All Roads Lead to Calvary

J >> Jerome K. Jerome >> All Roads Lead to Calvary


"I wish he was dead!"

"He who in his heart--" there was verse and chapter for it. Joan was a
murderess. Just as well, so far as Joan was concerned, might she have
taken a carving-knife and stabbed Deacon Hornflower to the heart.

Joan's prayers that night, to the accompaniment of Mrs. Munday's sobs,
had a hopeless air of unreality about them. Mrs. Munday's kiss was cold.

How long Joan lay and tossed upon her little bed she could not tell.
Somewhere about the middle of the night, or so it seemed to her, the
frenzy seized her. Flinging the bedclothes away she rose to her feet. It
is difficult to stand upon a spring mattress, but Joan kept her balance.
Of course He was there in the room with her. God was everywhere, spying
upon her. She could distinctly hear His measured breathing. Face to
face with Him, she told Him what she thought of Him. She told Him He was
a cruel, wicked God.

There are no Victoria Crosses for sinners, or surely little Joan that
night would have earned it. It was not lack of imagination that helped
her courage. God and she alone, in the darkness. He with all the forces
of the Universe behind Him. He armed with His eternal pains and
penalties, and eight-year-old Joan: the creature that He had made in His
Own Image that He could torture and destroy. Hell yawned beneath her,
but it had to be said. Somebody ought to tell Him.

"You are a wicked God," Joan told Him. "Yes, You are. A cruel, wicked
God."

And then that she might not see the walls of the room open before her,
hear the wild laughter of the thousand devils that were coming to bear
her off, she threw herself down, her face hidden in the pillow, and
clenched her hands and waited.

And suddenly there burst a song. It was like nothing Joan had ever heard
before. So clear and loud and near that all the night seemed filled with
harmony. It sank into a tender yearning cry throbbing with passionate
desire, and then it rose again in thrilling ecstasy: a song of hope, of
victory.

Joan, trembling, stole from her bed and drew aside the blind. There was
nothing to be seen but the stars and the dim shape of the hills. But
still that song, filling the air with its wild, triumphant melody.

Years afterwards, listening to the overture to _Tannhauser_, there came
back to her the memory of that night. Ever through the mad Satanic
discords she could hear, now faint, now conquering, the Pilgrims' onward
march. So through the jangled discords of the world one heard the Song
of Life. Through the dim aeons of man's savage infancy; through the
centuries of bloodshed and of horror; through the dark ages of tyranny
and superstition; through wrong, through cruelty, through hate; heedless
of doom, heedless of death, still the nightingale's song: "I love you. I
love you. I love you. We will build a nest. We will rear our brood. I
love you. I love you. Life shall not die."

Joan crept back into bed. A new wonder had come to her. And from that
night Joan's belief in Mrs. Munday's God began to fade, circumstances
helping.

Firstly there was the great event of going to school. She was glad to
get away from home, a massive, stiffly furnished house in a wealthy
suburb of Liverpool. Her mother, since she could remember, had been an
invalid, rarely leaving her bedroom till the afternoon. Her father, the
owner of large engineering works, she only saw, as a rule, at
dinner-time, when she would come down to dessert. It had been different
when she was very young, before her mother had been taken ill. Then she
had been more with them both. She had dim recollections of her father
playing with her, pretending to be a bear and growling at her from behind
the sofa. And then he would seize and hug her and they would both laugh,
while he tossed her into the air and caught her. He had looked so big
and handsome. All through her childhood there had been the desire to
recreate those days, to spring into the air and catch her arms about his
neck. She could have loved him dearly if he had only let her. Once,
seeking explanation, she had opened her heart a little to Mrs. Munday. It
was disappointment, Mrs. Munday thought, that she had not been a boy; and
with that Joan had to content herself. Maybe also her mother's illness
had helped to sadden him. Or perhaps it was mere temperament, as she
argued to herself later, for which they were both responsible. Those
little tricks of coaxing, of tenderness, of wilfulness, by means of which
other girls wriggled their way so successfully into a warm nest of cosy
affection: she had never been able to employ them. Beneath her
self-confidence was a shyness, an immovable reserve that had always
prevented her from expressing her emotions. She had inherited it,
doubtless enough, from him. Perhaps one day, between them, they would
break down the barrier, the strength of which seemed to lie in its very
flimsiness, its impalpability.

And then during college vacations, returning home with growing notions
and views of her own, she had found herself so often in antagonism with
him. His fierce puritanism, so opposed to all her enthusiasms. Arguing
with him, she might almost have been listening to one of his Cromwellian
ancestors risen from the dead. There had been disputes between him and
his work-people, and Joan had taken the side of the men. He had not been
angry with her, but coldly contemptuous. And yet, in spite of it all, if
he had only made a sign! She wanted to fling herself crying into his
arms and shake him--make him listen to her wisdom, sitting on his knee
with her hands clasped round his neck. He was not really intolerant and
stupid. That had been proved by his letting her go to a Church of
England school. Her mother had expressed no wish. It was he who had
selected it.

Of her mother she had always stood somewhat in fear, never knowing when
the mood of passionate affection would give place to a chill aversion
that seemed almost like hate. Perhaps it had been good for her, so she
told herself in after years, her lonely, unguided childhood. It had
forced her to think and act for herself. At school she reaped the
benefit. Self-reliant, confident, original, leadership was granted to
her as a natural prerogative. Nature had helped her. Nowhere does a
young girl rule more supremely by reason of her beauty than among her
fellows. Joan soon grew accustomed to having her boots put on and taken
off for her; all her needs of service anticipated by eager slaves,
contending with one another for the privilege. By giving a command, by
bestowing a few moments of her conversation, it was within her power to
make some small adoring girl absurdly happy for the rest of the day;
while her displeasure would result in tears, in fawning pleadings for
forgiveness. The homage did not spoil her. Rather it helped to develop
her. She accepted it from the beginning as in the order of things. Power
had been given to her. It was her duty to see to it that she did not use
it capriciously, for her own gratification. No conscientious youthful
queen could have been more careful in the distribution of her
favours--that they should be for the encouragement of the deserving, the
reward of virtue; more sparing of her frowns, reserving them for the
rectification of error.

At Girton it was more by force of will, of brain, that she had to make
her position. There was more competition. Joan welcomed it, as giving
more zest to life. But even there her beauty was by no means a
negligible quantity. Clever, brilliant young women, accustomed to sweep
aside all opposition with a blaze of rhetoric, found themselves to their
irritation sitting in front of her silent, not so much listening to her
as looking at her. It puzzled them for a time. Because a girl's
features are classical and her colouring attractive, surely that has
nothing to do with the value of her political views? Until one of them
discovered by chance that it has.

"Well, what does Beauty think about it?" this one had asked, laughing.
She had arrived at the end of a discussion just as Joan was leaving the
room. And then she gave a long low whistle, feeling that she had
stumbled upon the explanation. Beauty, that mysterious force that from
the date of creation has ruled the world, what does It think? Dumb,
passive, as a rule, exercising its influence unconsciously. But if it
should become intelligent, active! A Philosopher has dreamed of the vast
influence that could be exercised by a dozen sincere men acting in unity.
Suppose a dozen of the most beautiful women in the world could form
themselves into a league! Joan found them late in the evening still
discussing it.

Her mother died suddenly during her last term, and Joan hurried back to
attend the funeral. Her father was out when she reached home. Joan
changed her travel-dusty clothes, and then went into the room where her
mother lay, and closed the door. She must have been a beautiful woman.
Now that the fret and the restlessness had left her it had come back to
her. The passionate eyes were closed. Joan kissed the marble lids, and
drawing a chair to the bedside, sat down. It grieved her that she had
never loved her mother--not as one ought to love one's mother,
unquestioningly, unreasoningly, as a natural instinct. For a moment a
strange thought came to her, and swiftly, almost guiltily, she stole
across, and drawing back a corner of the blind, examined closely her own
features in the glass, comparing them with the face of the dead woman,
thus called upon to be a silent witness for or against the living. Joan
drew a sigh of relief and let fall the blind. There could be no
misreading the evidence. Death had smoothed away the lines, given back
youth. It was almost uncanny, the likeness between them. It might have
been her drowned sister lying there. And they had never known one
another. Had this also been temperament again, keeping them apart? Why
did it imprison us each one as in a moving cell, so that we never could
stretch out our arms to one another, except when at rare intervals Love
or Death would unlock for a while the key? Impossible that two beings
should have been so alike in feature without being more or less alike in
thought and feeling. Whose fault had it been? Surely her own; she was
so hideously calculating. Even Mrs. Munday, because the old lady had
been fond of her and had shown it, had been of more service to her, more
a companion, had been nearer to her than her own mother. In self-excuse
she recalled the two or three occasions when she had tried to win her
mother. But fate seemed to have decreed that their moods should never
correspond. Her mother's sudden fierce outbursts of love, when she would
be jealous, exacting, almost cruel, had frightened her when she was a
child, and later on had bored her. Other daughters would have shown
patience, unselfishness, but she had always been so self-centred. Why
had she never fallen in love like other girls? There had been a boy at
Brighton when she was at school there--quite a nice boy, who had written
her wildly extravagant love-letters. It must have cost him half his
pocket-money to get them smuggled in to her. Why had she only been
amused at them? They might have been beautiful if only one had read them
with sympathy. One day he had caught her alone on the Downs. Evidently
he had made it his business to hang about every day waiting for some such
chance. He had gone down on his knees and kissed her feet, and had been
so abject, so pitiful that she had given him some flowers she was
wearing. And he had sworn to dedicate the rest of his life to being
worthy of her condescension. Poor lad! She wondered--for the first time
since that afternoon--what had become of him. There had been others; a
third cousin who still wrote to her from Egypt, sending her presents that
perhaps he could ill afford, and whom she answered about once a year. And
promising young men she had met at Cambridge, ready, the felt
instinctively, to fall down and worship her. And all the use she had had
for them was to convert them to her views--a task so easy as to be quite
uninteresting--with a vague idea that they might come in handy in the
future, when she might need help in shaping that world of the future.

Only once had she ever thought of marriage. And that was in favour of a
middle-aged, rheumatic widower with three children, a professor of
chemistry, very learned and justly famous. For about a month she had
thought herself in love. She pictured herself devoting her life to him,
rubbing his poor left shoulder where it seemed he suffered most, and
brushing his picturesque hair, inclined to grey. Fortunately his eldest
daughter was a young woman of resource, or the poor gentleman, naturally
carried off his feet by this adoration of youth and beauty, might have
made an ass of himself. But apart from this one episode she had reached
the age of twenty-three heart-whole.

She rose and replaced the chair. And suddenly a wave of pity passed over
her for the dead woman, who had always seemed so lonely in the great
stiffly-furnished house, and the tears came.

She was glad she had been able to cry. She had always hated herself for
her lack of tears; it was so unwomanly. Even as a child she had rarely
cried.

Her father had always been very tender, very patient towards her mother,
but she had not expected to find him so changed. He had aged and his
shoulders drooped. She had been afraid that he would want her to stay
with him and take charge of the house. It had worried her considerably.
It would be so difficult to refuse, and yet she would have to. But when
he never broached the subject she was hurt. He had questioned her about
her plans the day after the funeral, and had seemed only anxious to
assist them. She proposed continuing at Cambridge till the end of the
term. She had taken her degree the year before. After that, she would
go to London and commence her work.

"Let me know what allowance you would like me to make you, when you have
thought it out. Things are not what they were at the works, but there
will always be enough to keep you in comfort," he had told her. She had
fixed it there and then at two hundred a year. She would not take more,
and that only until she was in a position to keep herself.

"I want to prove to myself," she explained, "that I am capable of earning
my own living. I am going down into the market-place. If I'm no good,
if I can't take care of even one poor woman, I'll come back and ask you
to keep me." She was sitting on the arm of his chair, and laughing, she
drew his head towards her and pressed it against her. "If I succeed, if
I am strong enough to fight the world for myself and win, that will mean
I am strong enough and clever enough to help others."

"I am only at the end of a journey when you need me," he had answered,
and they had kissed. And next morning she returned to her own life.




CHAPTER III


It was at Madge Singleton's rooms that the details of Joan's entry into
journalistic London were arranged. "The Coming of Beauty," was Flora
Lessing's phrase for designating the event. Flora Lessing, known among
her associates as "Flossie," was the girl who at Cambridge had
accidentally stumbled upon the explanation of Joan's influence. In
appearance she was of the Fluffy Ruffles type, with childish innocent
eyes, and the "unruly curls" beloved of the _Family Herald_ novelist. At
the first, these latter had been the result of a habit of late rising and
consequent hurried toilet operations; but on the discovery that for the
purposes of her profession they possessed a market value they had been
sedulously cultivated. Editors of the old order had ridiculed the idea
of her being of any use to them, when two years previously she had, by
combination of cheek and patience, forced herself into their sanctum; had
patted her paternally upon her generally ungloved hand, and told her to
go back home and get some honest, worthy young man to love and cherish
her.

It was Carleton of the _Daily Dispatch_ group who had first divined her
possibilities. With a swift glance on his way through, he had picked her
out from a line of depressed-looking men and women ranged against the
wall of the dark entrance passage; and with a snap of his fingers had
beckoned to her to follow him. Striding in front of her up to his room,
he had pointed to a chair and had left her sitting there for
three-quarters of an hour, while he held discussion with a stream of
subordinates, managers and editors of departments, who entered and
departed one after another, evidently in pre-arranged order. All of them
spoke rapidly, without ever digressing by a single word from the point,
giving her the impression of their speeches having been rehearsed
beforehand.

Carleton himself never interrupted them. Indeed, one might have thought
he was not listening, so engrossed he appeared to be in the pile of
letters and telegrams that lay waiting for him on his desk. When they
had finished he would ask them questions, still with his attention fixed
apparently upon the paper in his hand. Then, looking up for the first
time, he would run off curt instructions, much in the tone of a Commander-
in-Chief giving orders for an immediate assault; and, finishing abruptly,
return to his correspondence. When the last, as it transpired, had
closed the door behind him, he swung his chair round and faced her.

"What have you been doing?" he asked her.

"Wasting my time and money hanging about newspaper offices, listening to
silly talk from old fossils," she told him.

"And having learned that respectable journalism has no use for brains,
you come to me," he answered her. "What do you think you can do?"

"Anything that can be done with a pen and ink," she told him.

"Interviewing?" he suggested.

"I've always been considered good at asking awkward questions," she
assured him.

He glanced at the clock. "I'll give you five minutes," he said.
"Interview me."

She moved to a chair beside the desk, and, opening her bag, took out a
writing-block.

"What are your principles?" she asked him. "Have you got any?"

He looked at her sharply across the corner of the desk.

"I mean," she continued, "to what fundamental rule of conduct do you
attribute your success?"

She leant forward, fixing her eyes on him. "Don't tell me," she
persisted, "that you had none. That life is all just mere blind chance.
Think of the young men who are hanging on your answer. Won't you send
them a message?"

"Yes," he answered musingly. "It's your baby face that does the trick.
In the ordinary way I should have known you were pulling my leg, and have
shown you the door. As it was, I felt half inclined for the moment to
reply with some damned silly platitude that would have set all Fleet
Street laughing at me. Why do my 'principles' interest you?"

"As a matter of fact they don't," she explained. "But it's what people
talk about whenever they discuss you."

"What do they say?" he demanded.

"Your friends, that you never had any. And your enemies, that they are
always the latest," she informed him.

"You'll do," he answered with a laugh. "With nine men out of ten that
speech would have ended your chances. You sized me up at a glance, and
knew it would only interest me. And your instinct is right," he added.
"What people are saying: always go straight for that."

He gave her a commission then and there for a heart to heart talk with a
gentleman whom the editor of the Home News Department of the _Daily
Dispatch_ would have referred to as a "Leading Literary Luminary," and
who had just invented a new world in two volumes. She had asked him
childish questions and had listened with wide-open eyes while he, sitting
over against her, and smiling benevolently, had laid bare to her all the
seeming intricacies of creation, and had explained to her in simple
language the necessary alterations and improvements he was hoping to
bring about in human nature. He had the sensation that his hair must be
standing on end the next morning after having read in cold print what he
had said. Expanding oneself before the admiring gaze of innocent
simplicity and addressing the easily amused ear of an unsympathetic
public are not the same thing. He ought to have thought of that.

It consoled him, later, that he was not the only victim. The _Daily
Dispatch_ became famous for its piquant interviews; especially with
elderly celebrities of the masculine gender.

"It's dirty work," Flossie confided one day to Madge Singleton. "I trade
on my silly face. Don't see that I'm much different to any of these poor
devils." They were walking home in the evening from a theatre. "If I
hadn't been stony broke I'd never have taken it up. I shall get out of
it as soon as I can afford to."

"I should make it a bit sooner than that," suggested the elder woman.
"One can't always stop oneself just where one wants to when sliding down
a slope. It has a knack of getting steeper and steeper as one goes on."

Madge had asked Joan to come a little earlier so that they could have a
chat together before the others arrived.

"I've only asked a few," she explained, as she led Joan into the restful
white-panelled sitting-room that looked out upon the gardens. Madge
shared a set of chambers in Gray's Inn with her brother who was an actor.
"But I have chosen them with care."

Joan murmured her thanks.

"I haven't asked any men," she added, as she fixed Joan in an easy chair
before the fire. "I was afraid of its introducing the wrong element."

"Tell me," asked Joan, "am I likely to meet with much of that sort of
thing?"

"Oh, about as much as there always is wherever men and women work
together," answered Madge. "It's a nuisance, but it has to be faced."

"Nature appears to have only one idea in her head," she continued after a
pause, "so far as we men and women are concerned. She's been kinder to
the lower animals."

"Man has more interests," Joan argued, "a thousand other allurements to
distract him; we must cultivate his finer instincts."

"It doesn't seem to answer," grumbled Madge. "One is always told it is
the artist--the brain worker, the very men who have these fine instincts,
who are the most sexual."

She made a little impatient movement with her hands that was
characteristic of her. "Personally, I like men," she went on. "It is so
splendid the way they enjoy life: just like a dog does, whether it's wet
or fine. We are always blinking up at the clouds and worrying about our
hat. It would be so nice to be able to have friendship with them.

"I don't mean that it's all their fault," she continued. "We do all we
can to attract them--the way we dress. Who was it said that to every
woman every man is a potential lover. We can't get it out of our minds.
It's there even when we don't know it. We will never succeed in
civilizing Nature."

"We won't despair of her," laughed Joan. "She's creeping up, poor lady,
as Whistler said of her. We have passed the phase when everything she
did was right in our childish eyes. Now we dare to criticize her. That
shows we are growing up. She will learn from us, later on. She's a dear
old thing, at heart."

"She's been kind enough to you," replied Madge, somewhat irrelevantly.
There was a note of irritation in her tone. "I suppose you know you are
supremely beautiful. You seem so indifferent to it, I wonder sometimes
if you do."

"I'm not indifferent to it," answered Joan. "I'm reckoning on it to help
me."

"Why not?" she continued, with a flash of defiance, though Madge had not
spoken. "It is a weapon like any other--knowledge, intellect, courage.
God has given me beauty. I shall use it in His service."

They formed a curious physical contrast, these two women in this moment.
Joan, radiant, serene, sat upright in her chair, her head slightly thrown
back, her fine hands clasping one another so strongly that the delicate
muscles could be traced beneath the smooth white skin. Madge, with
puckered brows, leant forward in a crouching attitude, her thin nervous
hands stretched out towards the fire.

"How does one know when one is serving God?" she asked after a pause,
apparently rather of herself than of Joan. "It seems so difficult."

"One feels it," explained Joan.

"Yes, but didn't they all feel it," Madge suggested. She still seemed to
be arguing with herself rather than with Joan. "Nietzsche. I have been
reading him. They are forming a Nietzsche Society to give lectures about
him--propagate him over here. Eleanor's in it up to the neck. It seems
to me awful. Every fibre in my being revolts against him. Yet they're
all cocksure that he is the coming prophet. He must have convinced
himself that he is serving God. If I were a fighter I should feel I was
serving God trying to down Him. How do I know which of us is right?
Torquemada--Calvin," she went on, without giving Joan the chance of a
reply. "It's easy enough to see they were wrong now. But at the time
millions of people believed in them--felt it was God's voice speaking
through them. Joan of Arc! Fancy dying to put a thing like that upon a
throne. It would be funny if it wasn't so tragic. You can say she drove
out the English--saved France. But for what? The Bartholomew massacres.
The ruin of the Palatinate by Louis XIV. The horrors of the French
Revolution, ending with Napoleon and all the misery and degeneracy that
he bequeathed to Europe. History might have worked itself out so much
better if the poor child had left it alone and minded her sheep."