Trimblerigg

MR. TRIMBLERIGG, lying on his well-earned bed, was looking out through the dark canes of the chick at the large-eyed tropical night, when an opaque and curiously crested form entered his square of vision. The chick lifted, to the flash of a torchlight the crest detached itself, and a small scarlet-coated monkey leapt down on to the bed. This incongruous combination scared his calculating wits out of him; snatching his revolver he fired without aim.

The monkey, chattering in alarm, skipped back to the shoulder it had sprung from. ‘Missed again!’ said a familiar voice. ‘How do you do, Jonathan? May I come in?’

She clambered in as she spoke, and sat upon the bed, while Mr. Trimblerigg, exclamatory with anger and apology, lighted the lamp and stared at the unwelcome apparition. Met under such nightmare conditions, they did not stop to embrace.

‘So that was your object-lesson, was it?’ said Davidina. ‘Bad shot. What made you do it?’

‘You made me do it!’ retorted Mr. Trimblerigg sharply. ‘A fool’s trick, coming like that! How could I tell it was you?’

‘You couldn’t. But what are your sentries for? Haven’t you enough of them to feel safe?’

Mr. Trimblerigg, defending himself, gave away more of the situation than he intended. ‘Why, it might have been a sentry himself!’ he exclaimed. ‘You can’t trust one of them.’

‘Not even your converted Christians?’

‘Not as things are now. Christians?—scratch the surface, and you find they go pagan again.’

‘So you’ve been scratching them?’

‘No need. They scratch themselves; it’s reversion to type; the commonest disease missions have to contend with.’

‘And catching to civilization,’ remarked Davidina; ‘A scratch lot, all of you.’ Then, as Mr. Trimblerigg looked at her with furtive suspicion, ‘I’ve been interviewing a specimen,’ she said; ‘one of yours.’

She named her man. ‘He seemed honest enough,’ she went on, ‘but he’s been scratched badly, acting (he says) under your orders.’

Mr. Trimblerigg bristled to the implied criticism. ‘He has only done what was absolutely necessary.’

‘Necessary, of course,’ she returned. ‘You can always make a thing necessary if you want to. If a man sets fire to the tail of his shirt, he has got to get out of it. But that doesn’t make him look less of a fool, Jonathan. Necessary? It’s necessary, I suppose, that you should shoot people at sight before you know who they are. But if you mean that for an object-lesson, I don’t find it attractive.’

‘Object-lesson of what?’ demanded Mr. Trimblerigg.

‘Yes, of what?’ she retorted. ‘It’s not Free Evangelicalism, it’s not common sense, and I don’t suppose you think it comic either.’

Her accent on the word enraged him, as she had expected. ‘I was only asking,’ she said. ‘You’ve your sense of humour, and I’ve mine, and they don’t always agree. A man who can never see a joke is a poor creature; but when he makes a joke of himself and can’t see that—he’s past praying for. Did you say your prayers to-night, Jonathan? You did? Then better say ’em again backwards, and see if you can’t get more sense out of them.’

‘Thank you,’ said Mr. Trimblerigg. ‘You mean well; but I don’t need to be told how to pray: I pray as I feel.’

‘You do,’ she said comfortingly. ‘D’you ever look at your tongue first to see your symptoms? No? Well, you should then. There’s nothing in this world so dangerous as prayer if you’ve fixed up the answer before you begin. Forty years ago, Jonathan, you set that trap for yourself, now it’s a habit you can’t get rid of. Let’s look at your tongue. It’s my belief you’ve got an attack of it now, worse than usual. Either pray backwards from the way you’ve been doing—which means don’t begin by giving yourself the answer—or leave off.’

Mr. Trimblerigg, who during the past six months had been through deep waters and in his own eyes had done valiantly, sat up quivering with indignation.

‘If I hadn’t prayed,’ he cried, ‘prayed all I knew, prayed without ceasing—and if I had not depended every instant on my prayer being answered in ways beyond human power to devise, before this I should have been dead.’

‘Yes,’ said Davidina, ‘and if you had aimed your last prayer a little straighter, so should I. It missed—like some of the others, I’m thinking. Two days ago I met six of your prayers, as you call ’em, striped like a barber’s pole, dead as door-nails, standing on their heads in native earth. They weren’t exactly addressed to me; but I’ve come in answer to them; and if you don’t think it’s the word of the Lord I’m telling you now, Jonathan, put up another and have done with me!’

Mr. Trimblerigg’s sense of lifelong grievances came to a head, and he spoke plainly: ‘I shall never have done with you, Davidina, never, never! All my life you’ve hated me, persecuted me, wished me ill. Yes; you’ve been sorry whenever I succeeded, glad when I’ve failed; and if I were to fail now, you’d only say—“Serve him right! Serve him right!”’

‘That’s true,’ said Davidina; ‘the rest isn’t. Hated you? Don’t flatter yourself! You wouldn’t so much mind me hating you; it’s my seeing through you that you don’t like. “O Lord, so look upon me from on high that You don’t see me clear as Davidina sees me!” That has been your life-prayer, Jonathan, though you never put it into words. Yes, to you it may sound like blasphemy, but if you’d prayed a little less to yourself, and a little more to me, maybe, you might not have cut so famous a figure in the world—been such a firework, setting a spark to your own tail and running round after it (which is what you are doing here) but there’d have been more meat on you for one to cut and come again than there is now. It’s my belief, Jonathan, you don’t truly know where you begin and where you leave off. You’ve been standing in your own light so long, and walking in it, that you see yourself a child of light every time you look in the glass. I’ve only to switch this torch on’—she played it upon him as she spoke—‘and you look like a saint in a halo, waiting for the Kingdom of Heaven to come. Yes, that’s what you are always giving yourself—a halo; you’ve only to pray and it comes—like hiccoughs, or housemaid’s knee. You touch a button, you switch on the light, and you see yourself in a glory. Some day you’ll get one in real earnest; and when you do, I wonder what you’ll make of it, and what people will say? I think they’ll laugh.’

Mr. Trimblerigg looked at her with that same sort of uneasy awe which weak saints have for the Devil. Under her penetrating gaze he sealed himself to secrecy. This, that she was saying—so nearly true, yet treating it as a joke—was not a thing about which even relatively the truth could be told. Davidina had no sense of the mysterious, and very little of the divine; she lacked reverence; but her uncanny way of touching the spot did rather scare him. He changed the subject hastily. ‘Where have you been all this time?’ he inquired. ‘You’ve come a long way. How did you get on?’

Davidina, accepting the diversion, gave him a sketch of her travels. He heard of the toy air-balloons, the bird-warblers, and the soap-bubbles; the singing, and the playing, and the worshipping deputations of natives. Nor did Davidina disguise from him the fact that she had allowed godlike honours to be paid to her.

Mr. Trimblerigg, though he had used Relative Truth for his own ends, could not, as a Free Evangelical, think that was right.

‘I dare say it isn’t,’ said Davidina, ‘not as we think it. But if you start applying your own sense of what’s right to natives, they don’t think you a god, they think you a devil. That’s what you’ve been doing, Jonathan; and devil’s the result. And for my part, I don’t see that it’s any more against true religion to let yourself be worshipped as a god than to make yourself feared as a devil. Devil or god, it’s one or the other—you can’t get out of it; and to be thought a god and to act accordingly does less harm, comes cheaper, and makes things easier for all concerned.

‘Anyway here’s your object-lesson and there’s mine. I could have soon enough made them think me a devil if I’d taken your line, Jonathan. So now, unless it’s against your religion, you’d better try mine for a change. Be a god, Jonathan, be a god! It won’t be true; but believe me—sing, glory hallelujah! it’s the better hole to fall into. And now I’m going.’ So saying, she started to climb out the way she had come.

‘Where to?’ inquired Mr. Trimblerigg, astounded at so abrupt a leave-taking.

‘Anywhere, so long as it’s away from civilization—and you!’ she declared. ‘I’ll send my specimens down to the coast, then go back the way I’ve come. And, Jonathan, if you get beautifully burnt out by a bush-fire in the next day or two, don’t think it’s them; it’ll be me.’

‘What for?’

‘For fun, or for a moral object-lesson, just as you like to take it: Davidina’s dose—or jumps for Jonathan. Good-bye!’

She had escaped—had already gone a few paces, when Mr. Trimblerigg bethought him and called after her.

‘Daffy!’ It was the old abbreviated usage from days of childhood. She returned, and stood outside the chick without lifting it.

‘Well, what?’ she queried.

And Mr. Trimblerigg’s voice came cooingly from within: ‘You haven’t kissed me, Daffy.’

‘I have not,’ she replied starkly.

‘But we haven’t quarrelled, have we?’

‘Quarrelled? Have I ever quarrelled with you yet, Jonathan? No fear! I’ve been saying your prayers for you—right way up. Now you say “Amen”; kiss yourself your own way, and go to sleep!’

She heard him chuckle; then in a whinnying tone, as he stretched himself: ‘Oh, you are a comfortable person to talk to!’

‘You’ve said that before.’

‘It’s true. I’m glad you came, Davidina. You’ve given me a new idea.’

‘I generally do,’ she replied.

‘But this is my own,’ he insisted.

‘So is the stuffing of a goose, once it’s inside him,’ was her retort. And with that she was gone.

And Mr. Trimblerigg, with the feeling that something now remained to his credit, turned over and went blissfully to sleep. For having let Davidina know that she was ‘comfortable to talk to,’ he had turned the sharp points of her arrows, and so robbed them of venom that not a word she had said troubled him any more.

So he gave his beloved sleep; and into his dreams came hovering the crocean dawn or that new idea, so entirely his own, prompted by Davidina.