第60章

She remembered what Mr.Magnus had said: "If there's something of great value, don't think the less of it because the people, including yourself, who admire it, aren't worth very much.Why should they be?"She looked for a moment at Aunt Anne and saw her in an ecstasy, singing in her cracked tuneless voice, a smile about her lips and in her eyes, that gazed far, far beyond that Chapel.Maggie felt the approach of tears; she stopped singing--softly the refrain of the last verse came:

By the blood, by the blood, by the blood of the Lamb We beseech Thee!

The hymn over, Mr.Warlock read the Bible and then offered up a long extempore prayer.Strangely enough Mr.Warlock brought Maggie back to reality--strangely because, on an earlier occasion, he had done exactly the opposite.She realised at once that he was not happy to-night.Before, he had been himself caught up into the mood that held the Chapel; to-night he was fighting against a mood that was then outside him, a mood with which he did not sympathise and in which he could not believe.

She saw that he was unhappy, he spoke slowly, without the spontaneity and force that he had used before; once he made a long pause and you could feel throughout the Chapel a wave of nervous apprehension, as though every one were waiting to see whether he would fight his way through or not.Maggie felt her earlier emotion sentimental and false, it was as though he had said to her: "But that's not the true thing; that's cheap sham emotion.That's what they're trying to turn our great reality into.I'm fighting them and you must help me."He was fighting them.She could imagine Mr.Thurston's scornful lip, hidden now by his hands.As Mr.Warlock went on with his dignified sentences, his restraint and his reverence, she could fancy how Thurston was saying to himself: "But what's the good of this? It's blood and thunder we want.The old feller's getting past his work.He must go."But it was Mr.Warlock's reality of which she was afraid.As he continued his prayer she felt all her old terror return, that terror that she had known on the night her father died, during the hours that she had watched beside his dead body, at the moment when she had first arrived at the house in London, during her first visit to the Chapel, when she had said good-night to her aunt before going out with Uncle Mathew...And now Mr.Warlock was sweeping her still farther inside.The intensity of his belief forced hers.There was something real in this power of God, and you could not finish with it simply by disregarding it.She felt, as she had felt so often lately, that some one was suddenly going to rise and demand some oath or promise from her that she, in her panic, would give her word and then would be caught for ever.

"By the love of Thy dear Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, and by the promise of Thy second coming, we beseech Thee"...finished Mr.

Warlock.

During all this time the atmosphere of the Chapel had been growing hotter and hotter and closer and closer.It had always its air of being buried deep under ground, bathed in a kind of sunken heat that found its voice in the gas that hissed and sizzled overhead; near the door was a long rail on which coats might be hung, and now these garments could be seen, swaying a little to and fro, like corpses of condemned men.

The bare ugliness of the building with its stone walls, its rows of wooden seats, its grey windows, its iron-hung gas-lamps, its ugly desk and platform, was veiled now in a thin steaming heat that rose mistily above the heads of the kneeling congregation and seemed to hide strange shapes and shadows in its shifting depths.Every one was swimming in an uncertain world; the unreality grew with the heat.Maggie herself, at the end of Mr.Warlock's prayer, felt that her test of a real solid and unimaginative world was leaving her.

She was expectant like the rest, as ready to believe anything at all.

Out of the mist rose Mr.Crashaw.This was a little old man with a crabbed face and a body that seemed to have endured infernal twistings in some Inquisitioner's torture-chamber.Maggie learnt afterwards that he had suffered for many years from intolerable rheumatism, but to-night the contortions and windings of the body with which he climbed up onto the platform, and then the grimaces that he made as his large round head peered over the top of the desk, might have struck any less solemn assemblage as farcical.He wore an old shiny black frock coat and a white rather grimy tie fastened in a sharp little bow.His face was lined like a map, his cheeks seamed and furrowed, his forehead a wilderness of marks, his scanty hair brushed straight back so that the top of his forehead seemed unnaturally shiny and bald; his hands, with which he clutched the side of his desk, were brown and wrinkled and grasping like a monkey's.His eyes were the eyes of a fanatic, but they were not steady and speculative like Warlock's or glowing and distant like Aunt Anne's, but rather angry and restless and pugnacious; they were the eyes of a madman, but of a madman who can yet calculate upon and arrange his position in the world.He was mad for his own purposes, and could, for these same purposes, bind his madness to its proper bounds.

He seemed to Maggie at first rather pathetic with his little twisted body and his large round head.Very soon it was emotions quite other than pity that she was feeling.She saw at once that he was a practised preacher, and she who had, with the exception of Mr.

Warlock, never heard a fine preacher, was at once under the sway of one of the ablest and most dramatic orators of his time.His voice was sweet and clear, and seemed strange enough coming from that ugly and malevolent countenance.Only the head and the grasping hands could be seen, but sometimes the invisible body was driven with such force against the desk that it seemed that it must fling the thing over, down into the congregation.