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O Português na
África Atlântica
Márcia Santos Duarte de Oliveira
Gabriel Antunes de Araujo
Organizadores

Angola
Cabo Verde
Guiné-Bissau
São Tomé e Príncipe
O Português na África Atlântica
Universidade de São Paulo
Reitor
Vahan Agopyan

Vice-Reitor
Antonio Carlos Hernandes

Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas

Diretora
Maria Arminda do Nascimento Arruda
Vice-Diretor
Paulo Martins

Comissão Científica do Livro

Charlotte Marie C. Galves (Universidade de Campinas)
Eeva Sipolla (Universidade de Bremen)
Heliana Ribeiro de Mello (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais)
Waldemar Ferreira Netto (Universidade de São Paulo)
 DOI 10.11606/9788575063545

Márcia Santos Duarte de Oliveira

Gabriel Antunes de Araujo
Organizadores

O Português na África Atlântica

2ª edição

São Paulo, 2019

 Catalogação na Publicação (CIP)
Serviço de Biblioteca e Documentação
Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas da Universidade de São Paulo
Elaborada por Maria Imaculada da Conceição – CRB‐8/6409

P839 O português na África Atlântica [recurso eletrônico] / Márcia Santos Duarte de

Oliveira, Gabriel Antunes de Araujo (organizadores). ‐‐ 2. ed. ‐‐ São Paulo :
FFLCH/USP, 2019.
8.427 Kb ; PDF.

ISBN 978‐85‐7506‐354‐5
DOI 10.11606/9788575063545

1. Língua portuguesa – África ocidental (aspectos linguísticos) (aspectos sociais)

(aspectos históricos). 2. Intercâmbio cultural – aspectos linguísticos. 3.
Aprendizagem de língua estrangeira. I. Oliveira, Márcia Santos Duarte de, coord. II.
Araujo, Gabriel Antunes de, coord.

CDD 469.79966

Autorizada a reprodução e divulgação total ou parcial para fins de estudo e

pesquisa, desde que citada a fonte, proibindo qualquer uso para fins comerciais

Serviço de Editoração e Distribuição

Coordenação Editorial
Maria Helena G. Rodrigues – MTb n. 28.840/SP
Projeto Gráfico, Diagramação e Capa
Walquir da Silva – MTb n. 28.841/SP
Colaborador
Paulo Jeferson Pilar Araújo
Preparação e Revisão de Textos
Márcia Santos Duarte de Oliveira
Maria de Lurdes Zanoli
Informação da Contracapa
Márcia Oliveira junto a um embondeiro
Angola (banco de dados do “Projeto Libolo” – ver: Figueiredo & Oliveira (2016))
 Sumário

APRESENTAÇÃO
Márcia Santos Duarte de Oliveira; Gabriel Antunes de Araujo 07

ANGOLA
Variedades de português angolano e línguas bantas em contato
Paulo Jeferson Pilar Araújo, Margarida Taddoni Petter, José Albino José 17
Aspectos histórico-culturais e sociolinguísticos do Libolo: aproximações com o Brasil
Carlos Filipe Guimarães Figueiredo 47

CABO VERDE
Estudos sobre o português falado em Cabo Verde: o "estado da arte"
Francisco João Lopes, Márcia Santos Duarte de Oliveira 101
Aquisição do português L2 em Cabo Verde: alguns aspectos morfossintáticos
do contato
Nélia Alexandre 139
Caboverdiano e Português: cotejando estruturas focalizadas
Nélia Alexandre, Márcia Santos Duarte de Oliveira 165

GUINÉ-BISSAU
Contribuições para o estudo da prosódia do português de Guiné-Bissau: a entoação
do contorno neutro
Vinícius Gonçalves dos Santos, Flaviane Romani Fernandes Svartman 191
Estudo Inicial das Perguntas-Q no Português de Guiné-Bissau
Eduardo Ferreira dos Santos, Raquel Azevedo da Silva 237

SÃO TOMÉ E PRÍNCIPE

Ditongos no português vernacular de São Tomé e Príncipe
Alfredo Cristofoletti Silveira, Gabriel Antunes de Araujo 261
O português dos Tongas de São Tomé
Alan Norman Baxter 297

POSFÁCIO
Contato, filiação e gênio das línguas
Charlotte Marie Chambelland Galves 323

REFERÊNCIAS BIBLIOGRÁFICAS 337

Apresentação1
Este livro reúne nove ensaios sobre O Português na África Atlântica, re-
sultado do trabalho de investigação científica realizado por pesquisadores da
Universidade de São Paulo, Universidade Federal de Roraima, Universidade
da Integração Internacional da Lusofonia Afro-Brasileira, Universidade de
Lisboa, Universidade de Macau e Universidade de Saint Joseph (Macau),
seguidos por um posfácio de Charlotte Galves da Universidade Estadual de
Campinas. Os ensaios abordam aspectos linguísticos e sócio-históricos do
português falado em Angola, em Cabo Verde, na Guiné Bissau e em São
Tomé e Príncipe. Como os trabalhos demonstram, é a diversidade linguística
dessa África Atlântica (com suas centenas de línguas do tronco Níger-Congo
e as línguas crioulas de base portuguesa) que lança novas luzes sobre os estu-
dos do português brasileiro e europeu, bem como para o estudo das línguas
em contato com essas variedades de português faladas na África.
O português do Brasil e de Portugal contam com milhares de estudos,
graças à energia e interesse dos recursos humanos disponíveis em ambos os
lados do Atlântico, aos pesquisadores estrangeiros e aos múltiplos intercâm-
bios nos últimos 40 anos, tanto entre Brasil e Portugal, como entre cientistas
desses países e de todo o mundo. O mesmo ainda não pode ser dito sobre a
África lusófona. De um lado, a descolonização tardia de Cabo Verde, Guiné
Bissau, Angola e São Tomé e Príncipe, fruto das lutas que culminaram na
independência destes Estados nos anos setenta do século passado, e, de outro,
a instalação de regimes ora autoritários, ora isolacionistas, bem como à falta

1
Neste livro, os organizadores Márcia Santos Duarte de Oliveira e Gabriel Antunes Araújo
agradecem às agências de fomento FAPESP e CNPq pelos diversos apoios. Marcia Oliveira,
Paulo Jeferson Araújo e Charlotte Galves (autora do ‘posfácio) mencionam os estudos
apresentados nesse texto-livro ao Projeto Temático FAPESP – Processo 2012/06078-9: “A
língua portuguesa no tempo e no espaço”. Marcia Oliveira também agradece à FAPESP
pelo fomento aprovado para o V Congresso Internacional do GELIC na Praia, Cabo Ver-
de, – Processo 2014/12433-1 – em que este volume, em particular, se beneficia. Gabriel
Araújo e Marcia Oliveira, como organizadores e autores de capítulos do livro, agradecem
ao CNPq pelo apoio por meio de Bolsa de Produtividade de Pesquisa.
o português na áfrica atlântica

de recursos humanos locais treinados na tarefa de descrever e analisar o com-

portamento dos vernáculos nesses países resultou em uma lacuna nessa área
de estudos. Os ventos democráticos dos anos noventa reabriram os países da
África lusófona aos pesquisadores que encontraram vívidas discussões sobre a
padronização, valorização e ensino das línguas nacionais, mas pouca discussão
havia sobre as peculiaridades e idiossincrasias das variantes vernáculas do por-
tuguês. Por outro lado, o discurso oficial transafricano pró-lusofonia defendia
que se falava localmente o português europeu, quando se falava o português.
Além disso, o papel da escola e da mídia como difusoras da língua oficial não
se mostrou aberto às novas realidades. A educação das elites políticas e econô-
micas de Cabo Verde, Guiné Bissau, Angola e São Tomé e Príncipe, mesmo
após a independência, era mormente feita em Lisboa e Coimbra. A educação
lusófila das elites replicava o discurso da presença da variante europeia na Áfri-
ca como ponto pacífico. Contudo, os pesquisadores começaram a observar
o comportamento das variantes vernáculas e a constatar que a mudança, em
relação ao português europeu, era impossível de ser ignorada. Assim, o obje-
tivo deste livro é apresentar algumas das evidências que sugerem a especiação
do português de Cabo Verde, Guiné Bissau, Angola e São Tomé e Príncipe,
influenciados não somente pelo contato linguístico com as línguas nacionais
locais mas também pelo comportamento de seus falantes em direção ao novo.
Na obra os dois primeiros capítulos abordam o português em Angola,
seguidos por três estudos sobre Cabo Verde, dois sobre Guiné Bissau e dois
sobre São Tomé e Príncipe, fechando com um posfácio. A seguir, um breve
panorama de cada capítulo.
No primeiro capítulo, Variedades de português angolano e línguas bantas
em contato: Paulo Jeferson Pilar Araujo, Margarida Petter e José Albino José
trazem, em primeiro plano, um dos aspectos centrais desse livro: não é possí-
vel pensar as variedades vernaculares do português na África Atlântica igno-
rando os contatos linguísticos que as moldaram ao longo do tempo. No caso
de Angola, o texto investiga, na literatura e em dados colhidos no interior
angolano, o contato com as línguas bantu que levou a constituições morfos-
sintáticas peculiares, algumas das quais encontradas também no Brasil, o que

8
 apresentação

não se trata de uma mera coincidência, dadas as contribuições bantu em solo

brasileiro. Porém, a lacuna nos estudos do contato português-grupo linguís-
tico bantu só será preenchida quando aumentarmos o nosso conhecimento
sobre as línguas do grupo bantu, do passado e do presente, que fizeram e
fazem parte do contato. Os lugares-comuns da linguística bantu, argumen-
tam os autores, não são suficientes para desnudar os entrecruzamentos e as
influências diáfanas. Assim, para o grupo de autores, é o estudo empírico
das variedades em contato que permitirá, a partir de um modelo teórico co-
eso, seu entendimento. Os autores adotam, para tanto, o modelo teórico de
Myers-Scotton, com o objetivo de buscar explicações para as possibilidades
de transferência de traços linguísticos no contato entre línguas.
O segundo capítulo, Aspectos histórico-culturais e sociolinguísticos do Libolo:
aproximações com o Brasil, de Carlos Filipe G. Figueiredo, se dedica a mostrar
que, ao longo dos séculos XVI ao XIX, a região angolana do Libolo foi local
de captura de seres humanos, posteriormente escravizados e enviados ao Bra-
sil, muitas vezes via São Tomé e Príncipe. Porém, ao mesmo tempo em que
promoviam missões de captura de escravos (a partir de Luanda), os coloniza-
dores portugueses só viriam a ocupar a região no século XX. Para entender-
mos essas complexidades, Figueiredo apresenta aspectos geográficos e sócio-
-históricos da região do Libolo, recorrendo à farta documentação histórica
colonial, que revela um Libolo como ponto estratégico e, por isso, centro de
disputas violentas. Após a caracterização física e histórica da região, Figuei-
redo traz algumas particularidades sociolinguísticas do Libolo, com destaque
para as línguas bantu faladas no local e para os diversos graus de multilinguis-
mo. Por fim, o autor correlaciona algumas características morfossintáticas e
lexicais do português do Libolo com o português vernacular brasileiro.
Em Estudos sobre o português falado em Cabo Verde: o “estado da arte”, capí-
tulo três de Francisco João Lopes e Márcia Santos Duarte de Oliveira, apresenta-se
a situação sócio-histórica do arquipélago, seguida por um quadro da situação
sociolinguística. Cabo Verde é o país da África Atlântica lusófona que atesta,
segundo os autores, uma situação de diglossia: duas línguas, o português
local e o caboverdiano, essa, aparentemente, ocupando ambientes informais

9
o português na áfrica atlântica

e aquela, ambientes formais – embora se subentenda, a partir dos autores,

que ambientes formais/informais de fala em Cabo Verde não sejam tão sim-
ples de serem detectados. Em seguida, Lopes & Oliveira apresentam seções
acerca dos estudos do português falado em Cabo Verde, apontando aspectos
que têm sido investigados. De fato, depois de décadas do impacto de estudos
escolares centrados na gramática tradicional e no ensino da variante lusita-
na, é necessário um esforço de convencimento dos atores locais quanto às
características únicas do português de Cabo Verde. Esse fato, contudo, não
se limita à República de Cabo Verde, mas se estende a toda África lusófona,
como demonstra este volume.
Ainda sobre o português de Cabo Verde, o quarto texto Aquisição de
Português L2 em Cabo Verde: alguns aspectos morfossintáticos do contato, de Nélia
Alexandre, mostra que a compreensão dos fenômenos da língua portuguesa
no arquipélago passa pelo entendimento de que o português é aprendido
como segunda língua e, por isso, a influência do caboverdiano, língua ma-
terna da maioria da população, é profunda e visível em vários aspectos da
gramática. Ao mesmo tempo, há no português vernacular propriedades não
encontradas nem no português europeu, nem no crioulo de Cabo Verde.
Alexandre defende que a situação linguística não é de diglossia, posto que o
português seria “de fato” uma língua segunda e não uma língua confinada ao
mundo formal. Nesse sentido, o caboverdiano ocupa todos os contextos so-
ciolinguísticos, ao passo que o português é mormente uma língua do mundo
da escola, posto que nela se dá seu aprendizado. Com farta exemplificação
das influências da língua crioula no português vernacular, Alexandre conclui
que existem evidências para se sustentar que há uma tendência à especiação
da variante caboverdiana do português e isso deve ser considerado nas pes-
quisas futuras.
No quinto capítulo, Caboverdiano e Português: cotejando estruturas focali-
zadas de Nélia Alexandre e Márcia Oliveira, a partir da sugestão sobre a ne-
cessidade de estudos empíricos sobre o português vernacular de Cabo Verde,
as autoras buscam demonstrar que a estrutura de foco difere das estratégias
empregadas pelo português brasileiro ‘padrão’ e pelo português europeu.

10
 apresentação

Assim, a diversidade dessas estratégias poderia ser encontrada nas proprieda-

des gerais das línguas naturais, mas, nesse caso, com ressonância no contato
linguístico típico da situação do arquipélago. As autoras então descrevem
e analisam as estratégias de foco em caboverdiano e as comparam com a do
português vernacular caboverdiano. Novamente, uma abordagem unificada
das propriedades vernaculares do português se mostra um meio abrangente
para se alcançar um melhor entendimento das variedades portuguesas no
Atlântico.
Vinícius Gonçalves dos Santos e Flaviane R. Fernandes Svartman em
Contribuições para o estudo da prosódia do português de Guiné-Bissau: a entoação
do contorno neutro, capítulo seis, demonstram que a Guiné Bissau é um dos
países onde o português encara os maiores desafios para se difundir como
uma língua de unidade. De um lado, a fragmentação linguística, econômica
e política do país, o que acarreta uma presença mais tímida da escolarização
em português, associada a um processo de urbanização ainda em curso e, de
outro lado, a força do kriyol, a língua crioula de base portuguesa da Guiné
Bissau, a língua veicular do país e língua materna de um número cada vez
maior de jovens nascidos nas grandes cidades, confinaram o português aos
bolsões urbanizados da capital e de algumas poucas vilas do interior sen-
do, por fim, utilizado somente nos ambientes onde há uma efetiva presença
do estado ou onde há o desejo de torná-lo presente e nas manifestações da
mídia estatal ou estrangeira de expressão portuguesa. Portanto, nesse qua-
dro, o português é majoritariamente uma língua oficial do Estado (onde
esse se faz efetivamente presente), da grande mídia e do mundo da escola e,
como mostram Santos & Svartman, muitas das suas características linguís-
ticas estão condicionadas pelo quadro multilinguístico do país. Os autores
(op cit) centram o trabalho na descrição e análise dos aspectos prosódicos e
entoacionais das sentenças declarativas neutras. Esses estudos se dão dentro
de um quadro de comparação com o português europeu e brasileiro, posto
que estudos similares estão disponíveis. A investigação conclui que há carac-
terísticas entoacionais gerais no português guineense que são semelhantes
às encontradas nas demais variedades, porém a possibilidade de associação

11
o português na áfrica atlântica

de acentos frasais a fronteiras de sintagmas fonológicos não se relaciona ao

foco como na variedade brasileira, nem à posição do sintagma fonológico
na sentença como na referida variedade europeia de português. Portanto, o
português guineense apresenta também propriedades não encontradas nas
demais variedades de português. Os resultados alcançados, concluem os au-
tores, particularizam prosodicamente a variante guineense e podem refletir
transferências das línguas maternas (o crioulo de Guiné-Bissau e as línguas
africanas) no vernáculo português.
No seu Estudo Inicial das Perguntas-Q no Português de Guiné-Bissau, capítu-
lo sete, Eduardo Ferreira dos Santos e Raquel Azevedo da Silva mostram que
as variedades vernaculares do português da África possuem características
que as aproximam do português do Brasil, uma variedade cujo desenvolvi-
mento se deu em situações de contato linguístico, mas também mantêm ca-
racterísticas encontradas no português europeu. Em seu texto, Santos & Sil-
va, investigando a tipologia de construção de perguntas-Q, ou seja, perguntas
interrogativas que empregam pronomes-Q (qual, quem, quando, quanto, o
que, como, onde etc.) revelam, entre outros pontos importantes, que a va-
riedade guineense do português estudado emprega estratégias, no que diz
respeito às sentenças com pronomes-Q deslocados, agramaticais no portu-
guês europeu e consideradas, até então, exclusivas do português do Brasil,
além de mostrar também características compartilhadas com outras variantes
africanas, como no caso das clivadas interrogativas sem cópula. Portanto,
como mostram os dois ensaios sobre a Guiné Bissau, as investigações sobre
o português vernacular poderão ampliar enormemente os estudos sobre o
português em contato e revelar também que a diversidade se manifesta em
predicados endêmicos em todos os ambientes.
Alfredo Christofoletti e Gabriel Antunes de Araujo, no texto oito:
Ditongos no português vernacular de São Tomé e Príncipe, abordam uma área
ainda pouco estudada: a fonologia das variedades portuguesas na África. Os
autores, após apresentarem a situação sociolinguística em São Tomé e Prín-
cipe, onde as variedades locais do português convivem com quatro línguas
crioulas, sendo três autóctones, o santome, o lung’ie e o angolar, e uma

12
 apresentação

exógena, o caboverdiano, trazem o quadro vocálico do português urbano

vernacular de São Tomé e uma análise dos ditongos orais. Por si só, o qua-
dro vocálico já deveria chamar a atenção, uma vez que há sete vogais e não
oito como no português europeu. Ao mesmo tempo, na análise fonológica e
sociolinguística dos ditongos do português da capital são-tomense notam-se
muitas similaridades com o mesmo fenômeno no português do Brasil, po-
rém, há pelo menos uma diferença que força uma revisão na literatura sobre
os ditongos no português: palavras que seriam consideradas possuidoras de
ditongos verdadeiros e, portanto, não passíveis de monotongação, como a
palavra ‘direito’, o são no português de São Tomé, sendo realizada como
‘dirêto’. Ademais, a monotongação do [eI], diante de /t/, além de possível,
está em variação estável na comunidade são-tomense, fato não documentado
no português brasileiro.
Ainda no Golfo da Guiné, o capítulo nove, O Português dos Tongas de
São Tomé, de Alan Baxter, traz um apanhado de vinte e cinco anos de pesqui-
sa com o português dos Tongas, os descendentes de africanos continentais
contratados durante o período colonial português. Após uma contextuali-
zação histórica da comunidade, Baxter mostra a dinâmica populacional e
linguística nas propriedades rurais. Graças aos controles administrativos das
fazendas, os dados sobre a origem, o sexo e as línguas dos trabalhadores con-
tratados foram preservados, o que nos permite uma observação sobre vários
aspectos sociolinguísticos do contato. A língua resultante dos Tongas teria
sido gerada a partir das estruturações que eventualmente constituíam cara-
terísticas da comunidade linguística e seriam o resultado do uso da segunda
língua (no caso o português) pelo grupo, nivelando as diferenças entre as
interlínguas individuais em um ambiente onde os indivíduos tinham pouco
acesso à língua dos administradores das fazendas. Em seguida, Baxter elenca
uma série de características do português dos Tongas, mas não sem abordar
uma questão crucial no contato: por que temos um português dos Tongas e
não uma língua dos Tongas? Ou seja, quais as forças que mantêm o portu-
guês dos Tongas uma variante do português, apesar da pobreza do input, e

13
o português na áfrica atlântica

quais as forças que impediram a ruptura tipológica que caracteriza as línguas

crioulas de base portuguesa?
Por fim, Charlotte Galves, em seu Posfácio no texto que encerra a obra,
liga os nove textos deste volume às questões fundamentais do entendimento
das variedades transplantadas do português no século XX. De um lado, o
debate longevo entre a (suposta) influência (africana, indígena ou endógena)
dos fatores que promoveram as diferenças do português brasileiro (certamen-
te a língua mais estudada da família da língua portuguesa) em relação ao
português de Portugal e, de outro, a ação dos falantes e de suas línguas sobre
a língua a ser aprendida como segunda língua e, daí, como primeira para
os novos-falantes e, por fim, o que há de universal, sendo aproveitado via o
que há de areal, nesses mundos de contatos multilíngues e seus múltiplos
autores.
O conhecimento sobre as variedades portuguesas nos países lusófonos
da África é um tema ainda em desenvolvimento, mas será central na inves-
tigação das características da língua portuguesa no século XXI. Este livro,
pretende, assim, contribuir com esse tema e estimular novas pesquisas.
Os Organizadores

14
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 JONATHAN TRIMBLERIGG
(aged 7) with his Mother & Sister Davidina
Mr. 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. What happened
then nobody knows, or nobody chooses to tell. But between the
ages of seven and fifteen, while sustained by the call, Samuel
Samuel never saw a vacant seat, or an uncrowded aisle, or had
sitting under him a congregation unrent by sobs in the hundreds of
chapels to which the spirit bore him.
When Mr. Trimblerigg heard him, Samuel Samuel at the age of ten
was still in the zenith of his powers; and it has been credibly
reported that, in the mining villages which he passed through,
publicans went bankrupt and committed suicide because of him, and
pit-ponies, their ears robbed of the familiar expletives to which they
had been trained, no longer obeyed orders; and that alongside of
these manifestations of grace, the illegitimate birth-rates went up
and struck a record; till, six months later, things settled back and
became the same; birth-rates went down, pit-ponies obeyed a
restored vocabulary, and ruined publicans were vindicated in the
prosperity of their successors.
But these things only happened after; and when Mr. Trimblerigg
heard the cry of the Infant Samuel Samuel, he discerned a kindred
spirit, and saw a way opening before his feet, under a light which
thereafter continued to shine. And so at the age of twelve the
designs which Mr. Trimblerigg’s elders had on him, and the designs
which he had on himself, coalesced and became one; and even
Davidina, borne down by the sense of the majority, had to accept
the fact that her brother Jonathan had received a call.
Thus early did the conversion of souls enter into the life and
calculations of Mr. Trimblerigg. A striking justification of his chosen
calling followed immediately, when, without in the least intending it,
he converted an almost lost soul in a single day—the soul of an
Uncle, James Hubback by name, the only uncle upon his mother’s
side left over from a large family—who while still clinging to the
outward respectability of a Free Church minister, had taken secretly
to drink.
Mr. 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. These aspects of its beneficence he had
gathered first in the back kitchen of his own home, and secondly in
the natural history department of the County Museum, to which as a
Sunday-school treat he had been taken. Returning therefrom, he had
been bitten for a short while with a desire to catch, kill, and preserve
frogs, bats, beetles, snakes, and other low forms of existence, and
make a museum of his own—his originality at that time being mainly
imitative. To this end he clamoured to his mother to release his
saved pennies which she held in safe-keeping for him, in order that
he might buy spirit for collecting purposes; and so pestered her that
at last she promised that if for a beginning he could find an adder,
he should have a bottle of spirit to keep it in.
Close upon that his Uncle James arrived for a stay made sadly
indefinite by the low water in which he found himself. He still wore
his clerical garb but was without cure of souls: Bethel and he had
become separated, and his family in consequence was not pleased
with him. Nevertheless as a foretaste of reformation he wore a blue
ribbon, and was prevented thereby from letting himself be seen on
licensed premises; while a totally abstaining household, and a village
with only one inn which had been warned not to serve him, and no
shop that sold liquor, seemed to provide a safe environment for
convalescence.
It is at this point that Mr. Trimblerigg steps in. One day, taking down
a book from the shelf in the little study, he discovered behind it a
small square bottle of spirits: he did not have to taste or smell it—
the label ‘old brandy’ was enough; and supposing in his innocence
the word ‘old’ to indicate that it had passed its best use, at once his
volatile mind was seized with the notion that here was a mother’s
surprise waiting for him, and that he had only to provide the adder
for the bottle and its contents to become his. And so with that
calculating larkishness which made him do audacious things that
when done had to be swallowed, he determined to give his mother a
surprise in return.
Going off in search of his adder and failing to get it himself, he gave
another boy a penny for finding him a dead one. An hour later the
adder was inside the brandy bottle behind the books; and an hour
after that his Uncle James had achieved complete and lifelong
conversion to total abstinence.
The dénouement presented itself to Mr. Trimblerigg at first with a
shock of disappointment in the form of smashed glass, and his dead
adder lying in a spent pool of brandy on the study floor; and only
gradually did it dawn upon him after a cautious survey of the
domestic situation that this was not as he had at first feared his
mother’s angry rejection of the surprise he had prepared for her: on
the contrary she was pleased with him. His uncle, he learned, was
upstairs lying down, without appetite either for tea or supper. Mr.
Trimblerigg heard him moaning in the night, and he came down to
breakfast the next day a changed character. Within a year he had
secured reinstatement in the ministry, and was become a shining
light on the temperance platform, telling with great fervour
anecdotes which give hope. There was, however, one story of a
drunkard’s reformation which he never told: perhaps because, on
after-reflection, though he had accepted their testimony against him,
he could not really believe his eyes, perhaps because there are
certain experiences which remain too deep and sacred and
mysterious ever to be told.
But to Mr. Trimblerigg the glory of what he had done was in a while
made plain. More than ever it showed him destined for the ministry:
it also gave colour to his future ministrations, opening his mind in
the direction of a certain school of thought in which presently he
became an adept. ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is taken by tricks,’
became the subconscious foundation of his belief; and when he
entered the pulpit at the age of twenty-one, he was by calculative
instinct that curious combination of the tipster, the thimblerigger,
and the prophet, the man of vision and the man of lies, which drew
to itself the adoration of one half and the detestation of the other
half of the Free United Evangelical Connection, eventually dividing
that great body into two unequal portions, and driving its soul into a
limbo of spiritual frustration and ineffectiveness till it found itself
again under new names.
 CHAPTER TWO
The Early Worm
THOUGH Mr. Trimblerigg had not at the time taken the advice of his
Uncle Jonah in very good part, he did eventually accept a large part
of it—good or otherwise—in the shaping of his career. His wish to
become a great functionary of State gradually faded away, giving
place to others. But his intention to be President of the Free Church
Conference remained and grew strong. And to that end—spirituality
being required—he accepted faithfully Uncle Jonah’s last bit of
advice, and seeking a master behind whose back he could hide and
be clever in ways that didn’t show—have responsibility taken for his
mistakes, and get adequate recognition for the many things which
he did right—seeking for such a master, he found him to his own
satisfaction in the oldest of old ways; and never from that day on did
the suspicion enter his head, that the master whom he chose under
so devout an alias was himself.
If, in the process, he received a call, so did I; and it was at this
stage of his career that I began to watch him with real interest. His
calls became frequent; and though there was not always an
apparent answer there was always an attentive ear.
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. But that was not because I became able to anticipate
his reactions to any given circumstance or tight hole in which he
might find himself: but merely that experience of him caused me to
give up all rules based on the law of averages: he was a law by
himself. What at first baffled me was the passionate sincerity with
which he was always able to deceive himself—doing it mainly, I
admit, by invoking my assistance: that is to say, by prayer.
To see him fall upon his knees and start busily lighting his own little
lamp for guidance through the perils immediately surrounding him—
while firmly convinced all the time that the lamp was not his lighting
but mine—gave me what I can only describe as an extraordinary
sense of helplessness. The passionate fervour of his prayer to
whatever end he desired, put him more utterly beyond reach of
instruction than a conscious plunge into sin. Against that there might
have been a natural reaction; but against the spiritual avidity with
which he set to work saving his own skin day by day, no reaction
was possible. The day-spring from on high visited him with a light-
heeled nimbleness which cleared not only all obstacles of a material
kind but all qualms of conscience as well. In the holy of holies of his
inmost being self-interest sat rapturously enshrined; there lay its ark
of the covenant, and over it the twin cherubim of faith and hope
stretched their protecting wings. Mr. Trimblerigg might bow himself
in single spirit when first his prayer began; but always, before it
ended, his spirits had got the better of him, and he would rise from
his knees as beautifully unrepentant as a puppy that has dodged a
whipping, his face radiant with happiness, having found an answer
to his prayer awaiting him in the direction to which from the first it
had been set, much as your Arctic explorer finds the North Pole by a
faithful following of his nose after having first pointed it to the north.
I date my completed understanding of Mr. Trimblerigg, and of the
use he had made of me, to the day when—faced with an exposure
which would have gone far to reduce his ministerial career to a
nullity—he put up a prayer which (had I been a mere mortal) would
have made me jump out of my skin. I will not skin him retributively
by quoting him in full, but the gist of it all was that, much to his
perplexity he found himself suffering from a strange temptation, out
of keeping with his whole character, and threatening destruction to
that life of energetic usefulness in the service of others which he
was striving to lead. And so he prayed to be kept (‘kept’ was the
very word)—‘humble, and honest, and honourable.’ It was no change
that he desired; but only a continuance in that narrow and straight
path of acquired virtue down which (since the truth must be told) he
had hitherto danced his way more like a cat on hot bricks, than the
happily-banded pilgrim he believed himself to be. ‘Kept’ was the
word; and as I heard him I thought of it in all its meanings—and
wondered which. I thought of how dead game ‘keeps’ up to a point,
and is better in flavour for the keeping; but how, after that point is
reached, the keeping defeats itself, and the game is game no longer,
but mere offal. Was it in that sense that he wished to be ‘kept’? For
certainly I had found him good game, quick in the uptake, and brisk
on the wing.
It is difficult in this record to remain consecutive. Those who would
follow with accuracy the career of Mr. Trimblerigg, must jump to and
fro with the original—one of whom it has to be said that though he
denied himself many times (even in the face of the clearest
evidence) he denied himself nothing that held out any prospect of
keeping his fortunes on the move; and the stitch in time with which
he so often and so nimbly saved himself ran in no straight line of
machine-made regularity, but rather in a series of diversions this way
and that, stepping sideways and back preparatory to the next
forward leap; and in this feather-stitching along life’s road he
covered more ground, and far more ornamentally, than do those
who go merely upon their convictions, holding to one opinion and
doing only one thing at a time.
Yet it would be wrong to say that he was ever false to his
convictions, for these he seldom knew. Enough that so long as they
lasted his intuitions were sacred to him; and as it is the very essence
of intuitions that at any moment they may change, his
changeableness had about it a sort of truth, of consistency, to which
slower minds cannot attain.
But why call it ‘intuition’; why not ‘vision’? Well, if a camera of
powerful lens and stocked with highly sensitive films may be said to
have vision, vision he had in abundance. Adjusting his focus to the
chosen point of view, he clicked the switch of his receptivity, snapt a
picture, wound it off upon its wheel, and was ready for another. In
the space of a few minutes he had as many pictures stored as he
had a mind for. ‘Vision’? You may grant it him, if you will, so long as
you remember that that was the process. I would rather be inclined
to call it ‘optics’; and I see his career now rather as a series of
optical delusions, through every one of which he remained quite
convinced that he was right, and that the truth had come to him by
way of revelation. An early example will serve.
The small hill-side village in which Mr. Trimblerigg first learned to
escape the limitations of ordinary life was a place where things
seldom happened; and there were times in his early upbringing
when he found himself at a loose end, a rose wasting its sweetness
to the desert air; there was nothing doing in the neighbourhood on
which he could decisively set his mark. This was to live in vain; and
often he searched through his small world of ideas to find
inspiration. Should he run away from home, and be found wandering
with his memory a blank? Should he be kidnapped by gipsies and
escape in nothing but his shirt? Should a sheep fall into the stone
quarry so that he might rescue it, or a lamb get lost in the snow
during the lambing-season, that he might go out, and find, and
return bearing it in his bosom? Or should he go forth and become
famous as a boy-missionary, preaching to the heathen in an
unknown tongue? These were all possibilities, only the last
suggested any difficulty.
Whenever in doubt, adopting the method of old Uncle Trimblerigg,
he turned to the Scriptures: he did not search them, for that would
have been self-willed and presumptuous; he merely opened them,
putting a blind finger to the spot where divine guidance awaited him.
It was in this way that Uncle Trimblerigg had become rich; forty
years ago he had invested his savings in house property all through
having set thumb to the text, ‘I have builded an house to Thy name.’
And without searching the Scriptures further he had built twenty of
them. At a later date, slate-quarrying having started in the district,
their value was doubled.
So one day, in a like faith, our own Mr. Trimblerigg committed
himself to the same experiment. His first point on opening drew a
startling reply, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan, for thou savourest not
the things which be of God, but the things which be of men.’ Very
right and proper, of course: Satan thus safely disposed of, he tried
again. ‘Remember Lot’s wife,’ failed for the moment to convey any
meaning; he knew that it could not refer to him: it seemed rather to
indicate that his Bible had not yet given him its thorough attention.
To warm it to its task he lifted it as a heave-offering, administered to
it the oath, as he had seen done in a police court, kissed it, and set
it down again. This time it answered sharply, but still not to the
point: ‘Ye generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from
the wrath to come?’ Evidently the Lord was trying him. He turned
from the New Testament to the old: perhaps it was only the old he
should have consulted, for he had an idea that this was an Old
Testament method. That would account for the delay.
The Old Testament made a better response to his appeal. ‘The zeal
of Thy House hath eaten me up,’ suggested something at any rate,
but did not make the way quite clear; ‘Down with it, down with it,
even unto the ground!’ was practical in its bearing upon the Lord’s
House, but puzzling; ‘Behold how great a matter a little fire kindleth’
gave him the light he sought.
For at that time Bethesda, the chapel of the Free Evangelicals, had
fallen lamentably into disrepair, and since Uncle Trimblerigg, the only
man of substance in the district, had retired from the innovation of
hymn-singing to a stricter Bethel of his own, there seemed little
chance of raising the necessary funds for demolition and restoration.
And so decay went on, while still, from old habit, the chapel
continued to be insured.
Now whether we call it ‘vision’ or ‘optical illusion,’ there can be no
doubt that, thus aided by Scripture, Mr. Trimblerigg visualized rapidly
and clearly the means to an end which so many desired. And so it
came about one Saturday night, while frost held the village water-
supply firmly in its grip, and the road running up from the valley
slipped with ice, that Bethesda, through a supposed leakage in her
heating apparatus, caught fire; and only the fact that Mr. Trimblerigg
fetched the fire-engine from the town four miles away, saved it from
utter destruction. He had been sent into the town by his mother to
do errands, when at the foot of the hill he suddenly remembered
Lot’s wife, and looking back saw the chapel windows gustily ablaze,
and interpreting the peradventure aright had sped on with the news.
The miraculous arrival of the fire-engine with him on it, only half an
hour after the villagers’ discovery of an already well-established
insurance claim in swift operation, had caused an immense sensation
and some inquiry.
But Mr. Trimblerigg had a case on which no suspicion could rest; that
the fire was fought expeditiously, though under difficulties, was
largely owing to him, and the subsequent inquiries of the insurance
office agent who came to inspect the damage were only of a formal
kind. Every effort had been made, and a half-saved chapel was the
result; but its previous dilapidation made it easier to rebuild than to
restore, and when a new Bethesda rose from the ruins of the old,
the insurance company paid for it.
It was two days after the happy catastrophe, that Davidina remarked
(when, to be sure, he was taking them to light the lamp in another
room), ‘I wish you wouldn’t always go taking away the matches!’
‘I’m bringing them back,’ said Jonathan correctively.
‘You didn’t the last time,’ Davidina retorted. And at the word and the
tone of her voice, Jonathan trepidated and fled.
Was it ‘vision’ that made him do so, or only optical illusion on the
mental plane? For as far as I have been able to probe into Davidina’s
mind, which is not always clear to me, she knew nothing. It was
merely her way: the hunting instinct was strong in her, and he her
spiritual quarry: never in all their born days together was she to let
him go.
Of course Mr. Trimblerigg did not go on doing things like that. It was
an act of crude callow youth, done at a time when the romantic
instinct takes unbalanced forms; yet in a way it was representative
of him, and helped me to a larger insight into his character and
motives. For here was Mr. Trimblerigg, thus early, genuinely anxious
to have guidance from above for the exploitation of his
superabundant energies; and when, at first showing, the guidance
seemed rather to head him off from being energetic at all, he
persisted till his faith in himself found ratification, and thereafter
went his way with the assurance that what he decided to do must
almost necessarily be right.
Mr. Trimblerigg did not in after days actually set fire to anything in
order that he might come running to the rescue when rescue was
too late; but he did inflame many a situation seven times more than
it was wont to be inflamed, setting people by the ears, and causing
many an uprooting in places where no replanting could avail. And
when he had got matters thus thoroughly involved, he would apply
thereto his marvellous powers of accommodation and persuasion,
and, if some sort of peace and order did thereafter emerge, regard
himself quite genuinely as the deliverer.
At a later date his zeal for the Lord’s House broke up the Free United
Evangelicals into separate groups of an unimportant size, which
when they seemed about to disappear wholly from view, he reunited
again; and having for the moment redoubled what was left,
regarded his work as good, though in the religious world the Free
Evangelicals had forfeited thenceforth their old priority of place, a
circumstance from which (when convinced of its permanence) he
made his personal escape by embracing second Adventism. And
though doubtless he carried his Free Evangelism with him into the
field of modern prophecy, the Free Evangelicals within their own four
walls knew him no more. Very effectively he had burnt them out,
and in their case no insurance policy provided for the rebuilding: in
that seat of the mighty, probed by the beams of a new day, only the
elderly grey ashes remained of men whose word once gave light.
 CHAPTER THREE
Trial and Error
AT a very early stage in his career, before his theological training had
overtly begun, the moral consciousness of Mr. Trimblerigg was far
more accurately summed up in the words, ‘Thou, Davidina, seest
me,’ than in the more generally accepted text which shone with
symbolic rays from an illuminated scroll hung over his bed. That text
with its angel faces and gold edgings did not pierce the joints of his
harness, to the discovery of vulnerable spots, with the same sharp
efficiency as did the dark watchful eye of Davidina.
As he entered into his ’teens with the instinct for spiritual adventure
growing strong, he had an uncomfortable sense of transparency
where Davidina was concerned—or rather where she was not
concerned but chose to intrude—which made him cease to feel a
self-contained person. If there was anyone in the world who knew
him—not as he wished to be known, but as in his more disconcerted
moments he sometimes suspected himself to be—it was Davidina.
Under the fixture of her eye he lost confidence; its calm quizzical
gaze tripped his thoughts, and checked the flow of his words:
initiative and invention went out of him.
The result was truly grievous, for though he could do without self-
respect for quite long intervals, self-complacency was the necessary
basis for every action. Davidina deprived him of that.
Her power was horrible; she could do it in a momentary look, in a
single word; it seemed to be her mission in life, whenever he
whitewashed the window of his soul for better privacy, to scratch a
hole and look through.
When, for instance, he first experimented in kissing outside the
routine of family life, Davidina seemed by instinct to know of it.
Secretively, in the presence of their elders, she held him with her
eye, pursed her lips, and made the kissing sound; then, before he
could compose a countenance suitable to meet the charge, her
glance shot off and left him. For Davidina was a sleek adept in giving
that flick of the eye which does not wait for the repartee; though on
other occasions, when her eye definitely challenged him, there was
no bearing it down; it stabbed, it stuck, it went in, and came at his
back.
It was in these wordless encounters that she beat him worst; till Mr.
Trimblerigg, conscious of his inferiority, went and practised at the
glass a gesture which he hoped thereby to make more effective—a
lifting of the nose, a slight closing of the eyelids, a polished putting-
off of the hands, deprecatory but bland; and a smile to show that he
was not hurt. But the first time he used it upon her was also the
last.
‘Did you practise that in the glass?’ said Davidina; and the gesture
died the death.
Truly at that time of her life he wanted her to die, and slightly
damped her shoes on the inside after they had been cleaned, that
they might help her to do so. But it was no good; without saying
anything, she damped his also, rather more emphatically, so that
there could be no mistake; whereas his damping was so delicately
done that she ought not to have found it out.
The most afflictive thing about these encounters was his constant
failure to score a victory; only once, in the affair of the pocket-
money already narrated, had he succeeded in holding his own.
Perhaps it was all for the good of his soul; for in matters of finance
his sense of probity remained in after years somewhat defective;
victory over Davidina in that respect had apparently done him no
good. But in other directions she continued to do her best to save
his soul; and though he was now committed to the ministry, and was
himself to become a soul-saving apparatus, he did not like her way
of doing it; temperamentally (and was there ever a character more
largely composed of temperament?) he would much rather have
gone his own way and been damned, than saved by Davidina on the
lines she chose. She stung him like a gad-fly in his weakest spots, till
the unerring accuracy of her aim filled him with a superstitious
dread; and though never once uttered in words, ‘Thou, Davidina,
seest me,’ was the motive force which thus early drove him so
deeply and deviously into subterfuge that it became an infection of
his blood. And though against her it availed little, in other directions,
pricked to it by her incessant skill, he had a quite phenomenal
success, and was—up to a point—the nimblest being that ever
skipped from cover to open and from open to cover, till, in the
development of speed, he ceased to distinguish which was which;
and what he told would tell with the most complete conviction that,
if it told to his advantage, it must be truth; and then, on occasion,
would avail himself of the truth to such dazzling effect that, lost in
the blaze of his rectitude, he forgot those other occasions when he
had been truer to himself.
Of Davidina’s inspired pin-pricks here is an example, notable for the
early date of its delivery, when they were at the respective ages of
twelve and eleven. Brother and sister had fallen out in guessing at
an event as to which with probability all the other way, Davidina
proved to be right. Not believing this to be a guess, ‘You knew!’ he
cried indignantly.
‘I didn’t,’ she replied smoothly, ‘I only knew better.’
This was superfluous: it enabled Mr. Trimblerigg to get in with a
retort. ‘Even very conceited people,’ he said, ‘do sometimes manage
to guess right.’
Davidina recovered her ground. ‘I’m not as conceited as you,’ she
replied, ‘I never think myself good.’ It was the sticking-out of her
tongue, and adding ‘so there’! which gave the barb to those words.
At the earliest opportunity Mr. Trimblerigg retired to consider them.
It was evident that Davidina had penetrated another of his secrets;
she had discovered that he thought himself good. Many years after,
when asked by an American reporter what it felt like to be the
greatest man in the world, he replied that it made him feel shy, and
then was ready to bite his tongue out for having so aimed at
modesty and missed. He saw twenty reporters writing down the
words, ‘It makes me feel shy’; and within twelve hours it was all
over the world—a mistake which he couldn’t explain away. That was
to be one of the worst moments of his life; and this was another,
that Davidina should have unearthed so hidden and central a truth.
He was deeply annoyed, partly with her for having discovered it,
much more with himself for having let it appear.
Yet his cogitations brought him in the end to a conclusion which had
in it a measure of comfort. ‘After all,’ he said to himself, ‘I am good
sometimes.’
It was that ‘sometimes,’ and the consciousness of it, that in the
future was to work havoc with his soul. He did know desperately well
that he was good sometimes; and the fervour of it used to spread so
far beyond the appointed limit that he ceased to know where his
goodness began, and where it left off. As from an oasis in the
wilderness exhales fragrance from the blossom of the rose, regaling
the dusty nostrils of sand-bound travellers, as into its airy horizon
ascends mirage from waters, and palm-trees, and temples, that are
real somewhere—but not in the place where they so phenomenally
display themselves—so from parts of him excellent, into other parts
less excellent, went the sense that he was ‘somehow good’; and he
never perceived, in spite of the very genuine interest he took in
himself that what made him more interesting than anyone else was
the extraordinary division of his character into two parts, a good and
a bad, so dexterously allied that they functioned together as one,
endowing him with that curious gift of sincerity to each mood while
it lasted, which kept him ever true to himself and the main chance,
even as the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope always shape to patterns,
however varied, having the same fixed centre—a haphazard
orderliness which no amount of shaking can destroy.
As has been hinted already, a time unavoidable for youth came in
Mr. Trimblerigg’s life when kisses began to have an attraction for
him: in his case it came rather early, and the attraction grew strong.
But so also grew his fear of them—or perhaps it would be more true
to say his fear lest Davidina should get wind of them. Davidina had
an unlovable scorn for kisses, which she paraded to the world; she
kissed nobody except her parents, and them only from a sense of
duty, and became known, in a country-side where kisses were easily
come by, as the girl from whom nobody could get a kiss.
Few tried; the first who did so had been made a warning for others.
It is likely enough—since moral emblems have their contrary effect—
that the impregnable barrier set up by Davidina was responsible for
the thing becoming so much a vogue in other quarters; and Lizzie
Seebohm, the prettiest small wench of the village, in pure derision of
Davidina’s aloofness, and under her very eyes, made open sale of
her kisses at a price which, starting from chocolates, rose to a penny
and thence to twopence.
For this amiable weakness she got from Davidina the nickname of
‘Tuppenny,’ and in view of the feud which thence arose, Mr.
Trimblerigg was instinctively advised of danger to his peace of mind
if he put himself on Tuppenny’s list. And so it came about that,
whatever his natural inclinations in the matter, he saved his pocket-
money and did not apply for her favours.
In this Lizzie Seebohm saw the influence of Davidina; for which
reason and sheer spitefulness, Mr. Trimblerigg became her quarry.
So one day a communication reached him, artfully told by the small
maiden commissioned thereto as a breach of confidence. She had
heard Lizzie say that Jonathan might have a kiss of her not merely
for nothing; she would give twopence to get it. A sense that he was
really attractive made him fail to see deep enough, and when the
offer rose to sixpence he succumbed.
Within an hour—Lizzie Seebohm had seen to it—Davidina got the
news. Her wrath and sense of humiliation were deep; in the great
battle of life which lay ahead for the possession of her brother’s soul,
she had lost a point, and that to an opponent whom she regarded as
insignificant. It was not a case for silence. Davidina descended upon
him before the sixpence in his pocket had had time to get warm.
‘You’ve been kissing Tuppenny!’ she cried.
‘Who says?’ he demanded, scared at discovery so swift. Then,
bettering his defence: ‘Tuppenny, indeed! she’s not worth it. I
haven’t given her tuppence; I haven’t given her a penny. I haven’t
given her anything, so there! If she says I have, she’s a liar.’
This seemed almost conclusive; Davidina’s faith in the report
wavered. But whenever Jonathan was voluble she distrusted him; so
now.
‘It isn’t her word I’m going by,’ she said. ‘Somebody saw you.’
Mr. Trimblerigg’s mind made an alert movement—very characteristic.
He was not ashamed of what he had done; he only didn’t like being
caught.
‘You said Tuppenny,’ he retorted. ‘And I say—I didn’t give her
tuppence.’
Davidina pressed him along the track, as he meant her to. ‘Then
what did you give her?’
‘I didn’t give her anything; I’ve told you so already. She gave me
sixpence.’
His tone was triumphant, for now, in his own time and in his own
way, he had made a clean breast of it. Davidina’s face was a study.
‘Sold again!’ he said, watching the effect; and curiously he did not
mean himself, or his virtue, or anything else belonging to him; he
meant Davidina. Having got ahead of her with the facts, he
considered himself top-dog for that once at least.
But within a few hours of that avowal an amazing thing happened. It
happened during the night; for when he went to bed the sixpence
was in his trouser pocket, and when he got up in the morning it was
gone; nor did he dare to tax Davidina with the theft.
In chapel, the next Sunday, when the plate came round for foreign
missions, Davidina with ostentation put sixpence into it. Is it to be
wondered that, before the week was over, he had got sixpence back
from somewhere, and took care that Davidina should see him
spending it. Davidina meant well, I am sure; but it is to be
questioned whether her method of clipping his wings was the right
one. He became tangential to the orbit of her spells; they touched,
but they did not contain him.
Meanwhile, without Davidina’s aid, even without her approval, Mr.
Trimblerigg’s call to the ministry was becoming more assured. And
the question mainly was whether, in that family of cramped means,
money could be found in the years lying immediately ahead to
provide the necessary training. It meant two years spent mainly
away from home at the Free Evangelical Training College; two years
of escape from Davidina for whole months at a time; it meant
leaving home a boy and coming back very nearly a man. Even had
the ministry not appealed to him, it would have been worth it for the
peculiar attraction of those circumstances.
Whether this could become practically possible depended mainly
upon old Uncle Trimblerigg—Uncle Trimblerigg whose investments in
house property had been inspired by holy scripture, but whose
theological tenets were of a kind for which up-to-date Free
Evangelicalism no longer provided the college or the training. Nor did
he believe that either college or training were necessary for the
preaching of the Word. He had done it himself for fifty years, merely
by opening the book where it wished to be opened and pondering
what was thus presented. The verbal inspiration of Scripture, not
merely in its writing but in its presentation to the sense of the true
believer, was the very foundation of his faith. The sect of ‘the True
Believers’ had of late years sadly diminished; for as all True Believers
believed that while they believed truly they could never make a
mistake in their interpretations of Scripture, it became as time went
on dangerous for them to meet often or to exchange pulpits, since,
where one was found differing from another, mutual
excommunication of necessity followed and they walked no more in
each other’s ways. Only at their great annual congress did they meet
to reaffirm the foundation of their faith and thunder with a united
voice the Word which did not change.
Thus it came about that dotted over the country were many chapels
of True Believers cut off from friendly intercourse with any other by
mutual interdict; and the hill-side chapel of Uncle Trimblerigg—built
by himself for a congregation of some twenty families all told, his
tenants, or his dependents in the building trade—was one of them.
So among the True Believers there was small prospect of a career
for the budding Mr. Trimblerigg; and yet it was upon the financial aid
and favour of one of them that he depended for theological training
in a direction which they disapproved.
It speaks well for the sanguine temperament and courage of our
own Mr. Trimblerigg that the prospect did not dismay him, or even,
in the event, present much difficulty.
 CHAPTER FOUR
The Beard of the Prophet
UNCLE PHINEAS, the uncle of Mr. Trimblerigg’s father, lived at an
elevation, both physical and spiritual, among the stone quarries a-
top of the village. His house and the chapel where he ministered
stood adjoining, both of his own building; and in the days when
Jonathan knew him he was seldom seen leaving the one except to
go to the other. For he was now very old, and having made his
money and retired from business, he had only one interest left in
life, the preaching of the strict tenets of True Belief to the small
congregation which had trickled under him for the last fifty years.
The True Believers had a worship which was all their own; they
flocked by themselves, never going elsewhere, though others
sometimes came to them. No instrument of music was allowed
within their dwelling, nor did they sing—anything that could be
called a tune. When their voices were lifted in praise they bleated
upon a single note, which now and again they changed, going
higher and higher, and when they could go no higher they stopped.
To our own Mr. 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.
Lay-preaching and the ministry of the Word ran strong in the
Trimblerigg family, also in that of the Hubbacks, to which on his
mother’s side Jonathan belonged; and had he cared to divide himself
spiritually among his relations there were five sects from which to
choose—a division of creeds which did not amount to much, except
in the case of the True Believers. Grandfather Hubback, between
whom and Uncle Phineas there was theological war, ministered to
the Free Evangelicals at the Bethesda which Jonathan had helped to
renovate; Uncle James was a Primitive Brother; Uncle Jonah a First
Resurrectionist; his Sunday exercise—the practising of the Last
Trump—a welcome relief perhaps, from his weekday occupation of
undertaker. Mr. Trimblerigg, during his childhood, had sat under all of
them; the difference being that under his Uncle Phineas he had been
made to sit. Then came the question of his own call to the ministry,
and the further question as to ways and means. It was from then on
that Mr. 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.
Everything about Uncle Phineas was long, including his discourses.
He had a long head, a long nose, a long upper lip and a long chin.
To these his beard served as a corrective; long also, it stuck out at
right angles from his face, till with the weight of its projection it
began to droop; at that point he trimmed it hard and square, making
no compromise, and if none admired it except its owner, it was at
least in character. With such a beard you could not kiss people, and
Phineas Trimblerigg was not of a mind to kiss anybody. In spite of
old age, it retained a hue which suggested a too hasty breakfast of
under-boiled egg; while trying to become grey it remained
reminiscently golden.
And the beard symbolized the man; square, blunt and upright,
patriarchal in mind and character, he lived in a golden age of the
past—the age of romantic theology before science had come to
disturb it. His only Tree of Knowledge was the Bible, and this not
only in matters of doctrine; it was his tree of genealogy and history
as well. From its topmost branch he surveyed a world six thousand
years old, of six days making, and all the wonders that followed,—
the Flood, the Tower whose height had threatened Heaven, and the
plagues, pestilences and famines, loosed by an outraged Deity on a
stubborn but chosen people, and the sun and the moon which stood
still to assist in tribal slaughter, and the special vehicles provided for
prophets, at one time a chariot of fire, at another a great fish, at
another a talking ass,—all these things gave him no mental trouble
whatever; but joy rather, and confidence, and an abiding faith. He
believed them literally, and had required that his family should
believe them too. And truly he could say that, in one way or another,
he had to begin with made them all God-fearing. If in the process
five had died young, and one run away to sea and got drowned, and
another fallen into evil courses from which he had not returned alive,
so that Phineas in his old age was left childless—all this had but
made him more patriarchal in outlook than ever, turning his attention
upon nephews and nieces of the second generation, especially upon
one; which, indeed, is the reason why here he becomes an
important character.
Fortified by fifty years of prudent investment based upon revelation,
and with a comfortable balance at his bank, he cast his other cares
upon the Lord; lived frugally, gave a just tithe of all he possessed to
the foreign and home missions of the True Believers, drank no wine
or strong drink—except tea, denounced the smoking of tobacco, but
took it as snuff, believed firmly in Hell, war, and corporal punishment
for men, women and children alike, was still an elected, though a
non-attending, member of all local bodies, but in the parliamentary
election (regarding it as the evil thing) would take no part. To him
life, in the main, meant theology.
At the now sharply dividing ways he stood with old Pastor Hubback
(or rather against him) a leading and a rival light among the local
Free Churches; and because he had money to give and to leave he
was still a power in the district as well as in his own family. This was
the oracle to which Mr. Trimblerigg, in his fifteenth year, began to
give up his half-holidays.
Uncle Phineas was always at home; he had legs which never allowed
him to get farther than his own gate, except once a week to the
Tabernacle of True Belief, of which he was minister and owner. The
larger chapel in the village lower down had not known him for thirty
years when the youthful Jonathan first became aware of his
importance, and began under parental direction to pay a weekly call
at ‘Pisgah,’ and there learn from the old patriarch things about
himself and others, including God, to which he listened with an air of
great respect and interest.
Jonathan’s way with him was wily but simple: he would ask a great
number of intelligent questions, and receiving unintelligent answers
would appear satisfied. Now and then, upon his birthday, or when
revivalism was in the air, the old man would give him sixpence,
sometimes even a shilling, advising him to bestow it upon the
foreign missions of the stricter Evangelicals, especially those to the
native races of Central Africa and America, where the undiluted truth
of the Word had still necessarily to be taught. For those primitive
minds the taint of modernism had no effect; Heaven had so shaped
them to the divine purpose that nothing short of literal True Belief
could touch their hearts and soften their understandings. And the
old man would talk wondrously to Jonathan of how, in the evil days
to come, these black races were destined to become the repository
of the true faith and reconvert the world to the purer doctrine.
Uncle Phineas was on the look-out for punishment on a world-wide
scale, and had he lived to see it, the War of Versailles would have
gladdened his heart. For he wanted all the Nations to be punished,
including his own,—a point on which Mr. Trimblerigg ventured
privately to differ from him; being in that matter a Free Evangelical,
and preferring Heaven to Hell. Uncle Phineas preferred Hell;
punishment was owing, and the imaginary infliction of it was what in
the main attracted him to religion.
Punishment: first and foremost for man’s breaking of the Sabbath;
then followed in order drink, horse-racing, gambling, the increase of
divorces, modernism, and the higher criticism, with all its resultant
forms of infidelity, the agitation for Women’s Suffrage, and finally the
impious attempt of Labour to depose Capital.
All these things were of the Devil and must be fought; and in the
discussion of them Jonathan began—not to be in a difficulty because
some of them made an appeal to his dawning intelligence, but to
become agile. Luckily for him Uncle Phineas’s information was very
nearly as narrow as his intelligence, and Mr. Trimblerigg was able to
jump to and fro across his sedentary and parochial mind with small
fear of discovery. But the repeated interviews made him brisk,
supple, and conversationally adaptable; and once when the old man
remarked half-approvingly, ‘Aye, Jonathan, you’ve got eyes in your
head, but don’t let ’em out by the back door,’ he had a momentary
qualm lest behind that observation dangerous knowledge might lurk.
But it was only his uncle’s constitutional disapproval of a mind that
could move; and of Jonathan’s outside doings and opinions he had
at that time heard nothing to rouse suspicion. But clearly when Mr.
Trimblerigg was called to the ministry and began to preach there
would be a difficulty; for what would go down at Bethesda among
the Free Evangelicals, where his obvious career was awaiting him,
would not do up at Horeb, the chapel on the hill; and it was well
within the bounds of possibility that owing to his family connections
Mr. Trimblerigg might find it advantageous to preach at both.
That, however, was a problem still lying some few years away;
meanwhile Uncle Phineas might very reasonably die; and it was just
about this time that I heard Mr. Trimblerigg beginning to pray for
peace to the old man in his declining years, that he might not be
kept unduly on the rack of this tough world after so good a life.
And indeed it was a life in which he had accomplished much; for a
man of his small beginnings he had become of notable substance,
and his income derived from quarries and the houses he had built
for his workers was reckoned to amount to anything from six to
eight hundred a year, of which, in spite of generous gifts to foreign
missions, he did not spend one-half.
His expectant relatives did not talk among themselves about the
matter where, of necessity, interests were divided; but they thought
much, and occasionally they had their fears.
‘I shouldn’t wonder,’ said Jonathan’s father one day, ‘if when Uncle
dies it isn’t found that he had an unsound mind.’
It was to obviate such a calamity that Jonathan was sent to pay his
weekly visit, and that one or another of the family, at least once
every Sunday, went up to Horeb to pray.
Quite early in his examination of the tenets of True Belief, anxious
that she should keep him in countenance, Mr. Trimblerigg asked
Davidina what she thought of them.
‘My belief is,’ said Davidina, ‘that we can all believe what we want to
believe; and if you only believe it enough, it comes true—for you, at
any rate. You can believe every word of the Bible is true, or that
every word of it is false; and either way, you can live up to it. The
True Believers are right there, anyway. And if,’ she added, ‘you’ve got
nothing else to believe, you can believe in yourself: and you can
smile at yourself in the glass, and look at your teeth, and think they
are milestones on the road to Heaven, till they all drop out.
Believing’s easy; it’s choosing what you mean to believe that
matters. I believe the kettle’s boiling over.’
She went, leaving Mr. Trimblerigg to his meditations, also to a doubt
whether she had taken him quite seriously.
With his Uncle Phineas it was all the other way; they were nothing if
not serious together; but it often puzzled his ingenuous mind how
his uncle managed to believe all the things he did.
One day: ‘Uncle Phineas,’ he said, ‘how did you come to be a True
Believer?’
‘When I felt the need of conversion as a young man,’ replied Uncle
Phineas, ‘I started reading the Scriptures. Every day, before I
opened the book, I said, “Lord, help me to believe!” And by the time
I’d read ’em three times through, I believed every word.’
‘I’ve only read them twice yet,’ said Jonathan in meek admission, but
glad to get hold of the excuse.
‘Read ’em again,’ said his uncle.
‘And all the genealogies, too, Uncle?’ he inquired, for all the world as
though he felt genuinely committed to the task if the other should
say ‘yes.’
‘Why would you leave them out?’ queried his uncle. ‘It’s the sowing
of the seed. When you sow a field, you’ve not to care about this
grain or that, picking and choosing: it’s the sowing that matters. Sow
your mind with the seed of the Word, and don’t leave gaps. You
never know how you may come to need it hereafter. “Abram begat
Isaac; and Isaac married Rebecca, and begat Jacob:”—that was the
text the Lord showed me when He would have me choose a wife,
whose name was Rebecca.’ He fetched a sigh. ‘And I did,’ he said.
‘She was a poor weak wife to me, and the children took after her; so
now not one of them is left. It was the Lord’s will.’
‘But if you had married some one else, wouldn’t it have been the
Lord’s will too?’ inquired Jonathan.
‘That we won’t discuss,’ said his uncle. ‘I shouldn’t have chosen
without first looking to Scripture. There was only one Rebecca in the
village, and I hadn’t thought of her till then. ’Twas a marvellous
showing, and she on a bed of sickness at the time.’
Mr. Trimblerigg was properly impressed; but he doubted whether he
would choose his own wife that way, even should he become a True
Believer. So, not to linger on doubtful ground, he changed the
subject and began to ask about missionaries; having a wish to see
the world, they attracted him.
‘If I become a True Believer,’ he said, ‘I shan’t stay and preach in one
place; I shall go out and preach everywhere.’
‘You’ll do as the Lord tells you,’ said his uncle. ‘It’s no good one
that’s not a True Believer talking of what he’ll do when he becomes
one.’
‘No, Uncle,’ said Jonathan meekly, still out to do business; ‘but living
at home makes it very hard for me. I’m much nearer to being a True
Believer than Mother is, or Father, or Davidina. Davidina says you
can believe anything if you’ll only make yourself. She says she could
make herself believe that the Bible was all false, if she were to try.’
‘Has she tried, does she mean?’ inquired Uncle Phineas grimly.
‘I don’t know,’ replied Jonathan ingenuously. ‘It would be very
wicked if anyone did try, wouldn’t it?’
‘It would,’ said his uncle. ‘I’ve known men struck down dead for less.
I knew a man once who tore a leaf out of his Bible to light his pipe
with, and he was struck by lightning for it the same day. Yet his sin
was only against one leaf, one chapter. How much greater the sin if
you sin against the whole of it. She thought that, did she? When you
go home, send Davidina up to me: I’ll talk to her.’
Then Mr. Trimblerigg had a divided mind; for his fear of Davidina
was not less but rather more than his fear of Uncle Phineas. Indeed
he only feared Uncle Phineas for what he might fail to do for him in
the near future, but Davidina he feared for what she was, here and
now.
‘I think, perhaps, Davidina only meant—anybody who was wicked
enough. But please don’t tell Davidina that I said anything!’
‘Heh?’ cried Uncle Phineas, his eye suspicious: ‘That so? We’ll see.’
He got up, went slowly to his Bible and opened it and without
looking put down his thumb.
‘Listen to this, Jonathan,’ he said; and in solemn tone and with long
pauses, he read:
“She put her hand to the nail ... and her right hand to the
workman’s hammer ... and with the hammer she smote Sisera, she
smote off his head ... when she had pierced and stricken through his
temples.”... You hear that, Jonathan?’
‘Yes, Uncle,’ he replied, not yet understanding the application of the
text.
‘You see, Jonathan,’ said his uncle, ‘Davidina was getting at you.’
Being a True Believer’s interpretation, it was not open to discussion,
not for Jonathan at any rate. Uncle Phineas was a mighty hunter of
the Scriptures before the Lord: the true interpretation never escaped
him.
It was a curious and unexplained fact that Davidina was a great
favourite of Uncle Phineas, so far as one so entirely without affection
could be said to have favourites. Davidina was far from being a True
Believer, yet he trusted her; and he did not yet quite trust Jonathan.
But he saw well enough that Jonathan had in him the makings of a
prophet and of a preacher; if only he could trust him, he would help
him to go far. But the testing process took time.
So, day by day, Mr. Trimblerigg laboured to win his trust, and often,
after long hours of boredom in his uncle’s company, success seemed
near; for intellectually he was now growing fast, and to the
cultivation of an agile brain added the cultivation of a wily tongue,
and even where his future career did not depend upon it he loved to
sustain an argument.
But he never got the better of Uncle Phineas; for when Phineas
could not answer him, the Book did. He began to loathe the Book—
that particular copy of it, I mean—and to make faces at it behind his
uncle’s back. But a day came when he loved it like a brother.
At the right time for the forwarding of his plans, Mr. Trimblerigg
professed a desire for larger book-learning; he wanted to study
theology, and that not from one point of view alone. Ready to satisfy
him, up to a point, Uncle Phineas plied him with books containing
the true doctrine, some he would make him sit down and read aloud
upon the spot while he expounded them; others he let him take
away to study and return, questioning him closely thereafter to
discover how well he had read them. They were all good books—
good in the moral sense, that is to say—books written to inculcate
the principles of True Belief; but all, from the contemporary point of
view utterly useless, and all deadly dull.
One day Mr. Trimblerigg asked his uncle, ‘Where all the other books
were—the bad ones, which taught false doctrine.’
Why did he want to know? inquired Uncle Phineas.
‘I want to read them,’ said Jonathan greatly daring. ‘If one doesn’t
read them, how is one to know how to answer them? I want to read
them because they deceive people.’
‘Not True Believers,’ said his uncle.
‘No,’ replied Jonathan, ‘but people who might become True
Believers.’
‘They should read their Bibles. There you find the answer to
everything.’
‘Yes. So I did; I did it last night as I was going to bed: I opened it,
just as you do, Uncle, and there it was—written: the thing I was
wanting to know.’
‘What was it?’
‘It was this, Uncle: “Oh, that mine adversary had written a book.
Surely I would take it upon my shoulder and bind it as a crown unto
me.”’
‘That doesn’t say read it,’ objected his uncle.
‘No, but it means it. It means that if wicked books are written we’ve
got to do with them, we’ve not just got to let them alone.’
‘We’ll see,’ replied the other; ‘we’ll ask the Lord to show us.’ He got
the Book and opened it. ‘There, Jonathan, listen to this:
‘“What profiteth the graven image that the maker thereof hath
graven it; the molten image, the teacher of lies, that the maker of
his work trusteth therein to make dumb idols” ... God’s answered
you, Jonathan.’