CHAPTER XXV

THE CHURCHMAN

Alf, with all his faults, had at least the supreme virtue of the animal living in a fiercely competitive world: he never missed a chance.

A year after he began to drive for Mr. Trupp, he had a second car, a man driving for him, and another on repairing work.

Success sugared his political outlook, just as defeat had soured it. Like most really hard men, he saved himself in his own eyes by becoming a thorough-going sentimentalist. In the course of a year or two, King and Country had become the objects of his ferocious admiration; while the masses of his countrymen were to be dealt with as ruthlessly as expediency and the Vote would allow.

"Traitors, I call em," he confided to his new friend, the Reverend Spink. "All for their fat selves all the time. Never think of you and me. They fair give me the hiccoughs."

At the General Election of 1906 he came out fearlessly for God and the Conservative Party.

The two candidates for West Beachbourne were, as all decent men admitted, the worst who ever stood for a constituency. The sitting member had just received that which he entered Parliament to obtain--a Baronetcy; and his solitary ambition now was to be defeated. Unfortunately an aspiring wife had other views to which her spouse had to give way.

His opponent, on the other hand, had, according to the enemy, recently emerged "from a home of rest" in order to contest the constituency.

At the preceding Khaki Election the Conservative candidate, who was an undoubtedly fine whip, had secured the "Triumph of Right," as Archdeacon Willcocks finely called it, by the simple process of driving a well-appointed team through the constituency.

"I'll vote for them 'orses," had been the general verdict.

The victor now repeated his tactics.

On polling day, as a reward for his strenuous labours in the good cause, Alf was given a ride on the top of the coach among the very pick of England's aristocracy. In that fair company he meandered from public-house to public-house all a winter's afternoon, singing with his hosts hymns and spirituous songs.

In Cornfield Road, opposite the _White Hart_, Mr. Pigott, red and dusty from the battle, saw him ensconced on that bad eminence among the crimson faces and flowery hats of the enemy.

"You've changed your coat to some purpose," he bawled.

Alf leaned down.

"Yes, sir," he said quietly. "I've learned a bit, and I'm not ashamed to admit it."

The beery riders raised an aggressive cheer. And the son and heir of the candidate, snatching the horn from the hand of a footman, blew a strident blast in the ear of the outraged schoolmaster.

Alf's candidate was returned, to his no small chagrin--one of the few Tories to survive the democratic deluge of that year.

"Just a remnant of us," as Alf remarked pathetically to the Archdeacon, "that 'as not bowed the knee to Bile."

Thus earlier in life even than most of us, Alf joined the Big Battalions of those who, secure themselves, mean to make capital out of the insecurity of others.

"I'm a high old Tory," he would tell Lady Augusta Willcocks truculently. "And I don't care who knows it."

And finding quickly the necessity for, and advantage of, a religious sanction for a position that was morally untenable, he threw himself upon the bosom of the Church; and in that comfortable and accommodating community which opens wide its gates to all who prefer the Path of Compromise to the Road that leads up Calvary, he found the sustenance of which he stood in need.

Alf effected the change of religious community with considerable tact.

He began quite simply by touching his hat to the junior curate of the parish church, when he met him in the street.

The Reverend Spink, who was a man of much the same class as Alf, was highly gratified and uplifted.

Then Alf took to saying very shyly,

"Good morning, sir," hurrying past in order not to impede by his unworthy presence the great man's view.

Next he took to dropping in to the Reverend Spink's addresses for "men only."

Here he made himself conspicuous by his thoughtfulness and the corrugations in his brow as he imbibed the teachings of his master.

One day he asked, with some confusion and stumblings of speech, a question so easy that even the curate could answer it.

Alf nodded, well satisfied.

The curate swelled in the spirit. This catechumen at the least knew what was what.

Next day Alf, greatly daring, stopped the evangelist in the street.

"Beg pardon, sir," he began diffidently. "About what you was saying last night about them Proper Prefaces..."

The curate amplified his explanation.

Alf drank in the milk of the Word, nodding his head.

"Ah, I never thought of that!" he said.

"Look here!" said the curate with sudden warmth. "If you're interested in those sort of things..."

The naughty devil who possessed Alf bobbed out and almost undid him.

"What!--Proper Prefaces!" he said, and added hastily--"and the things appertaining to em!--religion and that."

"That's what I mean," said the curate. "Come round to my rooms on Friday. Some of us meet there once a week. Jolly fellows. Come and smoke a pipe and chat!"

The Reverend Spink was deeply tainted with the hearty bon-camarade method which the Bishop of Fulham had recently introduced into the Church to enable it to float on the flowing democratic tide.

After that Alf went often.

The curate, who had made inquiries, found that Alf had once been, according to report, "a roaring, raving Socialist and atheist!"

"Shockin the things he used to say!" his informant told him. The curate, who was all out for sensation, was thrilled. Here was a catch indeed!--If he could but bring it off!--What wouldn't the dear Bishop of Fulham say?

His prayers were answered more swiftly than he had anticipated.

In a month the Reverend Spink had led his penitent to the baptismal font.

Alf, asked if he would like any of his people to be present at the ceremony, had shaken his head.

"See where it is, sir, Mother's chapel. She'll never forgive me--not but what I'll put up with that if it's right. And dad's I don't know what. I don't know that he knows himself."

The only people Alf invited to attend were Mrs. Trupp and her daughter. They refused politely.

As Bess said to her mother with the firmness of youth, "We are on Ernie's side. Dad may forget, but we don't."

A few weeks later the Reverend Spink went to call on Alf's father.

After he had left, Mrs. Caspar heard strange sounds in the study. She went to the door and listened.

Then she opened and peeped in.

Edward Caspar was laughing as she had never seen him laugh in twenty odd years of married life. The tears were streaming down his face, his head was thrown back and his body convulsed.

His wife regarded him with dour sympathy.

"What is it?" she asked hardly.

Her husband wiped his eyes shamefacedly.

"Nothing," he said. "Only the curate's been converting me."

That evening, as he went to bed, he peered over the banisters, and said in his grave way to Alf in the kitchen,

"I hope your friend Mr. Spink'll come again."

Alf reported the incident next day to the curate, adding,

"I will say this for dad. He is broad."

Mr. Trupp heard of his chauffeur's conversion.

"You're church then now, Alf," he said.

"Yes, sir," replied the other with the curious naïveté of blunted susceptibilities. "More classier. See, I'm getting on now."

And Alf did not stop at baptism.

He was thorough in religious as in secular affairs.

Next spring, after a careful preparation by the Reverend Spink, he was confirmed by the Bishop and afterwards admitted a member of the C.E.M.S.

After the ceremony, the Bishop inquired of the Rector, in the vestry, who the young man with the immense head might be.

Archdeacon Willcocks always wore a little white imperial in reverent imitation of his master, Louis Napoleon. His cult of the Third Emperor was perhaps the most genuine thing about him, and had endured for fifty years. But for a stern no-nonsense father he would have deserted Cambridge in '70 to fight for a cause already lost. And he had never forgiven the scholar at his gate who had told him that his favourite had painted his face before Sedan.

"What if he did?" he had asked sourly.

"Nothing," Edward Caspar had answered. "Only it's interesting."

"I don't believe he did."

"Did you never read Zola's _Débâcle_?" asked the other gently.

"Nevah!" cried the Archdeacon, on firm church-ground now. "I don't read Zolah!"

"Ah," said Edward. "Pity..."

The Archdeacon looked like a gentleman, and, to do him justice, tried hard to live up to his looks. With this end in view he had married--to his no small gratification, and that of his mother--the daughter of a Victorian Earl. In the days before he became an Archdeacon he habitually wore a top-hat, slightly battered to signify that the wearer, while an aristocrat, was not a new one. A sedulous attendant on the rich of the parish, he visited the poor by proxy; and yet by the simple process of taking off his hat with a sweep to every cottage-woman in the Moot who vouchsafed him a good-morning on his rare passages through that district, he maintained an easy reputation among the more conservative of the working-class as a Christian and a gentleman.

Archdeacon Willcocks was in fact a snob, but he was not a cad; whereas his junior curate was both. When, therefore, the Bishop made inquiries as to Alf, the Archdeacon gave the glory to his subordinate.

"Spink got hold of him," he said. "He was a dangerous Socialist, I believe."

The Bishop regarded with approval the chubby young man with the pursed mouth, wondering whether he should transfer him to the industrial East-end or the slums of Portslade.

A thorough-going man of the world, like most of his type, he was quite astute enough to see that the real enemy of the Institution he represented was the Labour Party; and that the danger from this quarter was growing, and would continue to grow.

When Alf returned home from the ceremony in the parish-church, his mother was taking off her bonnet in the kitchen.

She eyed him with sardonic mirth as he entered.

"Feel a change?" she asked.

"What's that?"

"Since he done it."

"Was you there then?" asked Alf.

"I was."

Alf was entirely unabashed.

"I must go with me conscience," he said, "if it was ever so."

"And we all know which way your conscience goes, Alf," his mother answered.

"Which way's that then?"

"The way the money goes."

Alf was not in the least offended. Indeed he was rather pleased. He stood in his favourite position in the window with his back to his mother and cleaned his nails with a pen-knife.

"Crucified for conscience' sake," he muttered. "I dare say I'm not the first, nor I won't be the last neether."

Alf was confirmed into the church, and persecuted for it by his mother, a few weeks before his brother's return home.