They were the self-appointed confidants of God's mockery of
his own creation. So at any rate they stick in my mind. Vaguer, and yet
hardly less agreeable than this cosmic jest, this coming "Yah, clever!"
and general serving out and "showing up" of the lucky, the bold, and the
cheerful, was their own predestination to Glory.
"There is a Fountain, filled with Blood
Drawn from Emmanuel's Veins,"
so they sang. I hear the drone and wheeze of that hymn now. I hated them
with the bitter uncharitable condemnation of boyhood, and a twinge of
that hate comes back to me. As I write the words, the sounds and then
the scene return, these obscure, undignified people, a fat woman with
asthma, an old Welsh milk-seller with a tumour on his bald head, who was
the intellectual leader of the sect, a huge-voiced haberdasher with
a big black beard, a white-faced, extraordinarily pregnant woman, his
wife, a spectacled rate collector with a bent back.... I hear the talk
about souls, the strange battered old phrases that were coined ages ago
in the seaports of the sun-dry Levant, of balm of Gilead and manna in
the desert, of gourds that give shade and water in a thirsty land; I
recall again the way in which at the conclusion of the service the talk
remained pious in form but became medical in substance, and how the
women got together for obstetric whisperings.
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