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“It’s a rum world!”

The Reverend Robert Peterson got up from his study chair, and, walking over to the mantelpiece, selected one out of the many foul and well-used briar pipes, and proceeded very deliberately to fill and light it. A tall, fresh-complexioned, blue-eyed man, his black, curly hair going grey and thin a little at the temples, he looked what he was, a healthy-minded, clean-living English gentleman who had taken Holy Orders some twenty-five years before, not because of any tremendous and overwhelmingly religious experience, but because his father had been a parson before him, and he desired to serve his generation, and to stand for what was decent. It would not be fair to say of him that convention counted for more than conviction in his life. He had convictions, but they were the result of heredity and habit, rather than of conscious thought or strong feeling. People who had positive and personal religious experience made him feel uncomfortable and shy. He did not doubt their sincerity. He even admired them in the pulpit, but outside of it—well, he just wished they wouldn’t, that was all. He had always been a conscientious, hard-working parish priest, and was considered “good” with men and boys. Being average at all ball games, and more than average at golf, he commanded their respect. For fourteen years he had worked in and about Liverpool, first in the slums, and later in the suburbs, and had then come as rector to a wretchedly poor parish in the cathedral town of Ranchester. During the war he had joined up as a Padre, and done good work in the line as an amateur stretcher-bearer, receiving the Military Cross for gallantry on the field. Although the parish was poor the income was adequate, and he possessed sufficient private means to enable him to live without anxiety, to spite the Inspector of Taxes, in the pleasant old barn of a rectory which stood ivy-covered under the shadow of the Cathedral. His study window looked out upon the Cathedral close, which was now bathed in the sunshine of the end of May. The echoes of the great tower bell which had just chimed eleven o’clock died away into silence, and there was no other sound but the distant shouting of some boys at play. It was a lovely morning and a pleasant scene, a typical piece of that sweet mellow older England over which an American tourist is prepared to burst into an ecstasy at any moment. But there were no signs of ecstasy about the Rector of S. Philip’s. He stared out of the window with unseeing eyes, and, as his pipe got going, muttered to himself again:

“It is a rum world.”

Like many men in post-war England whose lines were cast in pleasant places, and who had no personal worries to speak of, he was, notwithstanding his creature comforts, neither happy nor altogether comfortable. The whole world seemed to be in a state of turmoil and somehow in these days one was forced to think about the world, forced to think about everything. That was the misery of it. Things that one had simply taken for granted before the war, and regarded, like the weather, as part of the natural, if incomprehensible order of things, rose up now and challenged a decent man to think. The poverty of his parish which he had pitied, and faithfully ministered to, in the old days, now made him uncomfortable in a new way. He had a wretched feeling when he compared his lot with that of his people that this glaring contrast ought not to be, there was something shameful about it. He had always detested Socialism and dismissed its enthusiastic advocates as cranks, but there were times now when he could not withhold his sympathy from them, even though he thought that they were wrong. It was disgusting that some of the decent working men who had served with him in France should be compelled to live as they did. He was heartily sick of politicians and politics. And there were other things. He had just been reading a sermon on the Sanctity of Christian Marriage which the Suffragan Bishop of the Diocese, an ardent and powerful Anglo-Catholic, had sent round to all the clergy. It was a disturbing thing to read. The sternness, almost ferocity, of its orthodoxy was upsetting to him. He had never thought of orthodoxy, in this or any other matter, as a thing which a man was called upon to get stern or ferocious about. It had always been the solid background of an ordered life which one took for granted and never thought about at all. But here was one whom he respected and admired, talking as though Christian Marriage were on its trial and needing of ardent, earnest, and reasoned defence. He thought of occasional sermons he had himself preached on the subject before the war. Remembering quite distinctly the line he had taken, he realized with an uncomfortable feeling that they would not do now. Even he could not deliver them now, they took everything for granted.

“Well, why the devil shouldn’t I take it for granted?” he said to himself. “If one can’t take that for granted, what is there that one can?” Even golf moved him but seldom to strong language, but he brought in the devil on this occasion as a kind of guarantee to himself of his own sincerity. He meant in effect: “Even supposing I jump out of my clerical skin and become a layman, I’m blessed if I see how I can, as a decent man, do anything but take strict Christian Marriage as a fixed and settled fact, about which there can be no real argument.” And yet ... there was this wretched business of Charlie Roberts and Maisie Smith—and there was Jim. There was Jim, that was a problem. What on earth ...? As though in answer to his thoughts there was a click of the garden gate, and a man walked quickly up the path. He was of middle height, broad and powerfully made, with a very large head, enormous dark eyes, and an ugly but striking face. Even before he spoke one might have guessed that he was Irish. The large, mobile, humorous mouth, and high cheek-bones prepared one to expect the brogue before one heard it. There had been days when the football fields had rung with his name, Counihan the Irish three-quarter back. He wore a cassock and no hat, and looked ill and worried. Presently he burst into the room unannounced.

“I say, Bob, are ye busy? or could you spare me half an hour now?”

There was no greeting smile, no joke. It was all so unlike Jim Counihan’s ordinary self that his friend took his cue at once and answered.

“Of course I can, Jim. Sit down and smoke.”

“Thank ye. No, I never smoke anything but fags,” he said, waving the proffered tobacco-jar aside and sitting down. “I’ve got some yellow perils on me somewhere.” He foraged round in the breast of his cassock and produced a battered packet of Gold Flake, lighted one, and then for awhile sat staring into the empty grate. They were old friends, these two. They had worked together in slums and campaigned together in France, and Peterson was not surprised at the silence. He knew, all his friends knew, that there was enough in this man’s life just then to make anyone silent. Presently Counihan felt again in the breast of his cassock, and out of his waistcoat pocket produced a letter, a letter which had been all crumpled up, and then straightened out again.

“Read that,” he said.

Peterson took it. It was written in a large loose feminine hand, sloping backwards, and smelt strongly of a certain scent which, even for him, brought back in a flood memories of the writer, the queer mixture of charm and repulsiveness which she had always had for him, a woman at once too hard and too soft to be friends with, one of those for whom it must be all or had better be nothing. Instinctively he was on his guard. She was the only woman who had ever disturbed him since his marriage twenty years ago. Once when she and Jim were engaged and had come down to spend part of a holiday by the sea with him and Robin, about two years after his own wife died, he had caught himself thinking about her far too often, and in a way that had shocked and surprised him. He had been glad, and yet strangely restless and lonely, he remembered, when she was gone. He could see her now with a yellow bath-robe thrown over her shoulders, shaking the water from her thick mop of bobbed brown hair with gold strands dancing in it, and laughing down at Jim and Robin who were sitting at her feet. She was asking for admiration and receiving it. She could not help it. She was always asking for admiration, and when she did not receive it, she was just puzzled and did not know what on earth to do next with the person, man or woman, who did not respond. He had never been able to make up his mind whether she was deliberately provocative, or whether it was simply natural, but the challenge was always there.

“What a woman! Why, even this scent ...”

All this flashed across his mind before he began to take in what the letter meant. It was brief. She was too lazy to write long letters about anything, even this. He remembered how Jim used to fret over the brief sweetness of her love-letters to him before they married.

“Dear Jim Crow,” it began. “Good Lord, what cruelty! She’s as hard as nails. No mercy—absolutely none, never had. It must have hurt like blazes, that name.”

“Dear Jim Crow,—

“Do hurry up and get your divorce. It’s no good, we could never live together. I was never meant to be a parson’s wife. Besides, I’m going to have a child now, and that ends it. Don’t waste time writing any more long letters and arguments, but get a divorce for my sake. You will not be so cruel as to let your religious scruples stand in the way. Hurry up and try not to think too hardly of it.

“Yours,

“Phyllis.”

The Rector read the letter through twice, and then looked at the tortured face of the man opposite to him. He felt utterly helpless and miserable.

“Well,” he said at last, “there’s nothing else to do, I suppose.”

“But I don’t believe in Divorce. I hate it. It is against the law of God. It is sin. This child of hers was conceived and will be born in sin, nothing can alter that. Why should I divorce her, and throw away the only chance I have of bringing her to repentance? This Philip Dunstone is a loose-living waster. God knows whether he will marry her even if I do divorce her. But if he does, what difference could it make? Is the sin going to be any less sinful because it has been whitewashed by Society? I’m sick of all this sham and hypocrisy. No one has any convictions about anything nowadays. I cannot and will not do it. It is contrary to the Law of the Church, and the Church is the only Society left in the world with a grain of moral sense in it.”

This was exactly the kind of talk that made Peterson feel all at sea inside. After all, what Phyllis asked for was only common sense, cruel if you like, but common sense. In theory, of course, there was no such thing as Divorce, but in practical matters, one had to compromise.

“Well, you know, Jim,” he said slowly, “I hate Divorce as much as you do, and believe in it as little. But for the life of me I cannot see how you can refuse to divorce her now. It would be cruel, as she says. I know she has been cruel to you. This letter is about the most heartless thing I’ve ever struck. But you are a Christian, Jim, old chap, and the law of love runs before all others, doesn’t it? You can’t be cruel.”

“Cruelty!” broke in the other. “That’s all this miserable sentiment over again. Isn’t that just what tempted me all the time? I never could bear to see her unhappy, and so I let her do as she liked. I allowed her to drift into this because I was afraid to be cruel. I betrayed her soul because I was not strong enough to give her pain. All her life she has done just what she liked, and got whatever she wanted. No mother—and that old fool of a father. Now you are the same. You never could deny her anything either. You want me to let her go on drifting because it is cruel to refuse. That’s what’s the matter with us all. We are soft and self-indulgent ourselves, and we daren’t be hard on anyone else, not even on our children. We let them go to the devil and pride ourselves on being kind. We daren’t act upon principle because principles are hard. Of course they’re hard, that’s what they’re for, to give backbone to jelly-fish like us.”

The Rector’s thoughts went back to the Bishop’s sermon. Here was another of them waxing stern and ferocious about orthodoxy. There was so much truth in it, too. He could remember Rose, his wife, saying the same sort of thing about him when he was pleading with her for Robin when she wanted to do some little thing against her mother’s wish. He could hear her saying, “My dear, it is not good for the child, and it is not kind to let her do what is not good for her. You are only being kind to yourself, that is all.” Kind to himself, he had always been kind to himself, that was really why he hated cruelty. He hated to see anyone unhappy or in pain. Perhaps that was why he was a parson. Was that all? Was even his vocation just being kind to himself? A jelly-fish, that’s what he was. He wobbled about things, and never could be firm unless he were goaded into it, and wanted a way out of a painful situation. But hang it all! There must be limits to this firmness business. You could not let the woman have an illegitimate child and compel her to live as that fellow’s mistress. It wasn’t decent. He got up from his chair uneasily, relighted his pipe, and walking over to the table stood there fingering the Bishop’s sermon. There was silence in the room, and he could hear the Dean of Ranchester calling to his grandson on the other side of the garden wall. “Harry, what are you doing? Come here at once.” There was no jelly about the Dean anyhow. He was another generation. They knew their own minds in those days. He was bringing the boy up in the way he should go all right.

Suddenly, without turning round, he said:

“Do you still love Phyllis, Jim?”

There was no answer. He turned about and saw his friend all crumpled up in the chair, his head buried in his hands, and his shoulders heaving. This was terrible. Once before he had seen Jim weep, and then there were tears in his own eyes. It was while they stood together to watch the remnant of the 137th Brigade march down the road from Fonquevilliers to Souastre after the show on July 1st, 1916. All the deep and loyal love he felt for his friend rose up and rent him to pieces inside. He walked over to him, and putting his hand hesitatingly on his shoulder, said:

“Don’t, Jim, old man, don’t.”

“Even now,” he thought, “I’m only being kind to myself. I hate to see him broken, it hurts like the devil. That beastly woman deserves all she can get.”

“I shouldn’t have asked that,” he said.

Jim sprang to his feet, walked to the table, and then turned leaning against it.

“Yes, you should,” he choked out, “it’s the one thing you should have asked. You weren’t just being kind when you asked that, you were getting down to it. That’s where my sin lies. There are times when I would give my soul’s salvation, aye and the salvation of all the souls in the world, to take her in my arms again and know that she was mine. Is that Love? Sometimes I think that it is, and that it is the only thing worth living for. When I’m sane I know that it isn’t, that it is sin. That it is sin now, and always has been sin; that it was sin the day I married her. God knows no one ever meant their marriage vows as I meant mine, and yet it was a mockery, and deep down somewhere I knew it was a mockery. I knew she could not help me in my work. I knew she hadn’t a spark of religion, real religion in her. I told myself that I did not want a curate but a wife, and that she had quite enough religion in her for that. I pretended that she was just a child, gay and innocent, but, in my heart of hearts, I knew she was a woman, a fascinating and enthralling woman, and that it was the woman in her that I wanted. I did not really care a hang about the work, the world, or the Church, or Christ or anything; I wanted her. I told myself that it was all right, only natural, and all that. I used to go down on my knees to thank God for her, and rise up knowing that I had not been thanking God at all, but just dreaming of her, of the way she spoke, and the little pucker under her nose when she laughed, and all the rest of it. You know what she was—and is, and always will be. No God, no Church, nothing could ever change her. I know it now. I knew it then, and yet I married her. That is my sin.”

“I don’t think it was sin, or is now,” Peterson said gently. “I was like that myself once. It’s only human nature after all.”

“No, of course you wouldn’t think it sin. Sin is a cruel word, isn’t it? It’s hard, and you can’t be hard, except when you have no time to think, and the inheritance of a decent Christian tradition comes out. Of course it’s only human nature, and what is human nature but sin? Weren’t we born in sin? This shallow, muddle-headed generation doesn’t like the Catechism ‘We being by nature born in sin and children of wrath.’ It shocks our fine susceptibilities, but we’ll have to learn to like it or go to the devil.”

“But you don’t finish,” interrupted the Rector. “You have not finished that. What about ‘are hereby made the children of grace’?”

“That’s all right if you stick to the Church, man, and live in grace. But haven’t I just said that I didn’t care a hang about the Church? I wanted her and I got her. That is human nature, and it is sin.”

“Well, I don’t agree. If Phyllis had played the game it would have turned out all right.”

“Played the game! What game? She did play the game, the only game she knows anything about. She’s playing it now, this letter is part of it. She is asking me to play up, and so are you. But what you don’t see, and she could never see, is that it is a different game. This is not the fine hard game of Christian Marriage with its strict rules and grand, relentless loyalties; it is the soft old game of human love in which everything is fair as it is in war. That’s just what the world won’t see, that there are two games, and that you must play one or the other. This sporting talk turns me sick when it pretends to be Christian. Of all the forms of modern cant it is about the meanest. We’re always talking about playing the game, but we daren’t play Christ’s game to save our blessed lives. We put a velvet cushion on the cross for fear the nails might hurt. And who am I to rail at the world? I talk like a priest, but I’m just a man, a common, dirty, sinful man, caught in the trap I laid for myself, and blaming it on the woman as usual.”

He walked over to the book-shelves opposite, and stood with his back to Peterson, drumming with his fingers on the bindings of the books, silent for a while because he could not trust himself to say another word.

“Don’t you see,” he stammered out brokenly at last, “I don’t know where I am now. I don’t know what game I’m playing. I don’t know whether it is that I hate to close the door for good, and give up the hope, the last hope I have, that she will come back to me, or whether what I said just now is really true, and I cannot cease to be responsible to God for her soul, and want to save her from her sin. If she came back to-morrow I would not dare to play the Christian, I would be so terrified of driving her away. I would tell myself that I must be tender for her soul’s sake, and all the time I would want her, want her, want her as a man wants his mate.”

The stark-naked sincerity of all this was somehow repulsive to Peterson. He heard confessions now and then, but only now and then, and under protest so to speak. This was worse than any confession he had ever heard. It was, moreover, complicated by the fact that he really loved his friend. The very pain of the situation drove him to the point of decision. He simply could not stand much more of this. He did not acknowledged it to himself, but in reality he was determined to put an end to the interview as quickly as he could.

It was bad enough having to teach the theory of Christian Marriage, but this brutal decision in practice was more than he could bear.

“Well,” he said, “if that is how you feel, Jim, old chap, don’t you think it is clear that you must divorce her? You feel that the marriage never was a Christian marriage, and that you are, partly at any rate, to blame. You do not know that your desire to hold her is not selfish, the indulgence of a crazy hope. A man of the world would say that to refuse your wife divorce under the circumstances was the act of a cad, and I can’t help feeling that there is something in it. It can’t be Christian to be caddish, can it?”

A certain hardness, born of inward irritation rather than conviction, crept into the words somehow, although he tried to soften it by a term of affection. The hardness had the effect of calming Jim.

“That’s better,” he said after a silence, “that’s straight talk. But”—and he looked up at his friend with a whimsical smile that had in it more agony than many tears—“but you’re still the same old woolly-headed fraud, you know. It’s my feelings, and her feelings, and your feelings that you are thinking about. But Christian Marriage does not rest upon feelings, it rests upon facts. What I felt and she felt, what you and I or the man of the world feels cannot alter the facts. Phyllis and I were made man and wife by God. No man-made law, no State nor Court can change that fact, any more than it can make you into a woman, or your daughter into a son. Once you ignore or defy that crucial point the whole basis of Christian Marriage crumbles into dust, and you fall back into the wash of feelings, expediencies, shifts and subterfuges that make up the world’s marriage laws. Of course I’m a priest, but my Priesthood does not really make up a scrap of difference in this connection. There aren’t two Christian Marriage laws, one for the Priesthood and the other for the laity. It is not my Priesthood that is at stake, but the whole conception of Christian Marriage. According to that if I divorce my wife, I openly condone her sin, and give her permission to go on living in it. How can I do that and continue to be a Christian? Am I not bound to try and save her soul, and get her back again?”

“You cannot save her soul,” Peterson interrupted with a flash of insight. “She must save her own by repentance and the grace of God, as we all must in the end. You may help her to that, but you certainly will not do it by insisting on your rights. You are much more likely to drive her to bitter hatred and resentment of your attitude. You do not believe in Divorce, and you will not be divorced, but you cannot compel her to share your belief by exposing her and her child to social pains and penalties. In the face of that answer to all your pleading do you think yourself that you are likely to bring her to real repentance by holding her to the law? Put yourself in her place. What could I feel about you suppose it were my Robin?”

“It couldn’t be Robin,” replied Jim with despair in his voice; “it couldn’t be Robin any more than it could help being Phyllis. They are two different types. It would be as impossible for the one as it was inevitable for the other. Robin is your daughter and had your wife for a mother. Phyllis had no mother, and that stupid, sensual, old Captain Forsyth, with his splutter and his spats, for a father—she never had a chance.”

“In that case, what is the good of Christianity at all?” Peterson said in gruff desperation. “If Phyllis could not help sinning and cannot be changed as you say. If she is just one type and our little Robin another—two fixed types from birth—where does the Church come in?”

“It’s not the birth that counts, though I suppose it does count, it’s the bringing up. The Church comes in with the children, if she comes in at all. But O God, I’m in such a muddle. Everything seems to be going from under me—faith and everything else. She won’t come back. I know her and I know she won’t. I cannot save her. What’s the good of my taking a strong line, when I’m not strong, when I’m weak as water? I may deceive myself into believing that I hold her on principle, when really I’m just being vindictive and futile. I suppose I shall divorce her, but I am all muddled up, and I can’t see right and wrong in it anyhow. God knows ...”

He broke off, lighted a cigarette, picked up the Bishop’s sermon, and after reading the title tossed it hopelessly aside. Then, as he turned, he saw the garden gate open and Robin ran up the path.

“I’m sorry to have inflicted this upon you, Bob,” he said, “but there was no one else I could go to. You can’t talk of this sort of thing to anybody. Here’s the little Robin.”

She ran to Jim Counihan and kissed him.

“Hullo, Uncle Jim,” she said, and then, turning to her father, “I’m late, Daddy, and I’m so sorry. Miss Grayson kept me talking about the dance for ages after my lesson. I would have been later if I had not met Peter, and came back in his car.”

While she was speaking she had turned back to Jim and stood now with her arm through his. He had known her since she was a baby, and had played bears with her round this very arm-chair by which they stood. He looked at her now with a wealth of affection shining in his troubled eyes. She was good to look upon, good as a wild rose just opening out in June. Half child, half woman, small but exquisitely formed, with the perfect complexion of a healthy schoolgirl, large frank blue eyes, a strong chin and a small mouth with character and fine breeding in every line of it, she looked up at Jim with sympathy and anxiety in her expressive face. She knew he was in trouble. For years these three had been friends and constant companions, and, next to her father, Jim Counihan was to Robin the dearest person in the world.

Feeling that if he stayed he would only make the child sad, he excused himself from coming to lunch. She saw him to the gate and as they were going down the path she took his arm and gave it a friendly squeeze.

“I’m sorry, Uncle Jim,” she said.

He kissed her gently and turned away.