  OR THE SILENCE OF GOD
"He is a god; peradventure he sleepeth"—1 Kings xviii. 27
CONSTABLE & CO LTD
First published, 1922
BY THE SAME AUTHOR THE MOTHER OF ALL LIVING
DEDICATION MY DEAR CHRISTOPHER, Recently a very eminent Anglican divine gave us a book which he said embodied "forty years of profound thought." In it he deals to no small extent with the subject of this novel, a novel which, though hiddenly, I wish to dedicate to you. I want to do so because, perhaps, you alone of all my friends will know how much herein written down is true to the life we both led and both have left. It is odd, I think, as I look back, how little we have seen of each other, and how much: how little, because great tracts of your life and mine have been traversed wholly apart, and we only met, in the beginning, when we had both of us come some distance along the way; but how much, since each time we met and walked a mile or two together, we talked very freely and we found we understood. Now, as like as not, I shall see increasingly less of you, seeing that you have become a Catholic, a religious, and a priest at that. It is little one knows of life and its surprises, but we have shaken hands at the cross-roads anyway. A moment, then, ere you go up the steep hill ahead of you, and a moment ere I take my own road that has I cannot see what level or uphill or down in it,—a moment ere you put my book in your pocket for the sake of the days gone by. You will appreciate the fact that I should have put my thought into a novel and not into a book of serious theology. Man's thoughts about God are read best in a novel. Yes, on the one hand, they are best set in a transitory frivolous form that booksellers will expose on their stalls labelled with one of those neatly-printed little tickets—you know: "Just the Book for a Long Journey"—to catch the attention of a man off for his holiday or a girl bored with having to return. Yes, they are best set where they can be read in a few hours by the drawing-room fire. For, after all, ten years or forty or four hundred of man's profound thought about God is worth, maybe a little more than the price of a pound of chocolates, maybe a little less than that of a theatre seat. Besides the novel has a coloured wrapper, and they are not yet brave enough or sufficiently wise to wrap up theology in that form. But on the other hand, my dear Chris, there is no form of writing yet devised quite so true or quite so profound as the novel of human affairs may well be. For, Incarnation or no Incarnation, beyond doubt you cannot separate man and God. We have no medium other than the human brain by which to think of Him, however illumined or deluded that brain may be, and no other measure of His Person than that of human life. Your abstract theologian may decide that He is or is not a Father: it is man's striving soul that knows; and against their presumptive reasoning of the spiritual heaven, I would set half a dozen pages torn from earth. You will be well aware as you read that these chapters are such pages truly enough. I do not mean that it is not the stuff of fiction that is here, but I do protest that Claxted and Keswick and Port o' Man and Thurloe End and Fordham, yes, and Zanzibar, are true to type, though many readers will scarcely believe me. I can see the critics mocking though the ink is not yet dry upon the page. And if, by chance, one of them should catch a fleeting glimpse of his own face in the glass, he will assuredly throw it up at me that the mirror is distorted. Yet, as Samuel Butler says: "If a bona fide writer thinks a thing wants saying ... the question whether it will do him personally good or harm, or how it will affect this or that friend, never enters his head, or if it does, it is instantly ordered out again." Allow me then, for this reason, your name within the boards. You will know, however much you disapprove, that there is no malice here. For what would I gain by mockery, old friend, who have already lost friends enough by speaking the truth? It is a pitiable dance this of ours around the altar of Baal, over which, if God be too divine, at least man should be human enough rather to weep than to mock. Yet I believe, as indeed I have written, that sorrow in the human story is but the shadow of a lovelier thing; that the grass grows green, that the flower blows red, that in the wide sea also are things creeping innumerable both small and great beasts, and that every one is good. And God's in His Heaven? Peradventure. At least His Veil is fair. But—and it is a big "but"—for you in your high vocation and for me in this of mine, for each of us, oddly enough, in his own way, there is a verse from Miss V. H. Friedlaender's A Friendship which I find I cannot easily forget: When we are grown And I want to set that down too, before a reader turns a page. Ever yours,
CONTENTS CHAPTER I. LAMBETH COURT
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