It had rained that April more continuously than capriciously, but this morning April showed at last her fairer face. The sunshine held as yet no sense of heat, only the bracingness of a glad salt wave. Across the spacious blue of the Essex sky clouds floated and met and parted in a restful restlessness. The great valley swam in a blue sea of vapour. Men trod as on buoyant sunshine that bore them along. The buds were peeping out from every hedge and tree, the blackthorn was bursting into white, the whole world seemed like a child tiptoeing towards some delightful future. Primroses nestled in every hollow: the gorse lay golden on the commons. The little leaves of the trees seemed shy, scarcely grown familiar with the fluttering of the birds. All the misery, pain, and sadness had faded from creation like a bad dream: the stains and pollutions were washed out, leaving only the young clean beauty of the first day. It was a virgin planet, fresh from the hands of its Maker, trembling with morning dew—an earth that had never seen its own blossoming. And the pÆan of all this peace and innocence throbbed exultingly in bird-music through all the great landscape. Over the orchard of Frog Farm there were only two larks, but you would have thought a whole orchestra.

A blot against this background seemed the blood-red shirt of Caleb Flynt in that same orchard; a wild undulating piece of primeval woodland where plum-trees and pear-trees indeed flourished, but not more so than oaks and chestnuts, briars and brambles, or fairy mists of bluebells. The task of regenerating it had been annually postponed, but now that Caleb was no longer the Frog Farm “looker,” it formed, like his vegetable garden, his wheat patch, or his wife’s piggery, a pleasant pottering-ground. He worked without coat or smock, chastening the ranker grass while the dew was still on it—or in his own idiom, “while the dag was on the herb.” White-bearded and scythe-bearing, he suggested—although the beard was short and round and he wore a shapeless grey hat—a figure of Father Time, incarnadined from all his wars. But in sooth no creature breathed more at one with the earth’s mood that morning than this ancient “Peculiar,” whose parlour bore as its text of honour—in white letters on a lozenge of brown paper: “When He giveth quietness, who then can make trouble?”

Quietness was, indeed, all around him in this morning freshness: the swish of the scythe, the murmurous lapse of shorn grass, the drone of insects, the cooing of pigeons from the cote, the elusive cry of the new-come cuckoo, seemed forms of silence rather than of sound. And his inner peace matched his outer, for, as his arms automatically wielded the scythe, his soul was actually in heaven—or at least in the New Jerusalem which, according to his wife’s novel Christadelphian creed, was to be let down from heaven for the virtuous remnant of earth—and at no distant date! Not that he definitely believed in her descending city, though he felt a certain proprietary interest in it. “Oi don’t belong to Martha’s Church,” he reassured his brethren of the Peculiar faith, “but Oi belongs to she and she belongs to me.”

In this mutual belonging he felt himself the brake and Martha the spirited mare who could never stand still. No doubt her argument that we were here to learn and to move forward was plausible enough—how could he traverse it, he who had himself changed from Churchman to Peculiar? But her rider: “We don’t leave the doctrine, we carry it with us,” struck him as somewhat shifty. And her move from “Sprinkling” to “Total Immersion”—even if the submergence did in a sense include the sprinkling—was surely enough progression for one lifetime. He did not like “this gospel of gooin’ forrard”: an obstinate instinct warned him to hold back, though with an uneasy recognition that her ceaseless explorations of her capacious Bible—to him a sealed book—must naturally yield discoveries denied to his less saintly and altogether illiterate self. Discoveries indeed had not been spared him. Ever since she had joined those new-fangled Christadelphians—“Christy Dolphins” as he called them—she had abounded in texts as crushing as they were unfamiliar; and even the glib Biblical patter he had picked up from the Peculiars was shown to imply at bottom the new teaching. Curtain lectures are none the less tedious when they are theological, and after a course of many months—each with its twenty-eight to thirty-one nights—Caleb Flynt was grown wearisomely learned in the bold doctrine launched by the great John Thomas that “the Kingdom of God on earth” actually meant on earth and must be brought about there and nowhere else, and that Immortality enjoyed except in one’s terrestrial body—however spiritualized—was as absurd a notion as that it was lavished indiscriminately upon Tom, Giles, and Jerry.

The worst of it was he could never be sure Martha was not in the right—she had certainly modified his belief in “Sprinkling”—and he fluttered around her “New Jerusalem” like a moth around a lighthouse. Had anybody given a penny for his thoughts as he stooped now over his scythe, the fortunate investor would have come into possession of “the street of pure gold, as it were transparent glass,” not to mention the sapphires and emeralds, the beryls and chrysolites and all the other shining swarms of precious stones catalogued in Revelation. If he had kept from her the rumour that had reached his own ears of such a treasure-city of glass actually arising in London at this very moment, it was not because he believed this was veritably her celestial city, but because it might possibly excite her credulity to the pitch of wishing to see it. And the thought of a journey was torture. Already Martha had dropped hints about the difficulties of “upbuilding” in the lack of local Christadelphians to institute a “Lightstand”: the wild dream of some day breaking bread in an “Ecclesia” in London had been adumbrated: it was possible the restless female mind even contemplated London itself as a place to be seen before one died.

But surely the New Jerusalem, if it descended at all, would—he felt—descend here, at Little Bradmarsh. A heaven that meant girding up one’s loins and wrenching out one’s roots was a very problematic paradise, for all the splendour with which his inward eye was now, despite himself, dazzled.