"How fantastic you are," he said impatiently. "The thing has a brain, hasn't it? You have in a larger and far more developed measure exactly what that bird has; so have I. But that is all. Soul! There is no such thing!"
The bird in the cage had caught the word, which excited its mechanical and oral memory to the repetition of one of its stock phrases.
"Soul! Soul! 'Pon my soul, that's too good. Ha, ha, ha!" said the parrot.
"Polly differs, apparently," Hampson said drily, as they moved on down the Commercial Road; "but what a hopeless materialist you are, Joseph. You go back to the dogmatism of the pre-Socratic philosophers or voice the drab materialism of the modern animal man who thinks with his skin. Yet you've read your Plato! – you observe that I carefully refrain from bringing in Christian philosophy even! You believe in nothing that you have not touched or handled. Because you can't find the soul at a post-mortem examination of the body you at once go and say there is no such thing. Scholars and men of science like you seem astonishingly blind to the value of evidence when it comes to religious matters. You, my dear Joseph, have never seen India. Yet you know a place called India exists. How do you know it? Simply through the evidence of other people who have been there. You have just as much right to tell the captain of a P. & O. steamer that what he thought was Calcutta was merely a delusion as to tell me or any other professing Christian that there is no such thing as the Kingdom of Heaven! Well, I must be off; I have a bit of work to do that may bring in a few shillings. There may be dinner to-night, Joseph!"
With a quick smile, Hampson turned down a side street and was gone. The man called Joseph continued his way, walking slowly and listlessly, his head sunk upon his breast in thought.
The teeming life of the great artery of East London went on all round him; but he saw nothing of it. A Chinaman, with a yellow, wrinkled face, jostled up against him, and he did not know it; a bloated girl, in a stained plush blouse, wine-coloured like her face, and with an immense necklace of false pearls, coughed out some witticism as he passed; a hooligan surveyed him at leisure, decided that there could be nothing worth stealing upon him, and strolled away whistling a popular tune – one and all were no more to the wanderer than a dream, some dream dim-panelled upon the painted scenes of sleep.
Shabbily dressed as he was, there was yet something about the man which attracted attention. He drew the eye. He was quite unlike any one else. One could not say of him, "Here is an Englishman," or "There is a German." He would have looked like a foreigner – something alien from the crowd – in any country to which he went.
Joseph's age was probably about thirty-three, but time and sorrow had etched and graven upon his face a record of harsh experience which made him seem much older.
The cheeks were gashed and furrowed with thought. Looking carefully at him, one would have discovered that he was a distinctly handsome man. The mouth was strong and manly in its curves, though there was something gentle and compassionate in it also. The nose was Greek, straight and clearly cut; the hair thick, and of a dark reddish-brown. But the wonder of the man's face lay in his eyes. These were large and lustrous; full of changing light in their dark and almost Eastern depth. They were those rare eyes which seem to be lit up from within as if illuminated by the lamp of the soul.
Soul! Yes, it was that of which those eyes told in an extraordinary and almost overwhelming measure.
The soul is not a sort of fixed essence, as people are apt to forget. It is a fluid thing, and expands or contracts according to the life of its owner. We do not, for example, see any soul in the eyes of a gross, over-fed, and sensual man. Yet this very man in the Commercial Road, who denied the very existence of the soul with convinced and impatient mockery, was himself, in appearance, at any rate, one of those rare beings of whom we say, "That man is all soul."
The man's full name was Joseph Bethune. To the tiny circle of his friends and acquaintances he was simply Joseph. If they had ever known his surname, they had forgotten it. He was one of those men who are always called by their Christian names because, whatever their circumstances may be, they are real, accepted, and unquestioned facts in the lives of their friends.
Joseph Bethune's history, to which he never referred, had been, up to the present, drab, monotonous, and dismal. When an event had occurred it was another failure, and he could point to no red-letter days in his career. Joseph had never known either father or mother. Both had died during his infancy, leaving him in the care of guardians.
His father had been a pastor of the Methodist sect – a man of singular holiness of life and deep spiritual fervour. Possessed of some private means, he had been able to leave a sufficient sum for his son's education upon a generous and liberal scale.
The boy's guardians were distant relatives in each case. One was a clergyman, the other a prosperous London solicitor. The strange, studious child, quiet, dreamy, and devoted to his books, found himself out of touch with both.
The clergyman was a Low Churchman, but of the worst type. There was nothing of the tolerant outlook and strong evangelical piety of a Robertson in Mr. St. John. He was as narrow as his creed, condemning all that he had not experienced, or could not understand, hating the devil more than he loved God. If he had been sent to the rack he could not have truthfully confessed to an original thought.
Joseph Bethune was sent to an English public school of good, though not of first, rank. Here he was unpopular, and made no friends. His nature was too strong, and, even as a boy, his personality too striking, for him to experience any actual physical discomfort from his unpopularity. He was never bullied, and no one interfered with him; but he remained utterly lonely.
In contradiction of the usual custom in the English public school of his day, Hamilton possessed splendid laboratories, and great attention was paid to modern science and mathematics.
Of these advantages Joseph Bethune availed himself to the full. His temper of mind was accurate and inquiring, and though his manner was dreamy and abstracted, it was the romance of science over which he pored; the cold, glacial heights of the higher mathematics among which his imagination roamed.
He gained a scholarship at Cambridge, lived a retired and monotonous life of work, shunning the natural and innocent amusements of youth while at the university, and was bracketed Third Wrangler as a result of his degree examination.
By this time his moderate patrimony was nearly exhausted, though, of course, his success in the schools had placed many lucrative posts within his reach. He had actually been offered a fellowship and a tutorial post at his own college, when he wrecked his university career by an extraordinary and quite unexpected proceeding.
At a great meeting in the Corn Exchange, convened by the Bishop of London for a discussion of certain vexed questions of the Christian faith, Joseph Bethune rose, and, in a speech of some fifteen minutes' duration, delivered an impassioned condemnation of Christianity, concluding with a fierce avowal of his disbelief in God, and in anything but the purely material.
We are tolerant enough nowadays. The red horror of the Inquisition has departed, and men are no longer "clothed in a shirt of living fire" for a chance word. A "Protestant" ruler no longer hangs the priests of the Italian Mission for saying the Mass. Any one is at liberty to believe what he pleases. But men about to occupy official positions must not bawl unadulterated atheism from the housetops.
The offence was too flagrant, the offer of the fellowship was withdrawn, and Joseph, so far as Cambridge was concerned, was ruined.
It is perfectly true that there were many people who believed exactly as he did. They sympathized with him, but in secret, and no word or hint of their sympathy ever reached him. He had done the unpardonable thing: he had dared to speak out his thoughts, and men of the world do not care to champion openly one who is publicly disgraced.
The news got about in many quarters. The man was not an "agnostic" – polite and windy word! But he was an atheist! Terrible word, recalling shuddering memories of Tom Paine and Bradlaugh even in the minds of men and women who themselves believed in nothing at all. Some men would have only been locally harmed by such an episode as this. But Bethune's case was peculiar, and it ruined him.
He had nothing to sell in