THE TEMPLE TO THE FORGOTTEN DEAD

I suppose I had a good conceit of myself and some apparent reasons for it. I had won a scholarship at Clifton and gone to Balliol and won first honours in “Mods.” and “Greats” and got the Ireland scholarship, and thought myself a wonder. It was the year after Asquith had swept the university of prizes and, like Asquith, I, too, went to the Bar in the Middle Temple. I swotted the first term or two and then, having worked too hard, went for a walking tour through Surrey and Sussex. Cæsar had kept off headaches and sickness by eating little, walking much and living always in the open air, and I followed the same regimen—with equally good results.

At the end of the second week of my holiday I reached the outskirts of Brighton, feeling very fit. It was a lovely evening, bright and warm, and I was glad to see a “pub” almost as soon as the heath died away in the streets.

The landlord was a big man. When I asked him for a “lemon squash” he seemed surprised, but soon put it before me. While we were talking there issued from a neighbouring room to the left of the bar shouts of laughter and a great noise, as of glasses being beaten on the table.

“What’s that?” I could not help asking.

“It’s a Mr. Collinson,” replied the landlord apologetically. “They have a sort of club there, sir, twice a week, and Mr. Collinson tells ’em stories.”

“Stories?” I repeated in a question.

“Yes, sir,” said the landlord; “and he does tell ’em surprising, sir.”

“Might I hear one?” I asked. “I love a good story.”

“This Mr. Collinson,” confided the landlord, “is some’ut out of the common. He used to be a master, I have been told, in Dr. John’s Grammar School, but he married an aunt of the doctor’s that had quite a bit of money of her own and now lives with her in ‘The Grange,’ the house standing alone on your left as you go out of the door. She was a widow and is quite a few years older nor him; but they gets along very well, though they do say as she wears the breeches. You know what I mean, sir, don’t you? No offence!”

I nodded. “Are you sure the other guests wouldn’t mind my listening?” I asked the good-humoured host.

“No, no, sir,” he replied cordially. “I often go in myself and listen when I’ve nothing better to do. No one will object, sir, I’m sure,” and he came round the bar as he spoke and opened the door for me.

There may have been a dozen men in the room. The story-teller, Mr. Collinson, was in the chair at the far end of the table. He was a man of perhaps five-and-thirty, nice-looking, with fair features, blue-grey eyes and almost black hair, worn rather long: he would have been very good-looking were it not for an outjutting, fleshy nose; the mouth, too, was a little large; but at first the impression was altogether pleasing, the eyes were so bright and quick and the smile so engaging.

“Here’s a friend,” said the landlord by way of introduction, “who would like to hear your stories, Mr. Collinson. Your name, sir?” he added, turning to me.

“My name is quite unknown to fame,” I replied; “it’s Clarke,” and I spelled it out.

“Mr. Clarke,” repeated the landlord, and Collinson rose and bade me welcome.

“Do you make up the stories?” I asked.

“Of course,” replied Collinson reproachfully.

“He tells ’em wonderfully, sir,” said one of the guests. “I never misses a Wednesday or Saturday evening. I——” And he shut up, apparently from excess of feeling.

“And he never tells two alike,” said another.

“What will you all drink?” I asked. “I must stand something for the good of the house!” The proposal seemed to be acceptable, and after everyone had a fresh drink before him Collinson wanted to know whether I’d mind a half-religious story. Naturally I told him that I left him the choice, and he began at once:

“This story came to me in sleep. We all know the brain often works in sleep and solves problems even for mathematicians that puzzled them when awake, and performs other wonders, and this dream of mine was strangely vivid, in spite of its wild improbability. I dreamed I had awakened on an isle in the South Pacific that was shut off by electric clouds from all communication with the outside world. There I found a curiously high civilisation, a society of people extraordinarily cultivated, who had made their little island (it was barely fifty miles round) an artistic home, where everyone worked and all enjoyed the luxuries even of a simple life. They had a law that any stranger reaching their land by any chance should be condemned to painless death, and I was so sentenced, and in ignorance was walking to my doom when I caught the eyes of an astonishingly pretty girl. I could not but smile to her, she was so fine and seemed sad, and she turned and took me from my attendants. I learned later that anyone who came from a family that had been thanked by the State for services could exercise the right of mercy at any time, and so Irene, as I called her, saved my life.

“All this and more I learned gradually as I mastered the language, for Irene had taken me to her home and taught me every day, though she was the daughter of one of the governors of the island. I had been reading a little before how Diotima, the lovely, light woman of Athens, told Socrates all sorts of new things, and I dreamed into Irene a sort of ideal nature, and indeed she was very fine.

“She held herself curiously erect; she had large grey eyes, with long black lashes, and a rather rich mouth showing bluey-white teeth. There was something challenging in her good humour and smiling superiority of approach. Though still in the twenties she was very wise. In my dream we were together, this Irene and myself, in a garden. I had been impressed by her wisdom and her air of conscious superiority, and accordingly I put forward the Sermon on the Mount as the sublimest height of wisdom that I knew anything about. ‘The Sermon on the Mount begins with beatitudes,’ I said, ‘or a sort of declaration of faith,’ and I recited them.

“‘I see, I see,’ said Irene, smiling, ‘the sort of thing a young man gets off to convince himself of his own originality.’

“I was struck by the truth of her remark, but went on reciting. When I came to the verses:

“‘Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him; lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison.

“‘Verily I say unto thee, Thou shalt by no means come out thence, till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing.’

—Irene was indignant. ‘I never heard worse morality,’ she cried. ‘Am I to make it up with an enemy merely for fear of the consequences? It’s degrading.’

“‘Listen,’ I said, and went on to the end of the chapter, and when I had finished this was Irene’s criticism—and I think it worth remembering:

“‘At first I thought it all bad,’ she began, ‘because of the judge and prison business, but soon I came to see that the whole sermon is a medley of thoughts put together at different times and representing very different stages of growth. The morality of the judge and prison is childish. If Jesus ever used the incident it must have been as a boyish memory; for it is expressly contradicted later when He teaches you to forgive your enemies and those who would despitefully use you and persecute you, ending with the noble words: “Be ye perfect, even as your Father, which is in heaven, is perfect.” That’s far enough away from the making up with your enemy for fear of consequences, far away, too, from the youthful, prig beatitudes. To be perfect is the real goal, but I don’t care for the tag, “As your Father in heaven is perfect,” for I see no striving after perfection in any part of creation.’

“When I asked Irene about her religion she told me that the popular religion of her people was as high, she thought, as the Christianity of the Sermon on the Mount, but very different; and one day, when I pressed her, she took me in her airplane to their Sacred City.

“It was a great wooded hill laid out in gardens and groves, and here and there were temples scattered about; she took me into one of the first of these and made me observe that there were realistic busts of men on all sides, with a kindred air of boldness and resolution.

“‘This temple is dedicated to courage,’ she began, ‘the youngest of all religions or, if you will, the oldest. Most of the worshippers here are boys and young men, and courage is commended to them as a sacred duty, and they are advised to imitate the courageous men whose busts are collected here.

“‘On the other side of the main road there’s a Temple to Pity, and that’s frequented by young girls and is to them the most appealing of all the creeds and the highest.’

“‘I see, I see,’ I exclaimed; ‘all the base of the hill is taken up with temples dedicated to various virtues.’

“‘And the preachers,’ she nodded, ‘are all picked because of the proofs they have given of preeminence in this or that quality that they talk about.’

“Slowly we made our way up to the top of the hill, to find it crowned by great colonnades interspersed with statues of every kind.

“Suddenly I cried: ‘All these statues lack something. See, that one is without hands and that there is eyeless. What does it all mean?’

“‘This,’ said Irene, ‘is the obverse of what you’ve already seen. Some of us worship in that temple at the foot of the hill, and some in another; but we all worship here, for this is “The Temple to the Forgotten Dead.”

“‘Who was the first to invent the wheel and so reduce the work of man by one-tenth? No one knows. Who was the first to make a screw? These are the Unknown Benefactors of Humanity, to whom we are all indebted and whose very names are lost in the whelming flood of oblivion. And our wisest suppose that these heroes and seers are forgotten because they lacked this quality or that, and so these statues prefiguring them all lack something, now an eye, now a hand.

“‘In my opinion they were content to give of their best and pass into the shrouding darkness without a word——’

“‘Wonderful,’ I broke in. ‘I shall not soon forget the Temple to the Forgotten Dead; but is that all there is in this Holy City?’

“‘One thing more,’ said Irene, ‘and perhaps the chief thing,’ and silently she led the way through the colonnade into a large grove of flowering, perfume-ladened trees.

“In the middle there was an open space and in it a great statue of a woman with both hands uplifted. I noticed, too, that her eyes were sightless.

“‘What does that prefigure?’ I asked.

“‘Our Rulers,’ replied Irene, ‘have given us that as the very soul of religion; they wish to tell us that woman is nearer the heart of things than man, and her hands are uplifted, as you see, in yearning desire, but her eyes are sightless, for she knows not whither she goes or to what bourne. Her aspiration is without a goal——’

“‘A lame and impotent conclusion,’ I cried, and Irene, agreeing with me, hastened to add:

“‘I told you I would show you our popular religion. I did not say it was perfect. The real religion of the best among us is made of two parts: the first is our duty to ourselves and is summed up in complete self-development; the second is all in the duty we owe to others, to help everyone born and especially the best to the utmost of our ability. We mortals don’t know much, do we?’ She broke off, with brooding, sad eyes.”

Collinson’s voice ceased.

“So that’s the end?” I half asked, and Collinson answered a little defiantly, I thought:

“That’s the end in one mood; but, fortunately, we men are allowed to have contradictory moods.”

I’m quite aware that I’ve told the story badly. To hear such a story in a common public-house almost took my breath away. And then Collinson told it inimitably. He made you feel that Irene was at once an English girl in looks and wiser than Diotima in reality; the bounds of the possible fell away as he talked. The myriad inflections of his voice, his dramatic pauses, the abrupt changes of tone, all were used to make the extraordinary probable and of everyday occurrence.

I hardly knew what to think and was very eager indeed to know what another first-rate mind would think of this story-teller.

I thanked Collinson warmly and promised to come on the next Saturday evening and bring a friend, an Oxford professor of rare talent, York Fowell, who would be infinitely pleased to applaud so gifted a story-teller. Fowell was already in Brighton, and I intended to see a good deal of him. Collinson smiled pleasantly, told me he’d be glad to meet any friend of mine, was very amiable; but he seemed just a little tired, as if telling the story had exhausted him somewhat. Thinking it over afterwards I began to realise that he was not very strong.

Well, the Saturday came in due course and I brought York Fowell to the public-house and introduced him to Collinson. After the usual courtesies and fresh drinks I asked Collinson would he tell us another story like “The Temple to the Forgotten Dead.” He immediately wanted to know whether we would mind a story of Art-life in Chelsea. Of course we told him at once to go ahead, and without more ado he began:

“This story is about the artistic life in Chelsea. I call it

‘THE STRAIT-WAISTCOAT’

“I don’t know that I ought to tell this story. I don’t even know that I can tell it, though I lived cheek-by-jowl with it for years and know intimate sides of it that are now completely forgotten.

“Everyone has heard of John Craven, the Royal Academician who made a great name for himself early in life as an artist.

“He was a very agreeable man. I had to interview him once or twice for The Daily Herald just after he did his famous picture of The Cup-Day at Ascot. It was very realistic and astonishingly effective; all the leading figures of the day and society queens were in the picture, and so it made a huge sensation. Crowds thronged to see it as they never throng to a masterpiece.

“Craven took it all as a matter of course, but Mrs. Craven was delighted with the notoriety. She was a very pretty woman, Mrs. Craven, perhaps at this time about thirty years of age. The Cravens had no children, but she was very, very sympathetic, and Lord Leith’s brother, Eric Falconer, evidently thought her the Queen of Fairies.

“I wrote about the picture and Mrs. Craven enthusiastically, and she asked me to dinner at ‘The Red House’ in Chelsea, which was very wonderfully furnished; in fact everything in it was very well done.

“In time I got to know the Cravens well. I must say I had no inkling at first of any disagreement between Mr. and Mrs. Craven.

“The garden at the back part of the ‘Red House’ had a big studio in it, where Craven used to work. And one day whom should I meet at the door but Miss Stannard, a famous model and extremely pretty girl in whom I was very much interested.

“‘Fancy you here, Leslie,’ I cried. ‘What are you up to now?’

“‘Mr. Craven wants me for his next picture. You know what a success Ascot has been!’

“‘They had to rail it off,’ I agreed, ‘but it is a poor picture, I think.’

“‘Rotten,’ she replied. ‘Everyone who knows what pictures are, thinks it worthless. John August says it’s only a coloured photograph, and bad at that.’

“‘He may be a little jealous,’ I suggested.

“‘No, no,’ she exclaimed, ‘he knows.’

“‘Don’t forget it was put on the line in the chief room by painters, Royal Academicians,’ said a voice close to us, and out of the studio, in front of which we had been talking, stepped Mr. Craven. Naturally we both backed down at once. Leslie said August was very young and of course mistaken. She was an awfully kind sort, was Leslie. But she did not think much of Craven’s painting. She had been knocking about studios for years and she knew pretty well who were the good painters and who the bad. I always thought Daisy Raffles had taught her a great deal, and everyone knows that Daisy Raffles is a genius as a critic!

“I think Craven’s change of attitude came from this picture, Ascot, and from Daisy Raffles. It all happened strangely enough. One day a whole party accompanied the Cravens to the Royal Academy Show to see his picture—the picture of the year. While he was standing in front of it two students passed, Walter Rainforth and James Simson. Rainforth said: ‘Don’t look at that botch!’ Simson replied: ‘It’s pretty tawdry, but I have always thought he might be a painter some day.’ They went on, but Craven had heard them.

“A little while later he had taken Daisy Raffles as a model. He told Daisy what the students had said and she told him they were quite right—dotted the ‘i’s’ and crossed the ‘t’s’ for him. She really knew and had any amount of cheek.

“Daisy was a curious product of the studios: an orphan brought up by an aunt and sent out at twelve as a model. She always said it was her youth that saved her. By the time she was a woman she had not only learned all the painters’ slang, but also their morals, or rather their amorality, and this knowledge, reinforcing a natural fastidiousness, kept her straight. She was nearer thirty than twenty when she became interested in Craven; she saw at once that he could both draw and paint, and bit by bit she developed in him a new mentality. I can’t explain how she did it, but she certainly did draw him out in the most astonishing way. And women, as a rule, I’ve noticed, are apt to like those whom they can help and who are dependent on them—the mother instinct in them, I suppose. But there was nothing more than friendship between her and Craven for a long time—indeed until his wife threw him over and took sides against him.

“As soon as he took Daisy on as a model Craven began to paint in a new way. In the first year he had no success at all—in fact I don’t think he showed a picture. But a year or so afterwards he exhibited his model, Daisy Raffles, painted ‘in the altogether’; she had evidently by this time got into his blood.

“Nearly everyone thought the picture ugly; nobody wanted it, but painters said it was surprising; it had quality in it. From that time on Craven’s downfall began. He painted pictures that nobody wanted; they were not even pretty; and gradually, bit by bit, he lost his money and began to be hard up.

“This much of his private history everyone knew. His wife tried again and again to get him to paint in the old way, but he wouldn’t, or perhaps couldn’t.

“According to Daisy Raffles his wife had always been in love with Eric Falconer, and certainly they were now very thick. When a woman of thirty or thirty-five falls in love she takes it badly, and Mrs. Craven took it worse than most. She was with Falconer or Falconer was with her morning, noon and night; their names began to be coupled together, and everyone knew it except Craven.

“I always wondered how the exposé came.

“Daisy Raffles said that it came about money, that Mrs. Craven got it into her head that Craven was mad. And indeed there was a good deal to be said for that theory. He had made thousands and thousands of pounds by his early pictures, then suddenly he began painting pictures that nobody wanted and no one would buy.

“One day I met Leslie Stannard with Daisy Raffles and had new light on the subject.

“Daisy Raffles swore that Craven was doing very interesting work; told us that his wife was a fool, and the sooner she got a divorce and married Eric Falconer the better. Daisy was quite pretty when she got excited and everyone knew she had the prettiest girl’s figure in London.

“Craven, she declared, was going to be one of the great painters. ‘You will see,’ she said: ‘the studies he has made of me will be worth a fortune yet’; and I remembered that Simson had said that he had the painter’s hand if not his head.

“In some way or other Daisy had given Craven a new view of art and life. Before he met her he was a photographer, so to speak; she made him an artist—taught him that it was not the object in itself, but the impression the object made upon him that was important. His portrait of Daisy as Salome was a masterpiece; it gave the essence of her: the sensuous, slim body and the supersensuous soul, like a flame triumphing over Death; there was something unearthly in the spirit-beauty of it. She believed, with Nietzsche, that all great art is produced in a sort of ecstasy, an intoxicated heightening of all the faculties.

“I was very interested in the whole thing. I never liked Eric Falconer and Mrs. Craven had always seemed to me rather pretentious.

“The catastrophe came suddenly. Falconer laid the trap, I am sure, and Craven fell into it.

“Craven thought, naturally enough, that people were down on him. They had swallowed all his earlier work greedily, had given him a great reputation, had filled his pockets with money. And now, when he was doing far better work than he had ever done, no one wanted it, no one would pay for it, no one seemed to appreciate it or had a good word to say for his striving. No wonder he became a little bitter. If it hadn’t been for Daisy he’d have been worse.

“It was on that bitterness of Craven that Falconer founded his plot. He encouraged Craven in his belief, made him think he was really hated and persecuted, and then one day he brought in the celebrated surgeon, Sir James Tripper, to meet Craven.

“Craven happened to be exceedingly bitter that day; the Academy had returned a picture to him; they wouldn’t even give it wall-room; yet it was a beautiful little study.

“Tripper drew Craven out a little and made up his mind at once that he was suffering from the mania of persecution. Doctors believe in the prevalence of disease, as saints in the universality of sin.

“A few days later Falconer brought Mr. Wisley, a friend of Tripper’s, to see Craven. Wisley, of course, came to the same conclusion as Tripper, and was fully convinced besides that Craven should be shut up and treated to a strict regimen.

“About this time Daisy Raffles had gone to Brighton to take care of her aunt, who was ailing, and Craven, all alone, was shutting up his studio one evening when two keepers and a warden came in and arrested him. He asked them to show their warrant and they showed it. It was in order: a London magistrate had signed it on the affidavit of the two doctors. Tripper, of course, had a great name.

“Craven, poor devil, wanted to go home to tell his wife, but the warder would not allow it. He was taken down by train and put in a private asylum in Surrey, kept by a Mr. Waterman. Waterman had evidently received his instructions from Wisley, so when he got his patient he pretended that Craven was violent and put him in a strait-waistcoat and threw him into a padded room. But he left the window open, and so the flies got in and wandered about Craven’s face and buzzed in his hair and moustache.

“They woke him up too every night by frequent visits of the warders. Daisy Raffles said afterwards that this was a well-known way of driving people mad, particularly excitable, strong men.

“Daisy was a wise little thing. When she came to the studio a week or so afterwards and found it all shut up, and heard that Craven had not been there, she began ferreting round, and soon ascertained that Craven had gone away with three common-looking men. I do not know how she came on the idea that he had been arrested, but she went and interviewed his wife and they had a regular slanging match, it appears, and the wife must have let out something, because Daisy told Miss Stannard that his wife knew all about Craven’s arrest; knew, too, that he had been taken down to Waterman’s private asylum in Surrey.

“Miss Stannard came to me about it. Daisy, she said, was in a fearful state and I must devise some way of getting Craven out of the asylum. I soon found out that it could be done by a writ of habeas corpus. To cut a long story short we all swore that Craven was quite sane and got out a writ to have him examined publicly and by independent doctors.

“In the meantime something had happened at Waterman’s asylum. Dr. Girton was the visiting doctor. After Craven had been about a week in the asylum Dr. Girton, according to law, had to see him and report on his case. Girton reported that Craven was suffering from persecution mania and was violent. But before the magistrate the case took on a very different complexion.

“Dr. Girton gave his evidence very emphatically, but Craven was plainly as sane as anybody in the court. He took the case into his own hands almost at once. ‘Your Worship,’ he said to the magistrate, ‘they did all they could to make me insane; they put me in a padded room and would not let me sleep, but when Girton came in one morning, he found me perfectly quiet, and he was so surprised that he asked me how I had borne it so well, because to have flies eating your face while you are unable to protect yourself is somewhat exasperating. I told him the truth: no persecution, no prison, no want of sleep, no strait-waistcoat had any effect on me, for I have been an artist in England.’

“The phrase made the magistrate smile and won the day.

“The end of it was that Mrs. Craven got her divorce unopposed, and when she married Falconer Craven married Daisy Raffles and began to produce the wonderful pictures that are now making him famous in the highest sense.”

This story taught me what a great talent Collinson possessed; he mimed the voice and accent of every character, managed in this way to convey subtle nuances of the personality that are utterly lost in the written story. For example, he showed you Miss Stannard as a sort of tall English beauty, and Daisy Raffles as a little dark-eyed, fair-skinned creature, whose soul had been drawn out by this painter and by that, till she had attained an extraordinary culture. Is there any education of a woman which can compare with the companionship of gifted men?

In some way or other, perhaps by cunning inflection of voice, Collinson managed to suggest that Craven was Daisy’s complement, that the two, to use an old phrase, were made for each other, and that their union was rarely perfect.

The more I thought of it the more I liked Collinson’s little tales. In this one he had given us a sort of picture of that artist-life in Chelsea flashed out on a dark background of calumny, vilification and hate.

I was astonished to find that York Fowell was even more deeply impressed. Suddenly he spoke to Collinson: “You know that Clarke, here, had already told me your story of ‘The Temple to the Forgotten Dead.’ I dare not say it made a deeper impression than this; but it was surely an extraordinary story or, if you will, an extraordinary idea. No one but Goethe has ever tried to add anything to the Christian ideal, and his pagan attempts in the Wanderjahre are not very successful. But your ‘Temple to the Forgotten Dead’ has really something in it; we should cultivate piety and reverence for those who have gone before us, as you call them, ‘The Unknown Benefactors of Humanity.’ To have succeeded even partially where Goethe failed is honour enough for any man. I congratulate you with all my heart. And this Chelsea story might have written by Maupassant. It is enough for any man’s measure to touch Goethe on the one hand and Maupassant on the other.”

To my surprise the warm praise affected Collinson greatly; his whole face quivered, his eyes filled with tears. “I never expected,” he said, “to be compared with Goethe; but ideas come to me sometimes that I love; they don’t seem to be mine,” he added deprecatingly. “They come to me—at their will and time—”

“You have got,” said York Fowell abruptly, “what I would give ten years of my life for—the creative spirit. I’ve toiled and studied, but never had any such divine visitation. You are very lucky, I think. But why don’t you write these stories of yours? They’d make a reputation for you and you should be known.”

“I can’t write,” said Collinson abruptly. “You overpraise my little things; but it’s very kind of you,” and he stretched out his hand impulsively to York Fowell, who took it, smiling amiably.

A little later we went away together and to my wonder York Fowell praised Collinson enthusiastically. “We must draw him out,” he concluded; “we must find the hidden source of those charming imaginings. Fancy the little master of an unknown school living on such heights of thought! What does he read? Do you know?”

I had to confess that I knew nothing really about Collinson, but Fowell’s enthusiasm affected me and I resolved to get to know him.

But the next Saturday came and Collinson wouldn’t tell a story—had none in his head, he said; and when we questioned him he told us he had an ordinary grammar school training, had learned German and French and Italian on his own, and, curiously enough, had gone as by instinct to the very greatest spirits. Heine, we found, he knew nearly by heart; he used to call him the first of the moderns. And in French, Villon and Balzac and Vauvenargues, and in Italian, Leopardi. He had got to the heights through literature. He was a Socialist without knowing the modern concept of the word—thought the land should belong to all the people and all public utilities should be nationalised, and stopped there.

Curiously enough Collinson was passionate about the need of nationalising coal-mining. I found out that he had once paid a visit to a friend in Merthyr and had been horrified by the degrading slavery of the miners’ life. “Humane living,” he exclaimed passionately, “is impossible under such conditions! It must all be lifted and ennobled.”

Little by little I came to know Collinson. One evening we walked to his house and he said timidly: “I’d ask you in, but my wife hates me to bring anyone unless they are known here socially, and she always objects to men without their wives. She was a Paget, you know, and is in love with all conventions.”

“Why did you marry her?”

He shrugged his shoulders: “I had a turn of bad luck. I found it so hard to teach kids who didn’t want to learn and I had a couple of boys of sheer genius who interested me intensely. The ‘Head’ gave me notice just after I had met Mrs. Livinstone. She had married an officer in the 10th Cavalry; he drank himself to death, I believe. Anyhow, she was a widow and pleasant and always inviting me. I told her one evening that I thought of going to London to get a new place and—somehow or other—I don’t know how it was—I found she wanted me to marry her, and I was—a coward. I hated to go to the agencies and pay and beg a place; it was humiliating, with ‘thoughts that wander through eternity’—thoughts make aristocrats of some of us. And so we were married. But I hate her society friends; that’s why I began going to the ‘pub.’ It’s common, and most of the habitués don’t understand me or my stories, but after all they don’t look down on one like the society crew. I’m quite happy when I can meet someone like you and York Fowell; he’s very able, isn’t he?”

“Very!” I nodded. “They say in Oxford he knows more than half the Faculty—an extraordinary power of assimilation; he learned everything as a sponge absorbs moisture.”

“And he compared me to Goethe, didn’t he?” said Collinson with jubilant eyes.

“Indeed he did,” I replied, “and when we were alone he thanked me for bringing him to the ‘pub’; said he had never had so great an evening. He’s coming again; but you disappointed him the last time when you would not tell us another story.”

Collinson turned his clear blue-eyes on me with an expression of humility I never saw in anyone else and cried: “I hadn’t a good story in my head; but the next time I’ll do better than my best for you, you’ll see”; and his eyes seemed to veil themselves in a mist of thought.

And in truth the next Wednesday he was better than his best. As soon as we came in he began:

“The other evening I had a wonderful night. I dreamed I was in some city in India, near the gates; it must have been Delhi, and I was a public story-teller. As evening fell, and the people began to drift into the country from their work in the city, I came out and sat at the door of my house in the deep shadow, with a great copper pan at my side for offerings. At first I told stories of Gautama Buddha, when he was a prince, and bit by bit the crowd gathered, and one asked me how I knew the prince.

“‘By likeness of nature,’ I replied boldly. ‘We can all know those we love, and I love the prince, who gave up everything—honour and riches and pleasure and joy and all the good things of this world—to go and live with his pain-stricken brethren and teach them how to attain Nirvana, where there is no suffering, because desire is dead.’

“‘But how can you know Gautama’s life as a young prince?’ another questioned, and a strange answer came to me in my dream. I said: ‘You know that there is a star near the Southern Cross so distant that it takes nearly two thousand seven hundred years for light to come from it to our earth; the tiny spark of radiance we see and name left it before the birth of Gautama, and in my imagination I knew someone living on that star, and he had watched the light ray that started from earth in Gautama’s youth and had taken photos of what the light brought him, and so he showed me pictures of Gautama even before his soul opened to the truth. Think of it! nothing is lost in this wonder-world. Light is still carrying the pictures it received ten thousand years ago, and it should be possible to reflect them again as easily as those of yesterday or to-day. Time is only relative; space a condition of our thought.

“‘I have begged my star-habitant to return to me out of the realm of sleep and one of these nights bring me light-pictures of the young Jesus as He walked and spoke when His mother and father found Him at twelve years of age teaching the Rabbis in the Temple.

“‘Fancy, if I could get the whole history of His life in photograph after photograph—when He first collected His disciples and drew them with Him to Nazareth, and how the townsfolk were indignant at one they knew giving Himself out as a prophet.

“‘Don’t we know Him?’ they cried; ‘are not His mother and His brethren here with us? How dare He pretend to such authority?’ and they went about to kill Him and He had to hide. His mother, we are told, declared He was mad; perhaps that was the reason He said afterwards: ‘This is my mother and these my brethren who do the will of my Father.’

“And think of the picture of the woman taken in adultery, when Jesus at first did not know what to say, for He realized that He had not come to fulfil the terrible law of Moses, with its ‘eye for an eye,’ but was full of a new and diviner message: ‘Let him that is without sin among you first cast the stone.’

“When this was said I saw all prisons vanish and all judges and judgments become ridiculous, for hospital wards took the place of prison cells, and doctors and nurses came instead of jailers and executioners. We have both now, side by side in our silly life, the prison here and the torturers, and the hospitals there and the healers! What madmen men are with Secretaries of State for War and no Secretary of State yet for Peace anywhere, though Jesus is dead these two thousand years!

“Think of it and remember that only one disciple records this story of the adulterous woman. Matthew, Mark and Luke saw nothing in it; but John remembered and recorded it: that explains to me why John was the beloved disciple.

“And remember, too, what Jesus said to the woman: ‘Neither do I accuse thee.’ What does this mean? Surely that He too was a sinner and had no more right to condemn than anyone else.

“Ah, the Sacred Story! One of these days we shall have all of it divinely illustrated and illumined, for the New Commandment of Jesus is the porch of the modern world, the door into the New Life!”

There was something inspired in the man. Even the tradesmen who sat around the table were moved by the unearthly passion of the vibrant voice, and York Fowell’s eyes were a confession of astonished admiration. I don’t know how we came away, but I shall always remember how York Fowell thanked Collinson.

A day or two afterwards I was called up to London and got that appointment at Durham which changed my whole life. I never saw Collinson again and York Fowell died untimely in the next autumn; but Collinson has left a memory as a story-teller that I have sought to perpetuate.