The Pilgrim's Progress

by John Bunyan

  I can’t do justice to Willinck by merely describing these articles; I ought to have them here to read to you. Noble English they were, and as simple as the Psalms… He pictured the constitution of the army, every kind of tongue and dialect and class, with the same kind of discipline as Cromwell’s New Model – Ironsides every one of them, rational, moderate-minded fanatics, the most dangerous kind. It was like Paradise Lost – Michael going out against Belial… And then the description of Russia – a wide grey world, all pale colours and watery lights, broken villages, tattered little towns ruled by a few miscreants with rifles, railway tracks red with rust, ruinous great palaces plastered over with obscene posters, starving hopeless people, children with old vicious faces… God knows where he got the stuff from – mainly his macabre imagination, but I daresay there was a lot of truth in the details, for he had his own ways of acquiring knowledge.

  But the end was the masterpiece. He said that the true rulers were not those whose names appeared in the papers, but one or two secret madmen who sat behind the screen and spun their bloody webs. He described the crusaders breaking through shell after shell, like one of those Chinese boxes which you open only to find another inside till you end with a thing like a pea. There were layers of Jew officials and Lett mercenaries and camouflaging journalists, and always as you went deeper the thing became more inhuman and the air more fetid. At the end you had the demented Mongol – that was a good touch for the Middle West – the incarnation of the backworld of the Orient. Willinck only hinted at this ultimate camarilla, but his hints were gruesome. To one of them he gave the name of Uriel – a kind of worm-eaten archangel of the Pit, but the worst he called Glubet. He must have got the word out of a passage in Catullus which is not read in schools, and he made a shuddering thing of it – the rancid toad-man, living among the half-lights and blood, adroit and sleepless as sin, but cracking now and then into idiot laughter.

  You may imagine how this took hold of the Bible Belt. I never made out what exactly happened, but I have no doubt that there were the rudiments of one of those mass movements, before which Governments and newspapers, combines and Press agencies, Wall Street and Lombard Street and common prudence are helpless. You could see it in the messages CC sent and its agitated service cables to its people. The Moscow Agency sat on our doorstep and bleated for more news, and all the while Punk was ladling out fire-water to every paper that would take it.

  ‘So much for the facts,’ Willinck said calmly. ‘Now I proceed to point the moral in the proper quarters!’

  If he was good at kindling a fire he was better at explaining just how hot it was and how fast it would spread. I have told you that he was about the only English journalist with a Continental reputation. Well, he proceeded to exploit that reputation in selected papers which he knew would cross the Russian frontier. He was busy in the Finnish and Latvian and Lithuanian Press, he appeared in the chief Polish daily, and in Germany his stuff was printed in the one big Berlin paper and – curiously enough – in the whole financial chain. Willinck knew just how and where to strike. The line he took was very simple. He quietly explained what was happening in America and the British Dominions – that the outraged conscience of Christiandom had awakened among simple folk, and that nothing on earth could hold it. It was a Puritan crusade, the most deadly kind. From every corner of the globe believers were about to assemble, ready to sacrifice themselves to root out an infamy. This was none of your Denikins and Koltchaks and Czarist émigré affairs; it was the world’s Christian democracy, and a business democracy. No flag-waving or shouting, just a cold steady determination to get the job done, with ample money and men and an utter carelessness of what they spent on both. Cautious Governments might try to obstruct, but the people would compel them to toe the line. It was a militant League of Nations, with the Bible in one hand and the latest brand of munition in the other.

  We had a feverish time at Ladas in those days. The British Press was too much occupied with the strike to pay full attention, but the Press of every other country was on its hind legs. Presently things began to happen. The extracts from Pravda and Izvestia, which we got from Riga and Warsaw, became every day more like the howling of epileptic wolves; then came the news that Moscow had ordered a very substantial addition to the Red Army. I telephoned this item to Willinck, and he came round to see me.

  ‘The wind is rising,’ he said. ‘The fear of the Lord is descending on the tribes, and that we know is the beginning of wisdom.’

  I observed that Moscow had certainly got the wind up, but that I didn’t see why. ‘You don’t mean to say that you have got them to believe in your precious crusade.’

  He nodded cheerfully. ‘Why not? My dear Martendale, you haven’t studied the mentality of these gentry as I have. Do you realise that the favourite reading of the Russian peasant used to be Milton? Before the war you could buy a translation of Paradise Lost at every book kiosk in every country fair. These rootless intellectuals have cast off all they could, but at the back of their heads the peasant superstition remains. They are afraid in their bones of a spirit that they think is in Puritanism. That’s why this American business worries them so. They think they are a match for Rome, and they wouldn’t have minded if the racket had been started by the Knights of Columbus or that kind of show. But they think it comes from the meetinghouse, and that scares them cold.’

  ‘Hang it all,’ I said, ‘they must know the soft thing modern Puritanism is – all slushy hymns and inspirational advertising.’

  ‘Happily they don’t. And I’m not sure that their ignorance is not wiser than your knowledge, my emancipated friend. I’m inclined to think that something may yet come out of the Bible Christian that will surprise the world… But not this time. I fancy the trick has been done. You might let me know as soon as you hear anything.’ And he moved off, whistling contentedly through his teeth.

  He was right. Three days later we got the news from Warsaw, and the Moscow Agency confirmed it. The Patriarch had been released and sent across the frontier, and was now being coddled and fêted in Poland. I rang up Willinck, and listened to his modest Nunc dimittis over the telephone.

  He said he was going to take a holiday and go into the country to sleep. He pointed out for my edification that the weak things of the world – meaning himself – could still confound the strong, and he advised me to reconsider the foundations of my creed in the light of this surprising miracle.

  *

  Well, that is my story. We heard no more of the crusade in America, except that the Fundamentalists seemed to have got a second wind from it and started a large-scale heresy hunt. Several English bishops said that the release of the Patriarch was an answer to prayer; our Press pointed out how civilisation, if it spoke with one voice, would be listened to even in Russia; and Labour papers took occasion to enlarge on the fundamental reasonableness and urbanity of the Moscow Government.

  Personally I think that Willinck drew the right moral. But the main credit really belonged to something a great deal weaker than he – the aged Tubb, now sleeping under a painted cast-iron gravestone among the dust-devils and meerkats of Rhenosterspruit.

  Sing a Song of Sixpence

  The effect of night, of any flowing water, of lighted cities, of the peep of day, of ships, of the open ocean, calls up in the mind an army of anonymous desires and pleasures. Something, we feel, should happen; we know not what, yet we proceed in quest of it.

  R. L. STEVENSON

  Leithen’s face had that sharp chiselling of the jaw and that compression of the lips which seem to follow upon high legal success. Also an overdose of German gas in 1918 had given his skin a habitual pallor, so that he looked not unhealthy, but notably urban. As a matter of fact he was one of the hardest men I have ever known, but a chance observer might have guessed from his complexion that he rarely left the pavements.

  Burminster, who had come back from a month in the grass countries with a face like a deep-sea mariner’s, commented on this one evening
.

  ‘How do you manage always to look the complete Cit, Ned?’ he asked. ‘You’re as much a Londoner as a Parisian is a Parisian, if you know what I mean.’

  Leithen said that he was not ashamed of it, and he embarked on a eulogy of the metropolis. In London you met sooner or later everybody you had ever known; you could lay your hand on any knowledge you wanted; you could pull strings that controlled the innermost Sahara and the topmost Pamirs. Romance lay in wait for you at every street corner. It was the true City of the Caliphs.

  ‘That is what they say,’ said Sandy Arbuthnot sadly, ‘but I never found it so. I yawn my head off in London. Nothing amusing ever finds me out – I have to go and search for it, and it usually costs the deuce of a lot.’

  ‘I once stumbled upon a pretty generous allowance of romance,’ said Leithen, ‘and it cost me precisely sixpence.’

  Then he told us this story.

  It happened a good many years ago, just when I was beginning to get on at the Bar. I spent busy days in court and chambers, but I was young and had a young man’s appetite for society, so I used to dine out most nights and go to more balls than were good for me. It was pleasant after a heavy day to dive into a different kind of life. My rooms at the time were in Down Street, the same house as my present one, only two floors higher up.

  On a certain night in February I was dining in Bryanston Square with the Nantleys. Mollie Nantley was an old friend, and used to fit me as an unattached bachelor into her big dinners. She was a young hostess and full of ambition, and one met an odd assortment of people at her house. Mostly political, of course, but a sprinkling of art and letters, and any visiting lion that happened to be passing through. Mollie was a very innocent lion-hunter, but she had a partiality for the breed.

  I don’t remember much about the dinner, except that the principal guest had failed her. Mollie was loud in her lamentations. He was a South American President who had engineered a very pretty coup d’état the year before, and was now in England on some business concerning the finances of his State. You may remember his name – Ramón Pelem – he made rather a stir in the world for a year or two. I had read about him in the papers, and had looked forward to meeting him, for he had won his way to power by extraordinary boldness and courage, and he was quite young. There was a story that he was partly English and that his grandfather’s name had been Pelham. I don’t know what truth there was in that, but he knew England well and Englishmen liked him.

  Well, he had cried off on the telephone an hour before, and Mollie was grievously disappointed. Her other guests bore the loss with more fortitude, for I expect they thought he was a brand of cigar.

  In those days dinners began earlier and dances later than they do today. I meant to leave soon, go back to my rooms and read briefs, and then look in at Lady Samplar’s dance between eleven and twelve. So at nine-thirty I took my leave.

  Jervis, the old butler, who had been my ally from boyhood, was standing on the threshold, and in the square there was a considerable crowd now thinning away. I asked what the trouble was.

  ‘There’s been an arrest, Mr Edward,’ he said in an awestruck voice. ‘It ‘appened when I was serving coffee in the dining-room, but our Albert saw it all. Two foreigners, he said – proper rascals by their look – were took away by the police just outside this very door. The constables was very nippy and collared them before they could use their pistols – but they ’ad pistols on them and no mistake. Albert says he saw the weapons.’

  ‘Did they propose to burgle you?’ I asked.

  ‘I cannot say, Mr Edward. But I shall give instructions for a very careful lock-up tonight.’

  There were no cabs about, so I decided to walk on and pick one up. When I got into Great Cumberland Place it began to rain sharply, and I was just about to call a prowling hansom, when I put my hand into my pocket. I found that I had no more than one solitary sixpence.

  I could of course have paid when I got to my flat. But as the rain seemed to be slacking off, I preferred to walk. Mollie’s dining-room had been stuffy, I had been in court all day, and I wanted some fresh air.

  You know how in little things, when you have decided on a course, you are curiously reluctant to change it. Before I got to the Marble Arch it had begun to pour in downright earnest. But I still stumped on. Only I entered the Park, for even in February there is a certain amount of cover from the trees.

  I passed one or two hurried pedestrians, but the place was almost empty. The occasional lamps made only spots of light in a dripping darkness, and it struck me that this was a curious patch of gloom and loneliness to be so near to crowded streets, for with the rain had come a fine mist. I pitied the poor devils to whom it was the only home. There was one of them on a seat which I passed. The collar of his thin shabby overcoat was turned up, and his shameful old felt hat was turned down, so that only a few square inches of pale face were visible. His toes stuck out of his boots, and he seemed sunk in a sodden misery.

  I passed him and then turned back. Casual charity is an easy dope for the conscience, and I indulge in it too often. When I approached him he seemed to stiffen, and his hands moved in his pockets.

  ‘A rotten night,’ I said. ‘Is sixpence any good to you?’ And I held out my solitary coin.

  He lifted his face, and I started. For the eyes that looked at me were not those of a waster. They were bright, penetrating, authoritative – and they were young. I was conscious that they took in more of me than mine did of him.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ he said, as he took the coin, and the voice was that of a cultivated man. ‘But I’m afraid I need rather more than sixpence.’

  ‘How much?’ I asked. This was clearly an original.

  ‘To be accurate, five million pounds.’

  He was certainly mad, but I was fascinated by this wisp of humanity. I wished that he would show more of his face.

  ‘Till your ship comes home,’ I said, ‘you want a bed, and you’d be the better of a change. Sixpence is all I have on me. But if you come to my rooms I’ll give you the price of a night’s lodging, and I think I might find you some old clothes.’

  ‘Where do you live?’ he asked.

  ‘Close by – in Down Street.’ I gave the number.

  He seemed to reflect, and then he shot a glance on either side into the gloom behind the road. It may have been fancy, but I thought that I saw something stir in the darkness.

  ‘What are you?’ he asked.

  I was getting abominably wet, and yet I submitted to be cross-examined by this waif.

  ‘I am a lawyer,’ I said.

  He looked at me again, very intently.

  ‘Have you a telephone?’ he asked.

  I nodded.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘You seem a good fellow, and I’ll take you at your word. I’ll follow you… Don’t look back, please. It’s important… I’ll be in Down Street as soon as you… Marchons.’

  It sounds preposterous, but I did exactly as I was bid. I never looked back, but I kept my ears open for the sound of following footsteps. I thought I heard them, and then they seemed to die away. I turned out of the Park at Grosvenor Gate and went down Park Lane. When I reached the house which contained my flat, I looked up and down the street, but it was empty except for a waiting four-wheeler. But just as I turned in I caught a glimpse of someone running at the Hertford Street end. The runner came to a sudden halt, and I saw that it was not the man I had left.

  To my surprise I found the waif on the landing outside my flat. I was about to tell him to stop outside, but as soon as I unlocked the door he brushed past me and entered. My man, who did not sleep on the premises, had left the light burning in the little hall.

  ‘Lock the door,’ he said in a tone of authority. ‘Forgive me taking charge, but I assure you it is important.’

  Then to my amazement he peeled off the sopping overcoat, and kicked off his disreputable shoes. They were odd shoes, for what looked like his toes sticking out was really part of the
make-up. He stood up before me in underclothes and socks, and I noticed that his underclothing seemed to be of the finest material.

  ‘Now for your telephone,’ he said.

  I was getting angry at these liberties.

  ‘Who the devil are you?’ I demanded.

  ‘I am President Pelem,’ he said, with all the dignity in the world. ‘And you?’

  ‘I? – oh, I am the German Emperor.’

  He laughed. ‘You know you invited me here,’ he said. ‘You’ve brought this on yourself.’ Then he stared at me. ‘Hullo, I’ve seen you before. You’re Leithen. I saw you play at Lord’s. I was twelfth man for Harrow that year… Now for the telephone.’

  There was something about the fellow, something defiant and debonair and young, that stopped all further protest on my part. He might or might not be President Pelem, but he was certainly not a wastrel. Besides, he seemed curiously keyed up, as if the occasion were desperately important, and he infected me with the same feeling. I said no more, but led the way into my sitting-room. He flung himself on the telephone, gave a number, was instantly connected, and began a conversation in monosyllables.

  It was a queer jumble that I overhead. Bryanston Square was mentioned, and the Park, and the number of my house was given – to somebody. There was a string of foreign names – Pedro and Alejandro and Manuel and Alcaza – and short breathless enquiries. Then I heard – ‘a good fellow – looks as if he might be useful in a row’, and I wondered if he was referring to me. Some rapid Spanish followed, and then, ‘Come round at once – they will be here before you. Have policemen below, but don’t let them come up. We should be able to manage alone. Oh, and tell Burton to ring up here as soon as he has news.’ And he gave my telephone number.