certain rules of conduct, certain conceptions of social
and political order, that had no more relevance to
the realities and needs of everyday contemporary life
than if they were clean linen that had been put away
with lavender in a drawer. Indeed, her religion
did actually smell of lavender; on Sundays she put
away all the things of reality, the garments and even
the furnishings of everyday, hid her hands, that were
gnarled and sometimes chapped with scrubbing, in black,
carefully mended gloves, assumed her old black silk
dress and bonnet and took me, unnaturally clean and
sweet also, to church. There we sang and bowed
and heard sonorous prayers and joined in sonorous responses,
and rose with a congregational sigh refreshed and relieved
when the doxology, with its opening “Now to
God the Father, God the Son,” bowed out the
tame, brief sermon. There was a hell in that religion
of my mother’s, a red-haired hell of curly flames
that had once been very terrible; there was a devil,
who was also ex officio the British King’s enemy,
and much denunciation of the wicked lusts of the flesh;
we were expected to believe that most of our poor
unhappy world was to atone for its muddle and trouble
here by suffering exquisite torments for ever after,
world without end, Amen. But indeed those curly
flames looked rather jolly. The whole thing had
been mellowed and faded into a gentle unreality long
before my time; if it had much terror even in my childhood
I have forgotten it, it was not so terrible as the
giant who was killed by the Beanstalk, and I see it
all now as a setting for my poor old mother’s
worn and grimy face, and almost lovingly as a part
of her. And Mr. Gabbitas, our plump little lodger,
strangely transformed in his vestments and lifting
his voice manfully to the quality of those Elizabethan
prayers, seemed, I think, to give her a special and
peculiar interest with God. She radiated her
own tremulous gentleness upon Him, and redeemed Him
from all the implications of vindictive theologians;
she was in truth, had I but perceived it, the effectual
answer to all she would have taught me.
So I see it now, but there is something harsh in the earnest intensity of youth, and having at first taken all these things quite seriously, the fiery hell and God’s vindictiveness at any neglect, as though they were as much a matter of fact as Bladden’s iron-works and Rawdon’s pot-bank, I presently with an equal seriousness flung them out of my mind again.
Mr. Gabbitas, you see, did sometimes, as the phrase went, “take notice” of me, he had induced me to go on reading after I left school, and with the best intentions in the world and to anticipate the poison of the times, he had lent me Burble’s “Scepticism Answered,” and drawn my attention to the library of the Institute in Clayton.