Rotting Hill

by Lewis, Wyndham

  “The tough institutionalism of Rome has naturally seen to it that the Latin countries are provided with a class that has some resistance to set a limit to professional indiscipline or red excesses. In France or in Italy communism is more open, not ‘crypto’ as with the English. The declared communist is easy to check. It is instructive to speculate what a purely Catholic Europe would be like at this time. In all likelihood a practical and orderly society would be there, instead of a feverish ideological patchwork, the rabid indiscipline of parties. With the fearful deterrents to revolt, or even to criticism, at the disposal of a twentieth century ruler, where there was any real authority the agitator would not exist. In Russia today he would be instantly liquidated, as we know in any non-Christian society that is what would happen.”

  “You believe in bumping off everyone who disagrees with you?” was my listener’s comment: comments usually made in the form of a question, but hardly anticipating an answer, though on this occasion receiving one.

  “No. I am in fact conducting a polemic, among other things, against absolutist methods.”

  “Stupid of me. Sorry.”

  “In my last remarks, for I have been indecently long and must finish, there is the evidence I must not omit, of how the rich have taken their squeezing to death by the State.”

  “They had no choice. They had no option.”

  “The average coarse illiterate tycoon, banker, or manufacturer one might expect to defend his property with savage desperation. But he does not do that, in these islands at least. He hands it over like an apologetic sheep, who has taken more than his share and knows it.”

  “Not in this county!”

  “No, they are as if spellbound, ‘like somnambulic cattle’. This is the result of the long conditioning. It is, otherwise, undeniably our nature as men to put up a fight to protect our property. I should myself defend, with gun if necessary, my typewriter, let us say, against a nocturnal intruder. I have no right to such a possession, except for that nine-tenths of the law possession takes with it. I just have it, have worked for it, and should defend it. If a man entered my flat, laid his hand upon my typewriter crying, ‘Property is a theft,’ I should answer, ‘Get out, you thief!’ If he did not leave, I should take steps (however violent) to prevent my typewriter from being removed and passing into his hands.”

  “Oh, wouldn’t you let him have it? I should.” Rymer pretended to look astonished at my possessiveness.

  “But you haven’t got anything!” I indignantly pointed out. “It’s easy for you to talk. You haven’t got a typewriter. I am speaking of normal property-owning people, who perhaps have a nice overcoat they do not want to lose: and of course the normal possessing class in a free enterprise society, with whom it would be, only greatly magnified, the case of my typewriter.”

  “Yes, I see the sort of people you are talking about—whose mobile police would machine-gun strikers and jail their leaders.”

  “That, more or less, is the normal behaviour. Our life is animal. What I mean is that we have the most house-trained set of magnates here on record.”

  “They had no choice,” said Rymer dully.

  “The Russian communists, to return to that, deal with dissent as a Bengal tiger would. This—once more—is because they have rooted Christianity out of their system. They are ‘sincere’: they are an idealogic tiger. They are dangerous, unless you feel like joining them.”

  “But what are you driving at?” There was a new note. Rymer, my Chorus, was showing signs of returning to personal life, and ceasing to be a mere heckler. “I see what you want to prove. But what then? Supposing I say, ‘Very well. Socialism is a product of Christianity.’ What happens next? Why should you wish to convince me of that?”

  “I can clear that up for you at once,” I told him. “The way things have gone has involved for us a terrible dilemma—for us ex-Christian liberals. The Third War approaches. That deepens the dilemma; since it will be a war between a liberal principle, and an anti-liberal principle.”

  “What war is this? What war are you talking about?”

  “Soviet Russia has never been socialist according to Western ideas (and Western connotes Liberal). In the same way the communists misuse the term democracy, as we understand it. But the twentieth century Left Wingers repudiated the Western norm: totalitarian socialism they regarded as just an up-to-date model—extreme perhaps but authentic. The Left Wing, of course, shades off into Liberalism where Mr. Attlee stands. And much muddy thinking develops: terms originating in the West, implicit in them the backgrounds of the Western mind with its roots in Aristotle or in Plato, come to be used to describe their opposite. Terms like Democracy and Liberty are stood on their head, or turned inside out. Verhovenski, and William Morris or Mr. Herbert Morrison, are supposed to stand for the same thing. Meanwhile the old men at present in control in England are good if confused men. All are hospital cases, however. Bevin’s doctor accompanied him everywhere: Bevin has dropped out. Cripps, the strongest of the Christian-socialist leaders, has dropped out too, though still alive. Attlee was in hospital for some time and it was believed he would have to lay down the premiership. Morrison was many months in hospital, his complaint phlebitis. None of them can survive the wear and tear of office for more than a few years. Who will it be then? How long will our rulers go to Church? How long will they understand, like Mr. Attlee, that socialism was born out of Christianity? The natural twentieth century drift must be towards the eventual repudiation of Christianity, or its sentimental political puritan hang-over. We see that occurring everywhere, do we not? In a word, the danger is that in its hour of triumph socialism will forget, ignore, or violently discard, the ethics by means of which it was able to gain acceptance and to mount to power: indeed that it may strip away all our civilized Christian freedoms and thrust us back into a system of villeinage and worse. Socialism without ethics is a terrible thing.”

  Stopping as if it were a book I had finished reading and was now closing with a snap, I looked over at Rymer. I saw that he was deeply upset. It might take him a half-hour to recover. I have explained how his is the religious approach: what he enjoys teaching he wishes to see treated as a sacred text. A hint that this fabric of salvation could have a fatal flaw was highly distasteful to him: the view that the very basis of socialism in Christian ethics might be its weak spot must have distressed him deeply. For when Christianity vanished, all socialism’s angelic credentials, as being so obviously unselfish that the power of Ghenghis Khan might be entrusted to it with absolute safety, would vanish too.

  That all such credentials would become worthless, was an odious suggestion to a man who would not even allow his wife to discuss the No-Food Minister’s Monkey Nut Scheme. So poor Rymer was miserable, had been sealing himself up with sealing-wax for fear he might burst, and I should have to break the wax.

  But I thought I would round off my discourse; so bending a stern eye upon him, I said:

  “As a priest yours is a great responsibility.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yes. To advocate socialism, as you do, is perhaps natural for a Protestant clergyman. It is good Christianity. But surely it is your duty to be critical and if necessary to denounce tendencies on the part of political extremists, to transform a basically Western theory into its illiberal opposite, substituting a violent caricature of the Hegelian State for the City of God.”

  “Well, no one can say,” said Rymer, with his brashest smile, “if I neglect to do my duty, that I did not know what it was.”

  Unexpectedly the tension relaxed. He shook himself and smiled sweetly. “Very interesting,” he told me in a most affable way, “although supposing you decided that socialism is too dangerous to go on with I do not see what you would do about it.”

  I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders.

  “That was not the point. I neither wish, nor should I be able, of course, to take any action. We were talking about you—about official Christianity. Your natural enthusiasm
for the triumph of the Christian ethic in the triumph of socialism should be tempered by the thought that the political expression of the Christian ethic is administered by ambitious men who might betray it. The Church, a rejuvenated Church, should be on the bandwaggon and seek to function as the conscience of the politician. It is surely the Church’s privilege to do this: it is after all its ethic that has been used.”

  “The Church consists largely of ambitious men also,” Rymer pointed out sedately.

  “You must get a new Church for the new socialist society,” was my answer to that.

  “Are you a socialist, would you say?” he asked, sitting up.

  This was the counter-attack.

  “I belong to no party, seeing that, if you do, the only truth you are allowed is a partisan truth. Your judgement then must function only pragmatically. I prefer to concern myself with a non-pragmatical truth. A literature at the service of propaganda ceases to be an art: it becomes an agent of intoxication and of deception.”

  “Not a socialist,” he summed up laconically. “He says he’s not a socialist,” as it were to himself.

  “That’s not quite true, either,” I objected. “You have assured me, Rymer, that it is not necessary for your parishioners to come to church on Sunday. They can be equally good Christians by stopping at home: is that correct?”

  “Yes,” he answered with a shade of defiance.

  “Well, as a good non-church-going Christian man I cannot help being, to some degree, a socialist. Socialism is lay-Christianity. I am what a good socialist ought to be.”

  Getting up, I went over and looked out at the waving jungle. “My conscience compels me—unofficially and not as a party-man—to approve of the idea of socialism, which I understand as an attempt to realize the brotherhood of man.”

  The savage vegetation waved hysterically as a gust from the sky blew on it. “‘Socialism’ is a term that covers very different state-forms. Some are like primitive communism, some like highly-organized capitalism. ‘If there were dreams to sell, which would you buy’?”

  I returned from the window. Rymer is physically a slothful man. He was still huddled in his chair.

  “Please show me,” I said, “those new poems of yours. Those epigrams and things you spoke about in your letter. Let us forget the Sermon on the Mount and turn to the Song of Solomon.”

  “Would you really like to see them?”

  He had them wedged in a book at his side. So we passed over into the other compartment of his mind. I took one after the other verses of half a dozen lines perhaps, each emptied of anything possessing weight. Most feelings had to be excluded, ideas were his enemies.

  His lines drifted across the mind like a shadow of a bird. Some were deliberately concrete: say a feather out of a white cloud. But it was visibly dissolving as you held the paper. What he set out to fashion were words that melted as the eye rested on them. His heaviest words had come to rest on the page like the whispering leaf of a canary bush falling like a shadow upon the emerald lawn of a Persian miniature. He did not always succeed. Several were far heavier than air, and one contained an idea: it had slipped in somehow. Then he had written quite different verses, but now they were apparently always like this. As he drifted heavily through Bagwick in the costume of the Bishop’s Fool, he was, I expect, lightening a line, or looking for a word that would fall like a snowflake, a silent self-effacing word.

  I picked up the last of these pieces; even the paper on which he got the schoolmistress in Cockridge to type his verses, was the flimsiest available. He sat in a shapeless huddle in his chair, as though there were no bones inside his clothes, but a great jellyfish. His face was as careworn as that of a Chinese sage, umber-faced, umber-eyed, every furrow at its sharpest and with the expression of a miserable malefactor—one who knew that he had murdered a violet or been guilty of weighting with too ponderous a dew the rose upon the grave of his friend.

  As I lifted the sheet of paper there was a thumping in the hall and a ringing: immediately Eleanor came in to announce the Storby car. It was a little windy outside. As Rymer drooped like a dejected porpoise over the sash of the car-window I warmly shook the poet’s hand. He cheered up as I shook him and as I drove off he was singing his good-byes. I heard Eleanor’s firmer note and agitated my hat out of the window.

  V

  I never had such a good visit again to Bagwick. Either there were young people there or Rymer was preoccupied by the worries of his cure, connected mainly with the hostile activities of the young farmer. But when he came up to London he was in better spirits. He returned to the excitements of his youth: he would have been to see a new Italian film which reminded him of the early Russian ones when he was an undergraduate. Another time he would have been to see a socialist curate in an East End parish who reported packed churches of slum-dwellers, to listen to a sensational mixture of inflammatory social doctrine and tawdry mysticism.

  Two months or more after my visit I sent him a post-card message as follows:

  “Recalling my discourse socialism and Christianity. Have just seen something written or said by David Low, the famous Cartoonist. Here it is.

  “‘If any man come to you from the Right or the Left and promise you economic security on condition that you first surrender your personal and political liberty, kick him downstairs. You won’t get the security and what is more having surrendered your liberty, you will then be in no position whatever to argue about it.’

  “I fear that Low will have lost an admirer in Bagwick.”

  Whenever I saw Rymer I made a point of enquiring if any new moves had been made, by his enemies in the parish, to have his living taken away from him. I got the impression that they had given it up as a bad job. He did not say so, but that is what I gathered was his view.

  Then one day in January, while a young Italian workman was “hacking out and reglazing” one of our hall windows, the icy wind from Siberia still blowing in, there was a knock at the front door. The young Italian went on hacking. Mr. Rushbottom, my old man of errands, my washer-up and guardian of the street-door key was standing hat in hand, counting with difficulty his silver. “Shall I see who it is, sir?” he enquired. I asked him to do so, and he went out into the hall. A moment later he returned, practically walking backwards with his customary exaggerated deference. He was followed by the massive form of Rymer, limping, and with a large black patch over his left eye. The Rymer that looked at me out of the other eye was a stranger.

  “Rymer, of all unexpected visitors!”

  “I’m sorry,” the stranger said.

  “Aren’t you cold? Come over here and sit by the fire.”

  “I’m not cold,” said the stranger.

  “Sit down,” I repeated. “Have you hurt yourself?”

  “No. I have not hurt myself.”

  “No? And you are limping, too. Bad luck. One moment, I will settle with Mr. Rushbottom.”

  I accelerated Mr. Rushbottom’s ritual of the-change-out-of-a-pound, dismissed him with old-world courtesy on both sides—a bow from Mr. Rushbottom at the door towards the ominous vault of Rymer’s back. That finished, I returned to the fire, facing my visitor.

  “You look as if you had been fighting,” I observed.

  “I have,” said the stranger.

  Gradually I grew accustomed to the lonely eye, staring at me with a new expression. It was not the eye of the Bishop’s Fool. Samuel Hartley Rymer was there, as he had begun: the parson that was underneath the rags and patches—which he was not wearing today: the man who played the Bishop’s Fool for my entertainment. Even the poet had deserted this forlorn figure.

  All those attributes removed, the personality was as it were undressed. However, this sort of psychological nudity was presented to me with dramatic satisfaction, so the old Rymer was there after all, peering at me dully out of his one eye.

  There was a long silence. Rymer looked down at the floor. The “hacking and glazing” the other side of the door filled the room with viole
nt sound. Rymer turned towards the door.

  “Who is that?” he enquired.

  “Why, that is an Italian workman,” I told him, “putting in a new pane of glass. He cannot speak, nor can he understand, the English language.”

  A silence ensued.

  “See this?” He pointed to the black patch obscuring his left eye.

  “I do,” I nodded.

  “The farmer did that,” he told me, panting a little.

  “I am sorry, Rymer. How disgusting.”

  “Yes, I’ve come up to see a lawyer. And a doctor.”

  There was a short deep silence.

  Several deep groans broke from him like successive belches. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his uninjured eye.

  “Will this lead to anything tiresome?” I asked him.

  “Lead to anything! I have been told to pack. I am to move into rooms in Storby. The Archdeacon came over last night. I was still in bed, he came into the room and told me no other course was open to them, I must go at once. I asked him what I had done. I have done nothing, people have done things to me. It is not I who should move away from the neighbourhood, it is Jack Cox. But they are such liars, a lot of people have come forward to testify that I… was drunk.”

  “You drunk!”

  “Drunk. They say that I stank of whisky. I never drink anything at all; even if I have people to lunch or to dinner and buy a bottle of wine for them at the grocer’s in Cockridge I never have any myself.”

  This I was able to confirm.

  “I noticed,” I said, “when you brought a bottle of claret back for lunch one day, that you drank nothing yourself. Here, I have offered you everything from beer to burgundy—certainly you do not drink. You’re the driest man I ever met.”

  “No, I don’t drink. But they say I do and that’s all that matters.”

  “A beastly situation! How did it all come to pass? You seem to have a lovely black eye.”

  He told me then how he had been trapped. Knowing him as I do it was not difficult to reconstruct the scene. I could see him as clearly as if I had been there, attempting to extricate himself. But a clergyman is a very easy prey, and this one perhaps especially so. He was a most unpractical man and at the same time over-confident in himself. His was so subjective a temperament that he was disposed to feel he could subdue to his will the most resistant fact. He behaved often as though the objective world were clay to be fashioned—not rock to negotiate. If a solid fact came into collision with him, as in this case for instance with his eye, he would be nonplussed.