St. Augustine Belives That Genesis Must Be Read on a Literal Level Is This True

  A. V. Laider

By MAX BEERBOHM

Author of "Enoch Soames," "Zuleika Dobson," etc.

I UNPACKED my things and went down to await luncheon.

It was good to be hither again in this picayune onetime sleepy hostel by the sea. Hostel I say, though it spelt itself without an "south" and even placed a circumflex to a higher place the "o." It made no other pretension. It was very cozy indeed.

I had been here merely a yr before, in mid-February, after an attack of flu. And now I had returned, after an assault of influenza. Cypher was changed. It had been raining when I left, and the waiter-- at that place was but a single, a very onetime waiter--had told me it was only a shower. That waiter was nonetheless here, not a twenty-four hour period older. And the shower had not ceased.

Steadfastly it fell on to the sands, steadfastly into the atomic number 26-gray sea. I stood looking out at it from the windows of the hall, admiring information technology very much. There seemed to exist little else to do. What niggling there was I did. I mastered the contents of a blue hand-nib which, pinned to the wall just beneath the framed engraving of Queen Victoria's Coronation, gave token of a concert that was to exist held--or, rather, was to have been held some weeks ago--in the town hall for the benefit of the Life-Boat Fund. I looked at the barometer, tapped information technology, was not the wiser. I wandered to the letter-board.

These letter-boards ever fascinate me. Usually some two or three of the envelops stuck into the cross-garterings accept a sure newness and freshness. They seem sure they will yet be claimed. Why not? Why shouldn't John Doe, Esq., or Mrs. Richard Roe turn upwards at whatever moment? I practise not know. I can only say that goose egg in the world seems to me more unlikely. Thus information technology is that these immature bright envelops touch my heart even more than than do their dusty and sallowed seniors. Sour resignation is less touching than impatience for what volition not exist, than the eagerness that has to wane and wither. Soured beyond mensurate these old envelops are. They are not about so nice as they should be to the young ones. They lose no chance of sneering and discouraging. Such dialogues as this are only too frequent:

A Very Young Envelop: Something in me whispers that he will come to-day!

A Very Old Envelop: He? Well, that'due south skilful! Ha, ha, ha! Why didn't he come up last week, when you came? What reason have you lot for supposing he'll e'er come at present? It isn't as if he were a bedfellow of the identify. He's never been here. His name is utterly unknown here. You don't suppose he'southward coming on the chance of finding you?

A. Five. Y. East.: It may seem silly, but--something in me whispers--

A. V. O. E.: Something in you? 1 has just to wait at you lot to see there's nothing in you just a note scribbled to him by a cousin. Look at me! In that location are three sheets, closely written, in me. The lady to whom I am addressed--

A. V. Y. E.: Yes, sir, yes; y'all told me all about her yesterday.

A. V. O. E.: And I shall practice so to-day and to-morrow and every day and all solar day long. That young lady was a widow. She stayed here many times. She was fragile, and the air suited her. She was poor, and the tariff was simply within her means. She was lonely, and had demand of love. I take in me for her a passionate avowal and strictly honorable proposal, written to her, later many crude copies, by a admirer who had made her acquaintance nether this very roof. He was rich, he was mannerly, he was in the prime of life. He had asked if he might write to her. She had flutteringly granted his request. He posted me to her the mean solar day after his return to London. I looked forward to being torn open up past her. I was very sure she would wear me and my contents side by side to her bosom. She was gone. She had left no address. She never returned. This I tell y'all, and shall continue to tell you lot, not because I want any of your callow sympathy,--no, thank you!--but that you lot may judge how much less than slight are the probabilities that you yourself--

Simply my reader has overheard these dialogues as oftentimes every bit I. He wants to know what was odd virtually this particular letter of the alphabet-board earlier which I was standing. At first glance I saw cypher odd about it. But presently I distinguished a handwriting that was vaguely familiar. It was mine. I stared, I wondered. There is ever a slight shock in seeing an envelop of 1's own afterward it has gone through the postal service. Information technology looks equally if it had gone through so much. But this was the first time I had e'er seen an envelop of mine eating its heart out in bondage on a letter-board. This was outrageous. This was hardly to be believed. Sheer kindness had impelled me to write to "A. V. Laider, Esq.," and this was the result! I hadn't minded receiving no reply. Only now, indeed, did I remember that I hadn't received one. In multitudinous London the memory of A. V. Laider and his trouble had soon passed from my mind. Simply--well, what a lesson non to go out of one'due south way to write to casual acquaintances!

My envelop seemed not to recognize me as its writer. Its gaze was the more piteous for being blank. All the same had I once been gazed at by a dog that I had lost and, after many days, found in the Battersea Abode. "I don't know who you lot are, merely, whoever yous are, claim me, take me out of this!" That was my dog's entreatment. This was the appeal of my envelop.

I raised my hand to the letter-board, pregnant to effect a swift and lawless rescue, but paused at sound of a footstep backside me. The old waiter had come to tell me that my luncheon was ready. I followed him out of the hall, not, however, without a vivid glance across my shoulder to reassure the footling captive that I should come back.

I had the precipitous ambition of the convalescent, and this the body of water air had whetted already to a finer border. In touch with a dozen oysters, and with stout, I before long shed away the unreasoning anger I had felt confronting A. V. Laider. I became merely sorry for him that he had non received a letter of the alphabet which might maybe have comforted him. In touch with cutlets, I felt how sorely he had needed comfort. And anon, by the big bright fireside of that pocket-size dark smoking-room where, a yr ago, on the terminal evening of my stay here, he and I had at length spoken to each other, I reviewed in item the tragic experience he had told me; and I simply reveled in reminiscent sympathy with him.

A. 5. LAIDER--I had looked him upward in the visitors'-book on the night of his arrival. I myself had arrived the day earlier, and had been rather deplorable there was no one else staying here. A convalescent past the sea likes to have some ane to detect, to wonder nigh, at repast-time. I was glad when, on my 2d evening, I plant seated at the table opposite to mine some other guest. I was the gladder because he was just the right kind of guest. He was enigmatic. By this I mean that he did non await soldierly or financial or creative or anything definite at all. He offered a clean slate for speculation. And, give thanks heaven! he evidently wasn't going to spoil the fun by engaging me in conversation afterward on. A decently unsociable man, anxious to be left alone.

The heartiness of his appetite, in contrast with his extreme fragility of aspect and limpness of demeanor, assured me that he, too, had just had flu. I liked him for that. Now and over again our eyes met and were instantly parted. We managed, as a rule, to observe each other indirectly. I was certain it was not merely considering he had been ill that he looked interesting. Nor did it seem to me that a spiritual melancholy, though I imagined him lamentable at the best of times, was his sole nugget. I conjectured that he was clever. I thought he might also be imaginative. At first glance I had mistrusted him. A shock of white pilus, combined with a young face and nighttime eyebrows, does somehow make a human being look similar a charlatan. But it is foolish to be guided by an accident of color. I had shortly rejected my kickoff impression of my fellow-diner. I found him very sympathetic.

Anywhere but in England information technology would be impossible for two lonely men, howsoever much reduced by influenza, to spend v or six days in the same hostel and not exchange a single word. That is one of the charms of England. Had Laider and I been born and bred in whatsoever other state than Eng we should have get acquainted before the end of our first evening in the small smoking-room, and accept found ourselves irrevocably committed to go on talking to each other throughout the residuum of our visit. Nosotros migh

t, it is truthful, have happened to like each other more than any one nosotros had always met. This off take a chance may have occurred to us both. Merely information technology counted for nothing confronting the sure surrender of quietude and freedom. We slightly bowed to each other every bit we entered or left the dining-room or smoking-room, and as nosotros met on the wide-spread sands or in the shop that had a modest and faded circulating library. That was all. Our mutual aloofness was a positive bond between us.

Had he been much older than I, the responsibleness for our silence would of class have been his lonely. But he was not, I judged, more than v or six years ahead of me, and thus I might without venial take taken information technology on myself to perform that difficult and perilous feat which English people call, with a shiver, "breaking the ice." He had reason, therefore, to be as grateful to me as I to him. Each of us, non the less bluntly because silently, recognized his obligation to the other. And when, on the final evening of my stay, the ice actually was broken there was no sick-will between us: neither of u.s. was to blame.

Information technology was a Sunday evening. I had been out for a long terminal walk and had come up in very late to dinner. Laider had left his tabular array almost directly after I sat downwardly to mine. When I entered the smoking-room I institute him reading a weekly review which I had bought the day before. It was a crisis. He could not silently offering nor could I have silently accepted, six-pence. Information technology was a crisis. We faced it like men. He made, by word of oral fissure, a svelte apology. Verbally, non past signs, I besought him to get on reading. But this, of course, was a vain counsel of perfection. The social code forced us to talk at present. We obeyed it similar men. To reassure him that our position was not then desperate as it might seem, I took the primeval opportunity to mention that I was going away early on adjacent morning. In the tone of his "Oh, are you?" he tried bravely to imply that he was distressing, even now, to hear that. In a style, perhaps, he really was sorry. Nosotros had got on and then well together, he and I. Nothing could efface the memory of that. Nay, we seemed to exist striking it off even now. Influenza was not our sole theme. We passed from that to the aforesaid weekly review, and to a correspondence that was raging therein on faith and reason.

This correspondence had now reached its 4th and penultimate stage--its Australian stage. It is difficult to see why these correspondences spring up; ane only knows that they do leap up, suddenly, like street crowds. At that place comes, it would seem, a moment when the whole English-speaking race is unconsciously bursting to have its say well-nigh some one thing--the split infinitive, or the habits of migratory birds, or organized religion and reason, or what-not. Whatever weekly review happens at such a moment to contain a reference, however remote, to the theme in question reaps the storm. Gusts of messages come up in from all corners of the British Isles. These are before long reinforced by Canada in full blast. A few weeks later the Anglo-Indians weigh in. In due class we accept the help of our Australian cousins. By that time, however, we of the mother country have got our 2d wind, and and then determined are we to make the most of it that at last even the editor suddenly loses patience and says, "This correspondence must now terminate.--Ed." and wonders why on earth he e'er immune anything then tiresome and idiotic to brainstorm.

I pointed out to Laider one of the Australian letters that had especially pleased me in the current effect. It was from "A Melbourne Man," and was of the sharp kind which declares that "all your correspondents accept been groping in the dark" and then settles the whole matter in one short sharp flash. The flash in this example was "Reason is religion, organized religion reason--that is all we know on earth and all we need to know." The writer then inclosed his bill of fare and was, etc., "A Melbourne Man." I said to Laider how very restful it was, after influenza, to read anything that meant nothing whatsoever. Laider was inclined to take the letter more than seriously than I, and to exist mildly metaphysical. I said that for me faith and reason were 2 carve up things, and equally I am no good at metaphysics, however mild, I offered a definite instance, to coax the talk on to footing where I should exist safer.

"Palmistry, for case," I said. "Deep down in my center I believe in palmistry."

Laider turned in his chair.

"You believe in palmistry?"

I hesitated.

"Yeah, somehow I exercise. Why? I haven't the slightest notion. I can give myself all sorts of reasons for laughing it to scorn. My common sense utterly rejects it. Of grade the shape of the hand means something, is more or less an alphabetize of character. But the thought that my past and future are neatly mapped out on my palms--" I shrugged my shoulders.

"Yous don't like that idea?" asked Laider in his gentle, rather academic voice.

"I only say information technology's a grotesque idea."

"Nonetheless you lot do believe in it?"

"I've a grotesque conventionalities in it, yes."

"Are you sure your reason for calling this thought 'grotesque' isn't merely that y'all dislike it?"

"Well," I said, with the thrilling hope that he was a companion in absurdity, "doesn't it seem grotesque to you?"

"It seems foreign."

"You lot believe in it?"

"Oh, absolutely."

"Hurrah!"

He smiled at my pleasure, and I, at the chance of reëntanglement in metaphysics, claimed him as continuing shoulder to shoulder with me against "A Melbourne Human being." This claim he gently disputed.

"You may think me very prosaic," he said, "but I tin't believe without evidence."

"Well, I'yard equally prosaic and equally at a disadvantage: I can't take my own belief every bit evidence, and I've no other bear witness to go on."

He asked me if I had ever made a study of palmistry. I said I had read one of Desbarolles'southward books years ago, and 1 of Heron-Allen's. But, he asked, had I tried to test them by the lines on my own hands or on the hands of my friends? I confessed that my actual practice in palmistry had been of a simply passive kind--the prompt extension of my palm to any ane who would be and so good equally to "read" it and truckle for a few minutes to my egoism. (I hoped Laider might do this.)

"Then I about wonder," he said, with his distressing smile, "that yous haven't lost your conventionalities, after all the nonsense yous must have heard. There are so many immature girls who go in for palmistry. I am sure all the 5 foolish virgins were 'awfully keen on it' and used to say, 'You lot can be led, but not driven,' and, 'You lot are likely to accept a serious illness between the ages of forty and 40-five,' and, 'Y'all are by nature rather lazy, but tin be very energetic by fits and starts.' And nearly of the professionals, I'm told, are as silly equally the young girls."

For the honor of the profession, I named iii practitioners whom I had found really adept at reading graphic symbol. He asked whether whatsoever of them had been correct about by events. I confessed that, equally a matter of fact, all three of them had been right in the main. This seemed to amuse him. He asked whether any of them had predicted anything which had since come true. I confessed that all three had predicted that I should exercise several things which I had since washed rather unexpectedly. He asked if I didn't accept this as, at whatever rate, a bit of evidence. I said I could only regard it as a fluke--a rather remarkable fluke.

The superiority of his sad smiling was offset to get on my fretfulness. I wanted him to see that he was as cool as I.

"Suppose," I said--"suppose, for the sake of argument, that y'all and I are nothing simply helpless automata created to do only this and that, and to have but that and this done to the states. Suppose, in fact, we haven't any free will any. Is it likely or believable that the Power which fashioned the states would take the problem to jot down in cipher on our easily just what was in store for us?"

Laider did not answer this question; he did simply annoyingly ask me some other.

"You believe in free will?"

"Yes, of course. I'll exist hanged if I'chiliad an automaton."

"And y'all believe in gratuitous volition just as in palmistry--without whatsoever reason?"

"Oh, no. Everything points to our having free will."

"Everything? What, for instance?"

This rather cornered me. I dodged out, as lightly as I could, by saying:

"I suppose yous would say it'south written in my mitt that I should be a believer in complimentary will."

"Ah, I've no uncertainty information technology is."

I held out my palms. But, to my smashing disappointment, he looked quickly away from them. He had ceased to grin. There was agitation in his voice as he explained that he never looked at people'due south hands now. "Never at present--never once again." He shook his head as though to trounce off some memory.

I was much embarrassed by my indiscretion. I hastened to tide over the awkward moment by maxim that if I could read easily I wouldn't, for fear of the awful things I might come across there.

"Atrocious things, yes," he whispered, nodding at the burn.

"Not," I said in self-defense force, "that there's annihilation very awful, so far as I know, to be read in my hands."

He turned his gaze from the fire to me.

"You aren't a murderer, for case?"

"Oh, no," I replied, with a nervous laugh.

"I am."

This was a more than awkward, it was a painful, moment for me; and I am afraid I must have started or winced, for he instantly begged my pardon.

"I don't know," he exclaimed, "why I said it. I'm usually a very reticent human. But sometimes--" He pressed his forehead. "What yous must recall of me!"

I begged him to dismiss the affair from his mind.

"It's very good of you lot to say that; merely--I've placed myself also as you in a false position. I ask you to believe that I'm not the sort of man who is 'wanted' or ever was 'wanted' by the police. I should be bowed out of whatsoever police-station at which I gave myself up. I'one thousand not a murderer in any bald sense of the discussion. No."

My face up must have perceptibly brightened, for, "Ah," he said, "don't imagine I'g not a murderer at all. Morally, I am." He looked at the clock. I pointed out that the night was immature. He bodacious me that his story was not a long 1. I bodacious him that I hoped it was. He said I was very kind. I denied this. He warned me that what he had to tell might rather tend to stiffen my unwilling organized religion in palmistry, and to milkshake my opposite and cherished religion in gratuitous will. I said, "Never mind." He stretched his hands pensively toward the fire. I settled myself back in my chair.

"My easily," he said, staring at the backs of them, "are the easily of a very weak human being. I cartel say you know enough of palmistry to come across that for yourself. You observe the slightness of the thumbs and of he two 'niggling' fingers. They are the hands of a weak and over-sensitive man--a man without confidence, a man who would certainly waver in an emergency. Rather Hamletish hands," he mused. "And I'k like Hamlet in other respects, too: I'grand no fool, and I've rather a noble disposition, and I'1000 unlucky. But Village was luckier than I in one thing: he was a murderer by accident, whereas the murders that I committed one twenty-four hours fourteen years agone--for I must tell y'all information technology wasn't one murder, but many murders that I committed--were all of them due to the wretched inherent weakness of my own wretched cocky.

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