quarries under the warder’s eye; and that sufferer of the antique world, drawn out of some fetid Eastern gaol, clad in the royal robe and crown, and marched in solemn priest-led procession to the top of a Syrian hill to be put to death for the salvation of the people. The sin-bearer, the redeemer—surely every criminal was such! “Don’t you see,” he said suddenly to the astonished anthropologist, “that they were right? They were simply saying what modern science is saying, only they said it far more beautifully. The criminal is the sin-bearer; he is crucified for the good of the people even to-day. He is imprisoned and hanged that our lives and purses may be safe. By his stripes we are healed.”

Sir Bernard Vanbrugh told his daughter that night that he was a little disappointed in Lord Alistair.

“He is brilliant enough in his own way,” was the scientist’s verdict, “but not practical. I am afraid he is a dreamer.”

It was the dreamer that Hero loved.