Trimblerigg

MR. TRIMBLERIGG’S acceptance of the phenomena of spiritualism, though it drew mass-meetings to hear him, gave a bad jolt to Free Evangelical unity. Thenceforth pulpits were divided; and Mr. Trimblerigg had the run of only half of them. But when, following upon that, he announced his conversion to Second Adventism, a special conference of the connection was called, and secession followed. Mr. Trimblerigg went out hopefully into the wilderness, drawing a tail of all the Free Churches after him; and though for a time they lacked funds, and found many doors closed against them, they had not to be long in doubt that theirs was the winning cause.

What the world wanted—the religious even more than the secular—was a real bird-in-the-hand; proof positive, quick results, practice not theory, ocular demonstration, moral certainty, wheels which actually went round, whose buzz could be heard to the far ends of earth. A race for Heaven without obstacles, and a goal visibly to be won were the materials to make religion once more popular. Spiritualism and Second Adventism run together seemed to meet the demand. The Free Churches Militant began, in an expressive American phrase, ‘to palp with emotion’; and as the new spiritual Combine devised by Mr. Trimblerigg, with joined effects of dark séance and lurid anticipation of coming events, filled its hired halls to overflowing with suffocating converts, the churches grew empty.

With the sword of his spirit unsheathed and high uplifted, Mr. Trimblerigg did not spare his old associates who hung back in this day of battle for the new birth of spiritual democracy; and, to ears which had drunk in the sound of it, the old gang’s trumpetings ceased henceforth to avail or mean anything. Starting upon his fiery crusade to the sound of a hundred drums hired for the occasion, he stood at the door of his Pulman car, in the special that had been provided for him, and flourished defiance to all opposers over the heads of the seething multitude which filled the terminus, frantic with joy at having found a leader whose single aim was to keep things on the run.

He stood there at the crowning point of his career; for here at last he had created his own atmosphere; at the touch of his magician’s wand a new and densely populated environment had sprung up to spread itself round him. Power had been given him, vision, and the gift of tongues; the future of revealed religion in the Free Churches hung trembling in the balances of his mind.

But though it trembled (as it might well), he himself did not. From all over the world he felt a responsive rush of wings to meet him; the right button had been touched, his call to make Heaven safe for Democracy had come at last and the means to it had been found. All the rest had been but a preparation; this was the real thing.

The first sure proof of it was the readjustment of the news-headings in the daily press; Religion began to take a front place. In the beginning this perhaps was merely due to the novelty of the thing, with its attendant features of controversy and secession upon a large scale. But when weekly meetings all over the country, in the largest halls that towns or cities could provide, became an established feature of the new movement, it acquired not only a popular but a commercial importance as well; and when presently Mr. Trimblerigg did his first great stroke of business—combining the earthly with the heavenly on a scale that had never been attempted before—Big Business itself sat up and began to pay attention. In less than six months, for reasons soon to be explained, the Stock Exchange, for the first time in its existence, became sensitive to the call of Religion; and before the finish even the Bank-rate had become affected by the vast scale of reinvestments in other worldliness engineered by Mr. Trimblerigg. For it was quite natural, was it not?—if the world was coming to an end—that people should want to take their money to Heaven with them. Mr. Trimblerigg obligingly provided them with a way, and even coined a new form of currency to give it better effect, image and superscription no longer Cæsar’s.

But this is to anticipate. Before these things happened, Mr. Trimblerigg’s faith in himself had reached an intensity which, except for outside assistance, it could hardly have achieved. The impetus had come from an unexpected quarter, and at first had not been welcome.

It was characteristic of Mr. Trimblerigg, when he took up with Second Adventism, to do so without acknowledging or even recognizing the source of his inspiration; for it is safe to say that within twenty-four hours of making it his own he had, by an acrobatic feat of mental detachment, put Isabel Sparling entirely out of his mind as having anything to do with it; and had almost forgotten her existence in the whirl of his own discovery, when among the rushing wings that flew to meet him from the far parts of the earth, came first a message from Isabel, couched in tactful terms, hailing him not as her follower but as her leader, and then Isabel herself. Nor did she come with her hands empty; she brought with her the proffered allegiance of her own vigorous following, already some fifty thousand strong and going stronger every day; Rain-Baptists, Seals of Solomon, First Resurrectionists, Second Adventists, Last Day Disciples, New Jerusalemites—all these, so little known in their separate capacities, now joined together under her leadership in a common bond were a force no longer to be despised. And however little Mr. Trimblerigg might welcome the reminder that his inspiration was shared by another, he was too practical to reject the material thus offered him. Even though at home the movement was going ahead by leaps and bounds, a nucleus of fifty thousand souls in a country so impressionable as America was worth having: it meant at least a year to the good in solid spade work; in publicity it meant even more.

But Isabel had something else to give beside adherents; something very unique and wonderful and precious—so, displaying it, she told him; nor was it the first time he had heard of it.

It was not much to look at: a small wooden box with a domed lid, and a cover of mildewed paper in an old-fashioned diaper; and around its rim were seven seals, chipped and blackened with age, two of them already hanging loose where the covering paper had detached itself. But though a poor thing to look at, it had of late years acquired fame, or at least notoriety; and the Press had made copy of it. For this was the box of the American prophetess, Susannah Walcot, dead now for over a hundred years but having followers still—the box concerning which she had said that it must wait till one wearing a crown should open it, and reveal to the world its prophecies concerning the last things. And because all the crowned heads approached had refused to open it, and had been much abused by the faithful remnant of her followers for so doing, therefore it had remained sealed; till, coming into the hands of Isabel Sparling, upon the adherence to her teaching of the dwindling group which held it, it brought to mind a bright particular head she had once seen, which, though in no earthly or material sense, had indubitably been crowned in a glory of its own, so fulfilling the condition which the prophetess had laid down.

And that memory being in her mind when the treasure came into her keeping, it may be guessed with what joyous confirmation of hope she heard presently that the once-crowned head had itself become a sudden convert to Second Adventism. No sooner did the news reach her than she felt that he was already hers; and having first sped a message, a week later she was upon the high seas, on her way to meet him, and the box with its seven seals, bore her company.

At the Customs she expensively saved its sacred contents from profane scrutiny by declaring it to be a special brand of tea hermetically sealed from sea-air. And as nothing of that weight could have cost her more, officials with uncrowned heads took her word for it, and passed into the country a prophecy destined to make its mark in history, besides giving a neat finish to the career of Mr. Trimblerigg.

What happened next must be briefly told; for I do not quite know all the circumstances that lay behind it. With the soul of Isabel Sparling I have had so little acquaintance that I do not make myself responsible for it; only as she came within range of Mr. Trimblerigg, and affected his career, did she interest me. For which reason I must leave unsolved the problem of the seven seals and what they contained at different dates, more especially whether they contained different things before and after the day when she actually took charge of them. I will only say this, that Isabel Sparling was by the look of her an astute, a daring, and a resolute character; nor do I think that for good and great ends she would stick at trifles or have more scruple than Mr. Trimblerigg himself. Also I have reason to believe that she knew her man; and it may well be that in the gyrations of her emotional career, on which Mr. Trimblerigg’s own orbit had had its gravitating effect, she may have assimilated the doctrine of Relative Truth more than one knows. And so whether it was genuine prophecy, coincidence, or only Relative Truth which brought the thing to pass, I leave each reader to decide according to his own taste or credulity.

The initial fact is that when Isabel Sparling, obliterating a disputatious past, again met Mr. Trimblerigg, in order to make him the instrument of her vision for the Millennium that was to be, she did not find his head visibly crowned. Nor had she expected it; yet she was puzzled that it was not so. Such self-abnegation, to the foregoing of a gift so uplifting and spiritual, though admirable as a mere act of humility was not to be encouraged when a world in flux was waiting to be saved not so much by knowledge in things spiritual as by novelty, and when, in consequence, anything in the way of signs and wonders might be of so much help.

Miss Sparling had seen the manifestation, and had believed in it; believed therefore that what had been once could be again. The circumstances under which she had seen it, gave her grounds for suspecting that Mr. Trimblerigg had not then borne witness valiantly to the light which was in him, had in consequence lost it, and needed perhaps to be encouraged in order to find it again. She recalled also the case of Jonah: prophets were sometimes reluctant and had to be pushed. All that I have now to record is the pushing.

Outwardly it was very gently applied: Miss Sparling merely placed the box in Mr. Trimblerigg’s hands for safe-keeping, and there left it. Inwardly? There after stating the facts, I can only leave others to guess. But be it noted that when she left it in his hands she did not ask him to open it; she even told him that only a crowned head could qualify for that purpose; and at that time at all events Mr. Trimblerigg was wearing no crown. Nevertheless—she having asked him to use his influence and persuade a crowned head to open it—the box lay in his undisputed possession. And, as I have said before, I think that Miss Sparling knew her man, and how best to have him.

And so it came about that, finding himself alone with it, though by no means yet convinced of its importance or the truth of its credentials, he became interested in it. The mere fact that a box has been shut up for nearly a hundred and fifty years makes it interesting—at least until it has been opened again: and this was a box claiming to contain prophecy.

Mr. Trimblerigg was no longer of a mind to reject anything which might bring grist to his mill. His discovery of Publicity as the wide gate and the broad road leading to eternal life, forbade him to dismiss as common or unclean anything which might seize the public interest. And his public was now in a mood to seize anything: a whirl of excitement had caught hold of the great semi-detached unsectarian forces of this transitional age; and the fact that he was emptying the Churches was sufficient proof that what the public wanted was something it did not get there. The Churches had ceased to prophesy; prophecy, therefore, might be the right card to play. Second Adventism was based on it: if anticipation was to be raised and seals opened, any old box might help; and this one had already attained publicity though not of a very serious kind. ‘Can any real prophecy come from America?’ had been the depreciatory attitude with which the religious communities of the Old World met its claims; and if from America, why this demand for a crowned head to open it? Why not a President, or a millionaire?

Mr. Trimblerigg himself, though doubting the extreme claims made for it, had never entirely rejected prophecy. Even when, for a brief spell, he had counted himself a modernist, the better to escape from the trammels of True Belief, he had still found a rhetorical use for it; and the Land of Promise with its flowings of milk and honey had oftentimes evoked soul-stirring utterances from his tongue which, when they failed to materialize, became mere figures of speech. But he would much rather that they had materialized; and had they done so would have claimed the credit for it. That precisely was, and always had been his attitude toward prophecy; if he could give its fulfilment he would claim credit for it; if not he would treat it as a figure of speech.

It was in that same attitude, tentatively, that he laid his hand on the box. It might be a good egg; but he did not want to commit himself publicly to anything that would let him down. He would like first to know more of the contents. Prophecy might be what his public required to complete the spell he had begun to lay on it; but the extant writings of Susannah Walcot, obscure, diffuse, and ungrammatical, together with the diminished number of her followers, did not inspire him with confidence; and so for the present his attitude toward prophecy, as he laid his hand on a box said to be full of it, remained unchanged,—he was only prepared to accept it conditionally—in his own time and in his own way; that is, if it suited him.

But as he stooped and examined the box, its structure as well as its possibilities began to interest him; for he noticed that though it had many seals at the top its bottom was quite removable; long rusty nails sticking out a little where the dried wood had shrunk, and at one point a gap where cautious leverage might be possible, suggested a way which in the interests of Relative Truth one might adopt. From one aspect—the one which practically did not matter—it was an equivocal and surreptitious deed; but as over everything else which might have held others in doubt, having quite made up his mind to it, he prayed long and fervently that he might be guided aright in what he did, and also that he might have sufficient skill in carpentry to cover up his tracks when the will of Heaven was done.

He worked at it very patiently for three hours, when the rest of his household was a-bed, till with gathered experience he acquired a standard which, if not skilled, allowed him to feel safe.

It was not hard work so much as delicate; the wood was tender and worm-eaten, the old-fashioned nails with screw-heads came out quite easily—too easily in fact, at first; bits of the wood came with them. This frightened him, he went more slowly. After a tedious period of minute labour the wood was ready to come away in his hand. With his attitude to prophecy still unchanged he lifted it away, and out of the box like a pudding from its mould came a compact mass of very yellow stained paper slightly stuck together by mildew, and dampness that had dried.

Mr. Trimblerigg saw at once that a long task was before him. The prophecies were in a small cramped hand with numerous contractions, and many words badly spelt.

Here and there the ink had gone faint; in other parts time and moisture had made whole passages undecipherable; portions of the prophecy had indubitably passed into oblivion; but far larger portions remained.

With the help of headings—titles symbolic in character—Mr. Trimblerigg began skimming. At first sceptical and a little bored, he presently grew interested; and though not yet convinced, he saw that from the publicity point of view the thing had possibilities. This, for instance, he regarded as an arresting passage:

‘And lo, when the Cock, stricken by the double-pated Eagle, draws in its claws, causing the Scarlet Parrot to fall from its perch, then shall a city fall and a people go free, and the mark of the Beast that was on it shall be blotted out.’

Mr. Trimblerigg, questing this way and that, searched his history; and when presently his mind lighted on a likely spot, he found there an astonishingly close parallel; for this, clearly, was—or could be taken as—a reference, couched in unfriendly terms, to the Papacy’s loss of Temporal Power in the year 1870, owing to the withdrawal of the French troops which protected it.

Presently he began to feel that he was missing things through not knowing as much about modern history as he ought to do; and that a great deal that he was reading might possibly be true could he but discover the application.

Presuming that the prophecies followed a chronological order, he turned on, and before long had struck substance. Here he was no longer out of his depth.

‘When the Bear and the Lion and the Cock shall rise up and stand together in a heap, and become as one for the defence of a Lamb that was without blame—’ This clearly was modern history, and though not quite true history it was the kind of history that was still being swallowed by the Public for which Mr. Trimblerigg had to cater. This at all events was the sort of thing that would go down; there was, in the journalistic sense, good copy in it.

At first Mr. Trimblerigg had inclined to suppose that ‘the Lamb’ had a scriptural significance; he soon decided, however, that it was better for it to mean Belgium; without making the prophecy more true it made it more obvious.

This wresting of the text to suit his possible requirements was a sufficient indication that now Mr. Trimblerigg’s interest had become active. His attitude to prophecy had not exactly changed, but it was being accentuated. He was beginning to see Opportunity upon a large scale; in fact he was not far off from becoming a Susannah Walcotite. With hope mounting to enthusiasm he read on.

Startling analogies began to come thick and fast; with a whirring of wings like coveys put up from fields of unreaped harvest—invisible at one moment, at the next dominating the whole landscape, they flew over his head making a plumed darkness on the bright heavens beyond. From this strange scripture, diffuse, chaotic, with pages not numbered, he began to take notes. Amid much that he did not understand and a good deal which might mean anything, certain figures leapt into definite significance, capable of meaning but one thing only.

‘When the Striped Eagle is seen walking upon the waters with his face to the sun,’ was the entry of America into the War. It is true that, in the first instance, he read the third word as ‘stupid’; but on consideration of the facts and the post-war susceptibilities of America, he decided that ‘striped’ was better. And there was more like unto it.

Then, turning for awhile from its theme of nations at War, the prophecy became personal and particular.

‘And in that day behold a man shall arise and become a beacon; in him a candle shall be set up, and its wick shall be kindled, so that the four corners of the earth shall know of it. His light shall shine; yea, men shall see it and be amazed. Honour shall be upon his head; and whatsoever he sayeth shall come to pass; his hand shall prosper it. My “yea” shall be upon his lips, and my yolk upon his shoulders; to his voice the “yea, yea” of the nations shall answer: they shall be all yolked together because of him.’

Susannah’s spelling was often queer; but as I read this, looking over Mr. Trimblerigg’s shoulder to do it, I began to think that her spelling was sometimes inspired; for I saw now what was coming.

Turning a page,—a page which stood somehow by itself, mildewed like the rest, but with most of its script obliterated—Mr. Trimblerigg read on:

‘He is my prophet, my messenger; unto Nineveh have I called him; yea, I have given him a name that he may be known, that he may be called the second Jonah. Than him none shall be more exalted; and of all feet that run no feet shall run faster.’

Jonathan sat up; his name almost was Jonah; and with the word that followed, dropping only an H, the anagram was perfect. Uplifted and entranced, he read on:

‘When I call him, he shall be afraid; but though he fears me I will run after him. Yea, I will run while I wait; and though I bide my time yet will I catch him. When I make my light shine on him he shall be in doubt; I will withdraw my light from him, so that in darkness he may learn and know. I will put my hook in his mouth and lead him; yea, I will bait his breath so that he may become a catcher of men. He shall travel west, but east he shall return: he shall go far, but I will make him come again. Yea, the ship whereon he goes shall be shaken because of him; the rigging thereof shall tremble. Have I not given him a name?’

Mr. Trimblerigg no longer merely sat up, he skipped to his feet. Only one letter—the letter ‘i’ was missing to make the prophecy absolute. But proper names, he remembered, were very seldom correctly spelt in old days; and it had ever been a source of pride to him to know that upon his father’s side, far back, the family had been illiterate for generations.

‘Trimblerigg!’ ‘And the rigging thereof shall tremble. Have I not given him a name?’ What could be plainer than that?

He continued to pore over the quaint crabbed writing, with its misspellings and its occasional misconstructions,—a style of grammar belonging to the half-educated of a century ago, but not much worse on the whole than the bad Greek of the New Testament. Was bad grammar and bad spelling a reason for rejecting a message so high? In the world’s eyes he feared it would be. In the worldly sense this Susannah was but a half-educated person; sometimes she made prophecies which he not only failed to identify, but which even seemed contradictory, in a wrong tone, out of place. This, for instance, presented a meaning less doubtful than undesirable; he had no use for it:

‘In that day the Lion and the Ass will lie down together; they will share a bed, they will eat hay together, and the heart of the Lion shall wax faint, and his thoughts grow foolish. And the Lion shall listen to the voice of the Ass, and shall think it wisdom. For the Ass shall bray and speak, saying, “It is going to rain”; and immediately it shall do so. Then shall the Ass say, “Come into my stable; for there I have a place prepared for thee, where it does not rain.” So shall they rise up and go, the Lion and the Ass together; and in the stable they shall find one waiting for them with his tackle prepared; and he shall let down his tackle upon their backs and harness the two of them, the Lion with the Ass, and the Ass with the Lion, making them to be a pair under one yolk. And all their apples shall be in one cart; and the man, the owner of the Ass shall drive them whither they know not.’

Mr. Trimblerigg read the passage twice; he did not like it, it perturbed him. Assuming the Lion to mean what he thought it to mean, this was an event which no reading of history could justify: it never had been true, it never would be true. In the other prophecies it was quite evident that the Lion was the chosen beast, well-pleasing to the Lord; how, then, did it come into this forecast of divine dispensation that the Lion should go so far astray?

And who the dickens was the Ass? He looked ahead wherever he saw Ass and Lion figuring together; and the obscurities and perversities of the prophecy became more confounding. The Lion was clearly not doing the right thing; it was following the Ass into a course of action which was leading to no good, which was, in fact, morally wrong; and so far as he could place the prophecies in their chronological sequence, these misdoings must some of them be quite recent, and some actually taking place now. Unedified, he began turning the pages in haste, to find something better; and so doing—it was a pity!—managed to miss this, which caught my quicker eye:

‘And the Ass said to the Lion, “Let us drive the scapegoat into the wilderness and there skin it; and from the skin of the scapegoat let us make coats for ourselves and for our children.” And the Lion said, “Will it be enough?” And the Ass answered, “It shall be enough; for we will stretch it this way and that and make it enough; or if so it be not enough, then we will wait till a second skin be grown, and will take that also; and after that another, and another, till we be satisfied.” Then said the Lion, “But if he die of it, how shall we be satisfied?” And the Ass answered, “We will not let him die, till we be satisfied.” So together they drove the scapegoat into the wilderness, and there they lost him. And the Lion reproached the Ass saying, “Where is the skin of the scapegoat that you promised me?” And the Ass answered, “A proposal is not a promise, neither is a promise a performance. Let it suffice that we have driven the scapegoat into the wilderness, and that he will presently die there. What matter how he dies, so long as he does die?” But the Lion said, “I have no coats for my children, and I am not satisfied.”’

Had Mr. Trimblerigg read that, I wonder what he would have made of it? Had he done so his attitude toward prophecy might have altered. He might have given the box back to Isabel Sparling ‘unopened,’ without having found what followed.

This was a separate enclosure of folded tissue paper, spotted and yellow with age, broken at the folds, and very frail to the touch. It was sealed with the seal of the prophetess; but a single seal on paper presented little difficulty to Mr. Trimblerigg. With great circumspection and delicacy of handling he applied the hot blade of a knife, lifted the seal away, and laid open the contents. A wash-drawing in sepia on mildewed paper was what met his eye. From the artistic point of view it was very poor and amateurish; but to say that it interested him were to put the matter very mildly indeed. It represented a man with rather short legs, middle-aged, somewhat full in the body, and clad in a full-skirted coat. As a forecast of present-day fashions it was not very good; but the legs were in trousers, not knee-breeches, and the head did not wear a wig.

It was the head that most interested him; a large spot of mildew had partly obliterated the features, but not enough to obscure the type. The face was broad, the cheeks were smooth-shaven, the forehead was noble, the hair rather long, and curled up at the ends like the hair of the knave of hearts in a pack of cards; a large bow-tie sat under the chin,—the black tie of a Free Church minister. Underneath were the words, ‘Behold the Fore-runner!’ And again, underneath that, were these words of Scripture: ‘Arise, shine, for thy light has come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee!’ Around the head was an indubitable halo; and faint, very faint, upon the blank space of it to right and left, the initials ‘J’ and ‘T.’