Chapter XXIV

Jim came back to London one dull November day, ready for his life-work.

There was no light, and the taste of fog was in the air.

The massive unconcern of London struck him like a blow.

Nobody wanted him or his knowledge; nobody wanted change; those who needed it most clung with the steadiness of limpets to the invisible rocks of their unsavoury habits.

Jim’s instinct took him to the river, down by the gray, unlighted miles of docks.

A region of narrow streets, and squalid, small houses swallowed him up, and only his landlady took a feeble interest in him, founded on rent.

When he went to see labour leaders and put his ideas before them he was looked upon suspiciously as if he wanted to get something out of them.

They looked at his hands and shut him out of their counsels. Labour was sullen and hostile in those days, before the shilly-shallying of intellectual freaks; they had been taken in so often by the devil appearing as an angel of light; and in the end they had found they always had to pay for the light.

Jim found himself as disconnected as a stray cat. His speech betrayed him; only a jaded but enthusiastic parson, buried in an enormous parish of poverty and spiritual apathy, gave him a sympathetic but scarcely encouraging word.

‘You may be able to do something,’ he said wistfully to Jim. ‘My profession is like the mark of the beast. They look at my clerical collar and sheer off. No wonder St. Paul was a tentmaker first and a preacher afterwards. I visit and do what I can for the young. Religion bores the men, and the women are too overworked to come to church.

‘You see how they live. It’s the life of nomads, without the climate—all these miles of dock and no centre for them to tell them where work is to be found—they wander and migrate like the birds—only without a plan.

‘I can’t alter anything. I’m a hobbled horse. People like you, perhaps, may do something, but I doubt it. Power is in the hands of money. St. John the Baptist couldn’t drag prominent people into the desert to listen to him now. They wouldn’t even bother about cutting off his head.’

Jim listened, and went away convinced that the church couldn’t help him, or herself. There was no backing in her for revolution, and no life possible without revolt.

It was five years since Jim had worked with his hands.

He went down to the docks to look for work. It was a slack time, and he had to wait for two weeks before he got taken on.

Jim hated taking the job when it came, for he was safe, and the men fighting and scrambling in the queue behind him were not safe.

But it was no use waiting for some one who could afford to miss a chance.

They all stood without a margin, with their eyes fixed on luck.

When luck failed them they sank like stones, and bitter waters closed over their heads.

Jim felt drowned with each man who went under, but he wouldn’t drown dumb. He spoke, and the men listened to him at last, for he was one of themselves now. He was acquainted with their infirmities. He poured out his scorn on the England who held her children so cheap that she could not give them work. He joined the Docker’s Union, and fed their meetings with his reasoned, inflammatory anger.

His brain was on fire, and the heavy, mechanical day’s work left him free to think.

He left no secrecy about his past. He told the dockers who he was and what he had done. It was not such an unusual story told to such an audience, but what Jim had made of it afterwards was unusual. He poured out to them his motives for the future. He wanted to get better wages, shorter hours, more centralization, more control of these mysterious docks; they loaded and unloaded for capricious and invisible powers.

He had all their sympathy for his passion and his resentment against the conditions of labour, but he wanted more than better conditions. He wanted, with the same passion, with the same vitriolic, practical invective, a scheme of things by which the free hours and added incomes would not be thrown away. Jim wanted to lift character. The men were puzzled by this attitude. They could understand an agitator or a parson, or even one or two noted men on the dockers’ side, who were priests and called themselves fathers and had combined the two attributes, but these infrequent visitors had vanished. They had stood for a while with a mysterious church behind them, into which they had finally withdrawn, a dream, which was as foreign to the life of a docker as a bird-cage in the life of a wild bird.

But Jim had no church behind him, and he was one of themselves.

He spoke out-doors and in public houses, and finally, as the weather grew worse and his audiences larger, he hired a room and gave night classes and Sunday lectures in it. The Sunday lectures were a curious blend of revolt against material pressure and discipline for the climbing soul. Indiscreet and challenging, they were flung, formless and alive, on to the raw attention of the men.

They did not flatter the dockers, but they interested them. They took a light straight into each man’s soul and held it there.

The little room grew crowded out and gave place to an empty factory.

Jim was one of the most important speakers for the union by then, and he hoped to see it run on French syndicalist lines. He did not believe in any compromise with capital. Compromises were only safe with equal partners. The powers of the employers were still too great. They had behind them riches, education, newspapers, the church, the state, and the army, with a front as solid as a cathedral. The men had only their numbers and their necessities. Unity could give them power, and it was for unity that Jim struggled. Unity and the overthrow of personal selfishness.

He had to give up his dock labour to devote himself to his union and his weekly talks.

He handed the empty factory over to a committee, the men ran it and paid for it. Jim only spoke in it.

He was responsible for nothing but his own ideas.

It was as if the birds of the air carried them about, and brought him in a harvest. Men who remembered his name from the university debating society, offered to take over night classes and run boys’ clubs and holiday funds for him. A Mr. and Mrs. Hodgkins, two devout and free-thinking young people, came down to Poplar to live near him as independent workers under his guidance.

Jim saw them, trembled before the fixed eyes and unmodulated opinions of Mrs. Hodgkins, and loved the thin, feverish face of her young husband. They talked to him in turn, steadily and for hours; he saw they looked on the millennium in the light of a model tenement house, where all the inhabitants would clothe themselves in blue serge bloomers, irrespective of sex, and eat cheese. But he saw, too, that they loved human beings. Before they had finished talking, Jim had handed over to them the organisation of his surprising church.

He had not meant it to be a church, but Mr. and Mrs. Hodgkins persuaded him that it was. They told him they were prepared to be called the Rev. and Mrs. Hodgkins, and to be Jim’s assistant ministers.

‘Well,’ Jim replied, when Mr. Hodgkins ceased to expound his innocent, thin daydreams, and Mrs. Hodgkins relieved him for a moment from her more fixed and sanitary plans, ‘Be what you like, only remember I’m Jim Barton, and I am never going to be anything else. I don’t mind what you do to the factory as long as the committee run the accounts. It’s the people’s church (if it is a church) not mine. They elect the committee and have a general meeting every six months.

‘They can turn me out at any moment, and they must be able to do the same with you. Meanwhile, I speak every Sunday night at seven. I say what I like, and you can do the same. But you must remember they are equally at liberty to object to it. If you take my advice, you won’t say anything about women wearing bloomers and men not eating meat. Because these kind of things aren’t going to happen yet in Poplar.’

The Rev. Mr. and Mrs. Hodgkins agreed to go slowly and build up public opinion. They stopped the factory being called a factory, and named it Calvary Church.

The committee was a little restive at first, but Mrs. Hodgkins magnetised them. She wore a cassock and a mortar-board and bought a brass eagle.

She told the committee that they had everything in their hands, and then proceeded to put into their heads what their hands should perform. The committee soon began to like the ideas with which she provided them. They chose an altar and a pulpit; they replaced a harmonium by an organ, and told Jim he must stop using a chair and sitting in the middle of them.

They got proper chairs in tidy rows instead of backless benches, and in the end they had red hassocks.

Everything became more like everything else and much more comfortable.

They hired a real organist who liked anthems instead of a shoemaker who could only play, ‘Dare to be a Daniel.’

The most important members of the congregation with adequate lung power went into the choir and wore surplices and cassocks.

Jim took no apparent notice of any of these changes. He agreed to the cassocks, which he found very uncomfortable, but not even Mrs. Hodgkins could prevail upon him to wear a stole.

‘You are a priest in the eyes of God,’ Mrs. Hodgkins reminded him firmly, ‘for ever—after the order of Melchisidek.’

‘Still, he didn’t wear a stole,’ Jim objected, ‘and I don’t need to remind God what I am. It’s no use setting up church people’s backs for a little thing like a stole. You wait a bit, we shall have heavier jobs than stoles to fight about before we’re through.’

Mrs. Hodgkins shook her head gloomily. She was one of Jim’s most devoted disciples, but at the bottom of her heart she wished he was different; he had no eye for the external. It seemed to Mrs. Hodgkins that if her husband had had a stronger throat and continued to do exactly as she told him, he would have made a better preacher than Jim.

London slowly awoke to the existence of Calvary.

It seemed there was a remarkable man who preached in Poplar and who wasn’t a proper clergyman at all.

There were packed services three times a day, on the lines of a refined and up-to-date Church of England.

The Service of Benediction had been lifted from the Church of Rome by Mrs. Hodgkins with a lightness of hand worthy of Eliza. There was a great deal of popular music, and the social side of the work had the effect of a mosquito upon the Local Government Board. It sang songs of triumph, stung, and wouldn’t keep still enough to be killed.

The committee ran the financial side of the church, and the people ran the committee, but Mrs. Hodgkins ran everything else, including Jim.

Jim knew that she ran him. He realised that he hadn’t meant to have a church, and that now he had one, and that he hadn’t meant to be any kind of a clergyman, and now he was some kind of a one.

But he was the vice-president of the Dockers’ Union, too, and he still said what he liked.

This was a great achievement, but Jim was not universally popular. If he had not been a great orator nobody would have listened to him.

His mistake was that he saw there wasn’t any side which was wholly in the right. He wouldn’t flatter the people he loved at the expense of the people they hated. He had to speak the truth, and it cost him many disciples.

When he fought against poor wages, long hours and interference with personal liberty, he could count on his influence over those he fought for; but when he turned on them the same shafts of indignation and ridicule, to eradicate evils at least as deep in their lives and his own, he met with no support.

No one in Poplar wanted to see that Christianity is just as much against hostility, unfairness and tyranny in poor people as it is against these characteristics in the rich, and that what it really requires is an abolition of personal selfishness.

The people of Calvary Church wanted to be told that they were the elect. They knew they were being respectable against heavy odds, and they thought this ought to be enough.

They resented being told that respectability wasn’t Christianity, and they didn’t want the ‘Down and Outers’ in the church at all.

‘If they go, I go,’ Jim said grimly. ‘If you’ve got an ex-convict for a minister you ought to be able to put up with a few criminals in the congregation.’

But after all, Jim couldn’t be everywhere at once, and ‘Down and Outers,’ those rare, shy birds, fugitively won from the placid nursery of their sins, fled back to them at the first sign of the righteous cold shoulders of their brothers. They came to Jim by night, for bread and love; but they didn’t want anything else.

There were men he had struggled to save and gone down with when they sank; there were women he had protected and rescued from an old and ready bondage.

They came to Jim because they knew his compassion was without judgment. They felt that all he wanted was to share their bad times, and give them his strength for their unequal fights. Even when they couldn’t fight, something in him helped them.

His door was always open, day and night. It caused a great deal of scandal. Mrs. Hodgkins told Jim he ought to consider the weaker brother. Jim looked at her reflectively. ‘Not before the weakest,’ he said quietly. Mrs. Hodgkins said no more, but she started a night shelter for women.

Jim did what he could to get them to go to it, but most of them were afraid of shelters.

When they could be persuaded to go, Mrs. Hodgkins managed them much better than Jim.

Jim didn’t understand women. He wanted them to be free and safe; but free first.

Mrs. Hodgkins gave them good hot tea and told them how wicked they were; and that was what they had expected.

There was a good deal of talk about getting Jim out of Poplar. The clergyman of the parish, who had been happily asleep for thirty years, woke up suddenly and strongly objected to the presence of a building called ‘Calvary,’ which was full, three hundred yards away from a church called St. Botolph’s, which was empty.

Bishops objected. Some tactless person from the west end hearing that Jim’s landlord was about to turn him out of Calvary, paid a fancy price for the site and handed it over to the committee.

There was nothing further for the authorities to do then, except to say how disgraceful it was, and wait for Jim to do something illegal.

When fashionable people read the small paragraphs in the paper about how disgraceful Jim was, they flocked to hear him.

Jim’s mordant wit became extremely popular in the west end, and his passion was as stirring as a play. People even wanted to meet him, especially when they found he had no wife, and wouldn’t accept their invitations.

But Jim did not keep this section of his admirers very long.

The first great dock strike branded him. This wasn’t only an amusing man who made Christianity thrilling. He was one of those dreadful people who come to bring not peace but a sword. He not only attacked people’s souls, but their interests.

It ceased to be bishops who thundered against Jim now; it was the whole class from which bishops spring.

Jim had prepared for the strike for years. He had devoted his whole energy into increasing the Union and its supplies, and had studied with secrecy and passion the points in the armour of the shipowners. When he struck, he struck hard and formidably.

It was a terrible and embittering time. Inconvenient for the shipowners and merchants, and devastating for the dockers themselves.

Famine, illness, and awful lassitude seized the miles of small gray houses, seized and shook the heart out of them for nine long weeks.

Then the strike was broken. The powers against them, outraged and well-handled, were too strong.

There was no general co-operation of labour to come to their help.

Their comrades in other trades watched their struggle with sullen eyes, in which sympathy was powerless to overcome the timidity of centuries.

They watched a great fire kindle, flicker, and die out.

The strike was broken, but not the spirit which made it. The dockers had not been able to get what they wanted, but they had shaken power.

Jim laughed when he read Mr. Egerton’s invitation to dinner. It was a grim laugh, for he had not had a dinner for some time—all his resources were stretched to the uttermost, and he never took more than would just keep him going.

‘They’re frightened,’ he said to himself. ‘Good—well, so are we, but we shan’t show it, and they have—this card is as good as a white feather. I can hear them saying, “We must get hold of the man, he’s dangerous.” Well, I’ve got to be dangerous, but if I meet them I shall know better, perhaps, just how dangerous I have got to be.’

Jim spoke with the pleasant zeal of one who is prepared to meet his enemies on their own ground, and without any presentiment that he might be called upon to face a far more difficult problem—the presence of a friend in the house of his enemies.