“Tremendous, eh?” Mr. Fargus used to say.
“Terrific. If you hadn’t done that
you’d have got it. That one move, all that
way back, was calamity. Calamity! What a
word!”
And they would stare bemused eyes upon one another.
“You put that into life,” Mr. Fargus used
to say. “Imagine if every life, at death,
was worked back, and where it went wrong, where it
made its calamity, and the date, put on the tombstone.
Eh? What a record! Who’d dare walk
through a churchyard?”
Sabre’s objection was, “Of course no one
would ever know. Suppose your idea’s correct,
who’s to say what a man’s purpose in life
was, let alone whether he’d fulfilled it?
How can you work towards a purpose if you don’t
know what it is?”
Then little old Mr. Fargus would grow intense.
“Why, Sabre, that’s just where you are
with an acrostic or in chess. How can you work
out the solution when you don’t know what the
solution is?”
“Yes, but you know there is a solution.”
Mr. Fargus’s eyes would shine. “Well,
there you are! And you know that in life there
is a purpose.”
And what attracted and interested Sabre was that the
little man, living here his hunted life among the
terrific “doings” of the seven female
Farguses, firmly believed that he was working out and
working towards his designed purpose. He had
“worked back” his every event in life,
he said, and it had brought him so inevitably to Penny
Green and to skipping about among the seven that he
was assured it was the keyed path to his purpose.
He amazed Sabre by telling him, without trace of self-consciousness
and equally without trace of religious mania, that
he was waiting, daily, for God to call upon him to
fulfil the purpose for which he was placed there.
He expected it as one expects a letter by the post.
When he talked about it to Sabre he positively trembled
and shone with eagerness as a child trembling and
shining with excitement before an unopened parcel.
One day Sabre protested. “But look here,
Fargus. Look here, how are you going to know
when it comes? It might be anything. You
don’t know what it is and—well, you
won’t know, will you?”
The little man said, “I believe I shall, Sabre.
I’ve ‘worked back’ for years, as
far as ever my memory will carry, and everything has
been so exactly keyed that I’m convinced I’m
in the way of my purpose. I believe you can feel
it if you’ve waited for it like that. I
believe you’re asked ‘Ready?’ and
I want to say, whatever it is, ‘Aye, Ready!’”
Mysterious and awful suggestion, Sabre thought.
To believe yourself at any moment to be touched as
by a finger and asked “Ready?” “Aye,
Ready!”
Mysterious and awful intimacy with God!
And then there were the Perches—“Young
Perch and that everlasting old mother of his”,
as Mabel called them.
