Love and Money

by Phyllis Bentley

  “You will oblige me by not referring to the matter again, Lucy,” he said after a moment in a quavering tone—the argument had thrown his poor old heart into a gallop.

  “As you wish, uncle,” said Lucy gravely. “I merely thought it right not to leave you in ignorance of my views.”

  Mr. Tolefree gave an uneasy sigh, the harbinger of many to come.

  6

  That Lucy’s view was shared by many of the Resmond Street congregation appeared at the meeting of the Deacons in the following week, when Mr. Aquile’s appointment as co-pastor, his year’s probation being successfully completed, was proposed. That Alderman Brigg’s view was shared by some, likewise appeared, for the appointment was hotly opposed on doctrinal grounds by a considerable minority. Eventually a compromise was reached and Mr. Aquile’s temporary reappointment as assistant pastor was formally recommended—this, of course, would be subject to the approval of the Trustees.

  Without waiting to be tackled by the Trustees on doctrine, Mr. Aquile wrote to them himself, to make, as he said, his position clear. He believed in every item of the Christian faith as promulgated by Christ Himself, but could not hold himself bound to the letter by the interpretations given by fallible human beings in the Trust Deed.

  The Trustees—or rather a few of them; influenza was rife at the time—met, and after a long and heated discussion it was decided by the Chairman’s casting vote that Mr. Aquile must categorically declare his belief in the ten dogmas named in the Trust Deed, or they could not consent to his reappointment. A letter was written to Mr. Aquile accordingly.

  Mr. Aquile replied at once in a short but trenchant note. To seven of the ten doctrines named he gave unqualified acceptance. But to numbers 3, 7 and 10 as there phrased he was unremittingly opposed; he thought them distortions of Christian teaching. If, he said, the whole human race was completely and hopelessly damned to all eternity by a prearranged fate, what was the use of faith, or repentance, indeed of Christ’s atonement itself? Why trouble to preach the moral law? Why struggle for regeneration since it was impossible save to a favoured few? In his view the Christian religion was a living, growing spirit; it had not halted for ever fifty years ago, it had not been perfected in Resmond Street in 1825. God did not forbid progress. He remained theirs faithfully, John Spencer Aquile.

  The Trustees met again in January; this time fifteen were present.

  Few occasions are more uncomfortable than the meeting of a committee—especially a Yorkshire committee—irrevocably divided into two parties. The members arrive, each in their several manners ready for a fray. They are all spruced up, in clean shirts, with well-brushed hair, bright eyes and tight lips; they greet each other with rather unusual politeness, and sign the attendance register, according to their temperament, either in an especially firm or an especially jerky hand. With apparent nonchalance they stroll about and seat themselves, when it is discovered that they are mostly grouped by their allegiance, with a few unhappy neutrals sprinkled between. The Minutes are disposed of in a trice, proposers and seconders quite barking out their resolutions to a quick chorus of agreed. Then the controversial matter which divides them is reached on the agenda. There is a silence; some members fold their arms and stare down at the green baize tablecloth, others exchange significant glances; it is obvious that caballing and canvassing have been going on outside.

  “I will read the reply I have received from Mr. Aquile,” said the Chairman—an old bowed man, parchment-coloured, one of the surviving original Trustees.

  When he reached the concluding sentences Councillor Starbotton—who had been absent from the previous meeting on business in London—let out a subdued snort of laughter.

  “He has you there,” he muttered.

  “Anyone who doesn’t agree with the Deed doctrines has no right to be a Trustee,” growled Alderman Brigg through his beard.

  “Propose that my resignation be called for, then!” cried Councillor Starbotton, flaring up at once. “Go on, Alderman! Propose it. Let’s take a vote.”

  “Nay now, gentleman,” urged the Chairman. (In the 1870’s there were no women on the governing body, of course.) “Let us discuss this important matter in a manner becoming to Resmond Street.”

  “To my mind there’s nothing to discuss,” said Alderman Brigg. “Aquile can’t accept the Trust Deed, and there’s an end of it. Mind you,” he added in a mollifying tone: “I respect the man for his honesty—he’s been straight with us, I grant you that. But he can’t accept the Deed and there’s no more to be said.”

  “If you’re going to make the Deed a test of membership, you’ll have an empty church,” grumbled one of the younger Trustees.

  “What’s that matter—” began the Alderman.

  “What’s it matter!” shouted several members. “—when a question of principle is concerned,” concluded Brigg.

  “If a man who doesn’t accept the whole Deed is acceptable in Resmond Street at the Communion Table, he should be acceptable in the pulpit,” said Councillor Starbotton.

  “Hear, hear.”

  “We’re an Independent body, after all.”

  “A man’s entitled to his own religious views.”

  “Aquile can think what he likes as far as I’m concerned so long as he doesn’t do it aloud in Resmond Street pulpit,” said Alderman Brigg sardonically.

  “Aquile’s the finest minister in Annotsfield.”

  “He is that.”

  “I never said he wasn’t,” said Alderman Brigg. “But——”

  The battle raged—though, as so often happens in committee meetings, the members were fighting different battles. Alderman Brigg was doggedly defending the binding effect of a contract, the honest acceptance of a legal liability, while Councillor Starbotton was breaking a lance for liberal and progressive views against diehard reaction. It must be remembered, on behalf of Annotsfield, that it was not agreeable to any of these men to be quarrelling; for Alderman Brigg was a cloth merchant of high standing, with whom all local manufacturers did, or wanted to do, business, while he needed their cloth to sell.

  “If we carried on in the cloth trade as you want us to do here, Alderman,” said Councillor Starbotton: “We should all still be using handlooms.”

  “Aye, but this isn’t the cloth trade,” said Alderman Brigg obstinately. “I’ve set my name to a Deed, and I’m responsible for it in a court of law.”

  “What court, pray?”

  “Why, I reckon it would be Chancery,” said Alderman Brigg.

  “Then let’s take the Deed to Chancery and break it,” said Councillor Starbotton impatiently.

  “Now, now, Fred, don’t let’s get wild,” said the Chairman. “You’re the youngest here, and the newest Trustee, think on.”

  “Aye, I know,” agreed the Councillor. “That’s just what I do know. If Resmond Street Independent gets left behind in 1825, don’t blame me”

  There was a pause.

  “Well, shall we go to the vote?” said the Chairman at length.

  “We haven’t got a motion before us as far as I know,” said Alderman Brigg disagreeably.

  “I move,” said Councillor Starbotton, “that we accept Mr. Aquile’s letter as complying sufficiently with the requirements of the Trust Deed—that is, if I’m thought old enough to move a resolution in this Committee, Mr. Chairman.”

  “Now, Fred. Is anybody seconding this motion?” said the Chairman formally.

  “Yes, I am,” said William Thomas Brigg. “I want Mr. Aquile to stay on at Resmond Street, choose how.”

  “Any amendment, gentlemen? What about you, Joshua?”

  “His letter doesn’t comply with the Deed.”

  “That’s just a direct negative, Alderman.”

  “I’m fully aware of that.”

  “His letter complies seventy per cent.”

  “Seventy’s not a hundred—at least not in my understanding. You wouldn’t expect me to accept a piece of fancy suiting with the pattern only seventy per cent
correct, Fred.”

  “I would if new pattern were an improvement on old.”

  “Any amendment? No? We’ll go to the vote, then. Those in favour?”

  Seven hands shot up. A grim smile of satisfaction crept beneath Alderman Brigg’s beard as he counted them. Fifteen present, counting one in the chair; the votes were about to tie, he thought, seven and seven; the Chairman would have to give a casting vote, and the Chairman was on his side.

  “Against?”

  Alderman Brigg and two others, surviving original Trustees, put up their hands against the motion. But four members did not vote. Two sat with their arms crossed, looking stubborn, one drew with a pencil on a piece of blotting-paper, the fourth had a fit of nervous coughing. There was a pause, in which Alderman Brigg seethed.

  “Am I to understand,” said the Chairman at length, “that you four gentlemen do not intend to vote? On a matter of such importance it would seem better to have a full vote.”

  “I don’t see the rights and wrongs of the matter clearly enough to vote, and that’s a fact,” said one of the four.

  “A child could see them,” growled Alderman Brigg.

  “Speak for yourself, Joshua.”

  “I’ve always found Mr. Aquile’s doctrine acceptable, but this Deed business troubles me, I own. Still—I never met a finer pastor,” said another of the non-voters.

  “Surely you can make up your mind one way or the other? Or haven’t you got a mind to make up?” thundered Alderman Brigg.

  “We have the right to abstain if we like.”

  “Aye! That’s right!”

  “Hear, hear.”

  “We aren’t obliged to vote because you say so, Joshua.”

  “I think we should give the matter further consideration.”

  “You’ve been at it a month already.”

  “A unanimous decision would be so much better.”

  “Aye, it would,” said Alderman Brigg grimly. “But we can’t go on like this; it’s becoming a scandal.”

  “There I agree,” put in Councillor Starbotton.

  “Well—I will take the show of hands again, so as to give every opportunity,” said the Chairman. “For the resolution? Seven. Against? Three. The resolution is carried.”

  “You’ll rue this day, Fred,” said Alderman Brigg, glaring at Councillor Starbotton across the baize.

  “I’ll chance it,” replied the Councillor briefly.

  “Is there any other business?” enquired the Chairman.

  “There’s just one point, Mr. Chairman,” said Councillor Starbotton. “The appointment as co-pastor was promised to Mr. Aquile if he gave satisfaction after a year’s work. Now we’ve accepted him as complying with the Deed, I don’t see that we can object to him being co-pastor if the nomination is made.”

  “Neither do I,” said Alderman Brigg drily. “The one thing follows on the other. Both are wrong, in my opinion.”

  “You’ve been voted down, Joshua,” said the Councillor in some irritation.

  “I know it, Fred. But it doesn’t change my mind.”

  A week later a special meeting of church members recommended Mr. Aquile as co-pastor. The vote was not unanimous; indeed at one moment it seemed as if the appointment were about to hang fire. Councillor Star-botton’s enthusiasm was somewhat resented—Yorkshire people tend to distrust enthusiasm—and one or two of the older male members even wondered to each other, though sotto voce, whether Starbotton was looking for an income for a son-in-law. At this point, however, the Councillor arose and read a letter he had received from Mr. Aquile, in which he expressed his willingness to become co-pastor if called, but declined to accept any increase of salary. The appointment was promptly voted, and this was confirmed by a meeting of seat-holders at the beginning of the following month. The process of democratic church government being now complete, “the call” was officially sent to Mr. Aquile next day, and he became co-pastor. No “ordination” ceremony was held, however. Alderman Brigg and his supporters were immutably opposed to it, and when the problem was laid before Mr. Tolefree he solved it by falling ill. The ceremony could hardly be conducted without him, and so it was shelved.

  “I hope, Alderman Brigg,” said Mr. Aquile courteously to the Trustee when they met on the Sunday following his election, “that these disagreements have not caused ill-feeling between you and myself. On my side at least there is none.”

  “I don’t know as they have,” said the Alderman. “Not to say ill-feeling. But I’m for the Trust Deed and you’re not. You can’t get away from that.”

  “I hope, however, that you will continue to give your active support to Resmond Street?”

  “Aye—why not? I was here before you and I daresay I shall be here after,” returned the Alderman, staring straight into his pastor’s eyes.

  “That is in the hands of the Lord,” said Mr. Aquile quietly. He gave a courteous inclination of his head and moved away.

  7

  All might yet have gone well, if Mr. Aquile had been a man of less tender conscience.

  If the Trust Deed dogmas had been left undiscussed for a few years, the passions they aroused might have died down. But it was not in Aquile’s truthful and honourable nature to gloss over, to let slide, to close his eyes to awkward facts. So he could not let the matter drop. Sure that he was right in doctrine, he yearned with loving anxiety over those of his congregation who did not think as he did; he was troubled to the soul that they should be so far astray (as he thought) from true Christianity; he longed to convert them. Why did they hold those harsh and narrow dogmas, he repeatedly asked himself, and what arguments would convince them they were wrong? He searched continually—in his own mind, in the Bible, in the many works of devotion with which he was familiar—for the answers to those questions. From time to time he thought he had found the answers; then, his fine eyes beaming with earnest conviction, with sincere love for humanity, with joy that now at last the souls in his care would be led to the right path, he preached, in forceful and winning language, on the subjects most painful to his hearers. It was not possible to listen to Mr. Aquile’s preaching without being moved. Some were moved to great admiration and a longing for a nobler life; others to genuine horror and profound disturbance of soul.

  So at last there came a Sunday when Mr. Aquile referred to one of the Deed doctrines as “a mediaeval bondage, a burden and a wrong”—and Alderman Brigg rose and strode with measured steps out of the church.

  Then indeed the congregation of Resmond Street was divided against itself and the quarrel grew loud and could not be hidden. Husbands disagreed with wives, fathers with children, brothers with brothers, uncles with nephews; they argued hotly, day and night. Paragraphs about the matter appeared in the Annotsfield Recorder and Pioneer. It was as troubling to Alderman Brigg and his party to find the radical Pioneer against them as to find the more conservative Recorder on their side. The pro-Aquile party said that Alderman Brigg was a disagreeable, narrow, reactionary, killjoy of a man, utterly out of touch with modern thought, who enjoyed the idea of everybody going to hell except Alderman Brigg; and that Mr. Aquile was a fine, true, brave Christian who was fighting the battle of emancipation for many other young clergymen as well as himself. The anti-Aquile party said simply that Mr. Aquile’s principles were contrary to those of the Resmond Street Trust Deed and he had no manner of right to pronounce them in the Resmond Street pulpit. The trouble was that both parties were right, and Mr. Tolefree’s trouble was that he knew it.

  “You wish me to be a coward, and withdraw from the battle for the right?” said Mr. Aquile, flushing slightly, when Mr. Tolefree urged him to leave Resmond Street.

  “I’m a man of my word, and I signed my name to the Trust Deed,” said Alderman Brigg, sticking out his jaw, when Mr. Tolefree suggested that since the Trustees had accepted Mr. Aquile’s doctrinal fitness to be co-pastor they could not reasonably object to his sermons.

  “I must retire—I have not the strength to deal as I ought with
this difficult situation,” said poor Mr. Tolefree in quavering tones.

  “Your retirement would be a deep grief to me personally and a great loss to the cause of righteousness,” said Mr. Aquile, taking the old man’s thin cold hand affectionately in his own.

  “Retire!” exploded Alderman Brigg. “And leave the way open to that impudent young jackanapes to become pastor? You can’t do it, Mr. Tolefree.”

  Presently, however, Mr. Tolefree was obliged to retire, for he suffered a slight stroke. Lucy found him one Monday evening in his chair by the fire, unconscious. The evening newspaper had slipped from his hand. Had he perhaps been reading the paragraph which described Mr. Aquile’s sermon of the day before? A sermon which applied the words “atheistical and blasphemous” to one of the Trust Deed doctrines? Mr. Tolefree was not in a condition to say, and when a few weeks later he recovered his speech, he did not mention the matter. He sent in his resignation, however, and Mr. Aquile declared his intention of presenting himself as candidate for pastor.

  The Trustees met. As before, fifteen were present including the Chairman. The previous doubters came down on the side of a quiet life and W. T. Brigg, frightened by the uproar, changed sides. By eight votes to six, therefore, the Trustees urged Mr. Aquile to withdraw his candidature for the sake of peace and harmony.

  Mr. Aquile replied that he placed himself in the hands of the congregation.

  The congregation—three hundred and fifty-four of them —met to choose a pastor. Two hundred and thirty-three voted for Mr. Aquile, the rest against. He therefore lacked by three votes, but only by three, the necessary two-thirds majority.

  Meanwhile the Deacons, amongst whom Mr. Aquile’s supporters had a majority, continued Mr. Aquile in his temporary appointment as co-pastor.

  Owing to death, removal or other natural causes, from time to time new Deacons and new Trustees had to be elected. The consultations, the canvassings, amongst both parties in order to elect Deacons and Trustees favourable to themselves, racked the congregation from end to end. It was alleged by the Brigg faction that some church members were deprived of their membership in order to secure the necessary majorities, but the Aquile faction declared this to be a mere routine revision of the membership list. Be that as it may, the Deacons and Trustees elected were favourable to Mr. Aquile.