Trimblerigg

“ Mr. Trimblerigg and Davidina alike; they took it as a worthy occupation;—he to be ill of it, she to have the nursing of it. For the next fortnight brother and sister enjoyed each other thoroughly, more than they had ever done in their lives before. They even became fond of each other. But character remained; the fondness was critical.
The day that the doctor pronounced him out of danger, Mr. Trimblerigg had already felt so much better, that he wanted to get up. Life having become attractive again, he was impatient to go out and meet it once more on his own terms. ”

“ For one moment the crowd, shocked into mute amaze, stood and gaped; then a roar of execration filled the air. Even the bright manifestation of his mission, which had once awed and delighted, failed to placate them now. Mr. [316] Trimblerigg knew enough of crowds to admit that his secretary was right; this crowd was dangerous; but he knew also that he had only to get them to listen, to hear his opening words, for his spell to be on them. He could trust the inspiration of the moment to do the rest. ”

“ If Miss Sparling herself limed that snare, she certainly did it well; the obliteration of the face, with just the suggestion of a likeness left, was finely controlled; and yet the control may have only been Father Time’s; and whether it was luck, or whether Susannah Walcot was in truth a prophetess of penetrating power, who is now to say? The lengths to which the human faculties can go have often filled me with astonishment; Mr. Trimblerigg was only one instance among many. ”

“ And so upon its second advent, Mr. Trimblerigg’s halo was a great success. It did not have to appear unexplained; a public meeting was arranged for it. And there with due solemnity for the strengthening of faith the box of Susannah Walcot was brought forth like a new ark of the covenant; and a crowned head, having first prayed to be guided aright, broke the seals, drew out the contents, and read extracts, and coming upon an illustrated page was for putting it modestly aside, when his hand was stayed by the vigilance of Isabel Sparling. ”

“ Trimblerigg, in order to make him the instrument of her vision for the Millennium that was to be, she did not find his head visibly crowned. Nor had she expected it; yet she was puzzled that it was not so. Such self-abnegation, to the foregoing of a gift so uplifting and spiritual, though admirable as a mere act of humility was not to be encouraged when a world in flux was waiting to be saved not so much by knowledge in things spiritual as by novelty, and when, in consequence, anything in the way of signs and wonders might be of so much help. ”

“ Trimblerigg, encumbered with his parcels, stood fixed. The thought flashed that here and now he had done something that he could not help, for he remembered that he did not swim; and though it was a pure accident, he had a swift apprehension that this would be a difficult and also a humiliating matter to explain truthfully. It was a very serious drawback for any young man at the beginning of his ministerial career to push his sister into the water and then have her drown ”

“ Trimblerigg set out to play the god—the god of peace, mercy, and reconciliation to the expropriated natives of Puto-Congo; not because he regarded it as specially true to his character, or as the better hole to fall into—for to fall he did not intend; but because the coming of Davidina had made him realize that a sporting alternative to reprisals did actually exist; and being a sportsman by instinct, where matters of principle were concerned, he saw it adventurously as the obvious game to play. ”

“ Trimblerigg’s attention was first attracted to the career his elders designed for him, not so much by the habitual goodness with which the rivalry of Davidina had imbued his character, as by his observation of the sensation caused in his native village by the missionizing efforts of a certain boy-preacher, then known to fame as ‘The Infant Samuel Samuel,’ whose call, beginning at his baptism in that strange invocative reduplication of the family name imposed by his godparents, went on till it suddenly passed in silence to an obscurity from which the veil has never been lifted. ”

“ Trimblerigg looked at her with furtive suspicion, ‘I’ve been interviewing a specimen,’ she said; ‘one of yours.’
She named her man. ‘He seemed honest enough,’ she went on, ‘but he’s been scratched badly, acting (he says) under your orders.’
Mr. Trimblerigg bristled to the implied criticism. ‘He has only done what was absolutely necessary.’
‘Necessary, of course,’ she returned. ‘You can always make a thing necessary if you want to. If a man sets fire to the tail of his shirt, he has got to get out of it. But that doesn’t make him look less of a fool, Jonathan. ”

“ That frightens me. It’s like a train whistling and screaming to say there’s going to be an accident.’
Whereat Mr. Trimblerigg put himself resolutely under the bed-clothes: and so she left him.
Yet, in the end, she did him good. It is a pathetic fact that from that day Mr. Trimblerigg left off biting his nails, hoping, perhaps, that as they grew an instinct for truth would be born in him. Eventually he even developed a habit of letting them grow quite long: securing, to that extent, a sense of escape from the supervision of Davidina. ”

“ Trimblerigg went out hopefully into the wilderness, drawing a tail of all the Free Churches after him; and though for a time they lacked funds, and found many doors closed against them, they had not to be long in doubt that theirs was the winning cause.
What the world wanted—the religious even more than the secular—was a real bird-in-the-hand; proof positive, quick results, practice not theory, ocular demonstration, moral certainty, wheels which actually went round, whose buzz could be heard to the far ends of earth. ”

“ And there in a darkened room the four of them sat,—Sir Roland, the medium, Mr. Trimblerigg, and the Prime Minister.
The medium was small and dark, and middle-aged; she had bright eyes under a straight fringe and she spoke with a twang. There was no doubt which side of the water she had come from. Until the previous year, except for a few days after her birth, her home had been the United States. The actual place of her birth was important; it helped to account for her powers; Sir Roland having recently discovered that the best mediums were people of mixed origin, born on the high seas. ”

“ Trimblerigg had been born and brought up in a household where the idea that spirits were anything to drink had never been allowed to enter his head. He only knew of spirit as of something that would catch fire and boil a kettle, or embrace death in a bottle and preserve it from decay. ”

“ He Tries to be Honest DAVIDINA got over her cold without difficulty. But Mr. Trimblerigg, who from repeated immersion, had been in the water much longer and with opportunities for severe chills to take him between whiles, fell seriously ill.
It was with a sort of satisfaction that he took to his bed; for this at any rate was a genuine result of his life-saving efforts, and seemed in a way to affect their character, giving them the testimonial he craved. ”

“ Trimblerigg was safely downstairs, I have seen her go into the bathroom and inspect, with a woman’s eye for details: appraise the amount of moisture left in the towel, and various other minute points for the confirmation of her hope that he was not overdoing it. And when she has quite satisfied herself, I have seen her smile and go on down to breakfast, a good contented soul, full of the comfortable assurances wives often have, that though husbands may be clever in their way, to see through them domestically is not difficult. ”

“ Davidina, having measured him judicially with her eye, settled that he was well enough for an indulgence that would be mutual.
‘He says you are out of danger,’ she answered; ‘so now you are in it again.’
‘In what?’
‘In your own way,’ she replied, elliptically. ‘It’s done you no harm being ill. To be safe from yourself for a fortnight never happened to you before. Mother calls it a God’s mercy you’re still alive. Perhaps it is: I don’t know.’
Mr. Trimblerigg lay trying to read her face and the meanings behind it. ”

“ Trimblerigg his due, that—if only he could find for it the right environment—would be but an added attraction. A tough job always delighted him; so much so that, setting his teeth to the toughness of it, he thenceforth forgot everything but appetite; and as his appetite always grew with what it fed on—given a proposition of sufficient toughness, his appetite was apt to go strange lengths. So it had been when he set out to hew Agag, and skin the scapegoat, giving to the fantasy that air of probability which it needed in order to make it popular ”

“ In this settling obscurity the sound of human woe went on increasing, enlivened now and again by cries of rage. The crowd, cumbered by its wedding raiment, was fighting confusedly for priority of place; the terminus was being rushed, empty excursion trains boarded. A faint-hearted exodus from the New Jerusalem [312] had already begun: the world was not coming to an end in the peaceful way that had been foretold.
A ring-up on Mr. Trimblerigg’s telephone gave him the news. ”

“ Trimblerigg this form of worship was terrible; he liked music and he liked tunes; diversity attracted him; and here, by every possible device, diversity was ruled out. But the importance of Uncle Phineas, both present and prospective, obliged certain members of the Trimblerigg family to ascend once at least every Sunday, to hear him preach and pray, and though none of them professed an exclusive conversion to the teaching of the True Believers, they kept an open mind about it, and listened respectfully to all that Uncle Phineas had to say. ”

“ Trimblerigg knew that he was decisively against them; nor was Cousin Caroline, his house-companion, the sort of person to suggest a quiver of revolt.
And so, while pledged to Isabel Sparling and her fellow-aspirants to become their champion when membership of the Synod should give him a voice, Mr. Trimblerigg for the present allowed the question to sleep. In his own time and in his own way he would make it his policy, but not probably so long as his Uncle Phineas was alive, and his own financial future unassured. He must first himself become a minister. ”

“ The natives of Puto-Congo themselves indicated what form of instruction best suited them; and under Mr. Trimblerigg’s dispensation it was no longer only the missionaries who were buried head-downwards and painted black-and-tan, to match the landscape with its foregrounds of burnt-out villages and long tracks of charred jungle wherein nothing lived or moved.
For this painful necessity Mr. Trimblerigg had good material provided him. Civilization had trained for war far more men than it could now employ in peace ”

“ The Conversion of Caroline MR. TRIMBLERIGG joined his family in a small retired bungalow, standing between estuary and sea, on the outskirts of a large health-resort looking south. It was the very place for him to be—if not exactly alone—unobserved. The shore was shadeless; across an arm of the estuary a rickety foot-bridge led to copse and field, and across the railroad to a wide expanse of heath. After that came the littered margin of the town, with its cheap and scrubby architecture run up as a trap for holiday-makers. ”

“ It may well be that when human nature appears, to those whose business is to understand it, most unexpected and incalculable, is the very time when it is or ought to be most instructive to eyes which are open. And certainly at this preliminary period—before I got accustomed to him—Mr. Trimblerigg did make me open my eyes wider and wider, till he got me to the point when nothing that he did surprised me. ”

“ Trimblerigg went more constantly and willingly to hear the doctrine of the True Believers, and began to display towards it something wider than an open mind. At the age of fifteen he had got into the habit of going to see and hear his uncle on weekdays as well, and very quietly he would endure for hours together while the old man expounded his unchangeable theology. ”

“ A Virtuous Adventure NOBODY who has followed this narrative with any intelligence can suppose that Mr. Trimblerigg was a man who did not have his temptations. What happened when he immersed Davidina in the stream without intending it, what happened when he did not immerse himself in the bath on a cold morning, has been faithfully told. But what he did to Davidina had hurt him far more than what he did to himself. It had hurt him because Davidina had found him out, and then had not allowed him to explain.
He liked explaining. Explaining always made him feel right again with his own conscience. ”

“ Trimblerigg had seen that habit—habit of mind as well as body—is the dead weight in the world’s affairs [307] which separates man from faith, and prevents mountains from being moved. And so with Second Adventism, backed by spiritualism and prophecy, he had routed men’s minds out of their groove, simply by convincing them that on a given date, willy-nilly, the groove was coming to an end. Mr. Trimblerigg’s greatest exploit was not in building a city capable of containing a million souls, but in finding a million souls ready to flock to it. ”

“ Trimblerigg—was how it appeared to a child’s eyes!
He helped them all quickly from the dish before him; after that they looked at him less continuously, but not less admiringly. This eased the situation till Martin, the elder of the two boys, inquired concerning the food upon [186] his plate. ‘Mummy, why don’t poached eggs have their yellow outside? Why don’t they, Mummy?’
Caroline told him not to talk, but to go on eating.
Amy remedied matters in her own way, saying wisely, ‘They do come outside when they’re hatched ”