in good company 35

in good company 35

And here I may interpolate that, a soldier’s grandson as he was, all

Stone’s boyhood longings were set on soldiering. Only the knowledge

that it was the heart’s desire of the father and mother he so revered

that he should follow his father by taking Holy Orders, and later

the conviction that he was called of God to the ministry, kept him

from a commission in the Army. His renunciation of his boyhood’s

dream was the first great act of obedience in a life of consistent

obedience and devotion to duty. The sacrifice--as it was--of his own

wishes, was made manfully and uncomplainingly, and he threw himself

whole-heartedly thereafter into his ministerial work. But the pang

remained, and to the last, when he spoke of soldiering, there was

that in his voice and in his eye which reminded one of an exile,

looking across far waters to the land of his birth. To Stone, to have

led a company, or a half-company, and for the first time, into action

in the service of his Sovereign and of his country, would have been,

in the words of George Meredith, the very “bend of passion’s rapids,”

as supreme a moment as Rossetti’s “sacred hour for which the years

did sigh.” That he would have made a gallant soldier, I am sure, but

not a great one. Leading a charge, he would have been irresistible,

but his was too highly-strung, too impulsive a temperament, calmly to

plan out and to carry through the cold-blooded details of a campaign.

He was to the last a soldier in heart, if not in looks, for, by the

beard and a certain breezy bluffness of presence, he might very well

have passed for a sailor. The head was finely moulded and on large

leonine lines, the forehead broad, full and lofty, the nose strong,

straight, purposeful and well-proportioned, and the set of the firm

mouth, and the shaping of the determined chin, were in keeping with

the forcefulness and the frankness of the eyes and of the whole

face. The darkness--so dark as to be almost black--of the straight

thick hair, which was brushed up and off the forehead, accentuated

the Saxon ruddiness of his complexion and the glossy red-brown (like

that of a newly-fallen chestnut) of his crisply curling moustache and

beard, which in sunlight were almost auburn.

 

His eyes instantly challenged and held your own, for he invariably

looked the person to whom he spoke fully and fearlessly, but never

inquisitively (one cannot think of the word in connection with

Stone), in the face; and it was his eyes that most remained in your

memory when he was gone. “Intent,” set, and full of fire, the look

in them was like the spoken word of command which calls soldiers to

attention. Brown in colouring, they were not the hard, glittering

and unrevealing brown which one sometimes sees in woman or in man,

but eyes that, when he was reading poetry, could shine as if his

soul were a lit taper, of which they were the flame. At other times,

I have seen them as merry as a happy boy’s, as untroubled as cool

clear agate stones at the bottom of a brook. His were eyes that

recalled the love and devotion which look out at us from the eyes

of some nobly-natured dog, yet eyes that when he was preaching, and

the very soul within him was trembling under a terrible sense of

responsibility to his people and to God, could burn fiercely red,

like a fanned coal in a furnace, but always as true, brave and loyal

eyes as ever looked out of human head.

 

 

III

 

In the fact that Stone was at heart intensely human lay the secret

of his hold upon the hearts of others. I have claimed high place for

him and have called him by high name, but a “saint” at least I have

never called him nor claimed him to be. We have been told that it

is impossible to be heroic in a high hat, nor is it easy to picture

a “saint” in a very pepper of a temper (to say nothing of a boating

sweater) at loggerheads, and more than half minded to knock down, a

foul-mouthed bargee. Stone’s Homeric laughter would not have accorded

ill with some Valhalla of the gods, but his rollicking sense of fun,

his schoolboy high spirits, still remembered affectionately and

joyfully as they are by some who were with him, first as a boy, and

thereafter as more than a middle-aged man at Charterhouse, suggest

neither a nimbus nor the Saints’ Calendar.

 

In later life, when the endless calls upon his time barred him from

following, other than rarely, the field sports that he so loved,

and even from the exercise which was so necessary for a man of his

physique, Stone not only put on weight, as happens always with

athletes out of training, but developed a tendency to stoutness--not,

I gather, from some study of the Old Masters, in keeping with the

character of Saints, who as a class do not appear to run to flesh.

 

Neither in looks nor in his life was there anything about Stone of

the ascetic who, living aloof and apart, tells over to himself--the

beads, as it were, in a rosary of self-mortification--the list of

pleasures denied, until in the contemplation of his self-denials he

comes at last to find a melancholy pleasure. Stone, on the contrary,

was the most natural and normal of men, with a healthy appetite for

the good things of this world. If he fasted, as was the case during

such a season as Holy Week, none knew of it except himself. He held

that the season, in which the Church bids us look back in awe and

worship upon the agony of our Lord’s Passion, is not a time for

bodily indulgence by Christ’s minister. But fasting in a monkish

sense, or as followed by the Roman Catholic Church, he neither

followed himself nor enjoined others to follow, and such fasting as

he practised was more in the way of salutary discipline than anything

else, and he imposed no fasting upon others.

 

None the less, though Stone was, as I have said, no saint, I doubt

whether any saint who was ever canonised had half so child-pure a

heart or lived half so stainless a life. His was not the negative

purity of the cold-blooded, the anæmic, or the passionless, to

whom the temptations of the flesh made small appeal. He was a

full-blooded, healthy and whole-natured man, a splendid “animal,”

by whom the animal (which by God’s wisdom and grace is in us all)

was not done violence to, stamped down, crushed out, and unnaturally

suppressed, to his own physical and spiritual detriment and even

danger. That is the unwisest of all courses to pursue. By mutilating

and maiming the beautiful work and image of God in us, which since

He made it must in itself be innocent and beautiful, we sin against

our own human nature and against God. Human nature is like a tree.

It must have space in which to fulfil the purpose for which it was

intended, and in which to grow. Crush down, and seek to crush out,

its natural expansion, and it takes distorted shapes (crippled

limbs, as it were, on the tree of life) and hideous fungus-like

boles and excrescences appear on what would otherwise have been a

fair, straight, and shapely young growth. In Stone (to return to my

original metaphor) the animal, which is in us all, was not a beast

to be bludgeoned down, or to drag us to earth, but a beautiful wild

and winged creature which brings strength and gladness to human

life, and, wisely guided and controlled, may even bear us aloft and

afar. In Stone it was so dominated by an iron will, so sublimated

by knightly and noble ideals, and by his innate purity of soul, as

to make impossible what was gross, sensual or base. And may I add,

perhaps wickedly, that the animal in him was sometimes a joy as

when by sheer brute force, if you like so to call it, he fell upon

(so I was once told) three blackguards who, late one dark night,

were foully assaulting a poor girl in what was then a lonely part

of London Fields. Stone heard her screams, rushed to her help, and

knocked out his first man with one blow. Then he closed with number

two, and trouncing him so soundly that the fellow howled for mercy,

flung him to the ground, and made off after number three, who had

taken to his heels.

 

I can well imagine Stone’s sportsmanlike joy and the flash of his

eyes when, as I am informed, he said, “Thank heaven I learned to use

my fists at Charterhouse! and thank heaven for what rowing did for my

biceps at Oxford. I think I’ve given those two scoundrels a lesson.”

He shook his head reminiscently and mournfully. “I’d have given five

pounds to have got my fists on that third rascal’s hide. Honestly,

I’ve enjoyed pommelling those other two scoundrels more than anything

that has happened since I came to Haggerston.”

 

Then, seeing, perhaps, a whimsical look in his companion’s eye, and

perhaps already asking himself whether “taking on” three blackguards

at fisticuffs, and badly punishing two out of the three in a fair

fight, would by every one be considered decorous or becoming in

a clergyman, he broke into infectious laughter that was directed

entirely against himself.

 

No, apart from the question whether this story (I tell it as it was

told me long ago) be true or not true, I do not claim for S. J.

Stone that he was a saint. To some men the consciousness of what

Stevenson called “a healthy dash of the brute” necessitates an ever

watchful “on guard” lest one day the brute spring out to overpower

the angel. To Stone--so wholly had he made honour, purity, and truth

the very habit of his life--a lapse into anything false, impure,

or dishonourable, into thinking or speaking, or even into allowing

others, in his presence, to speak what was evil or slanderous, had

become impossible. Had the proofs, or what seemed like the proofs,

of some base act on Stone’s part been brought to the knowledge of

any friend who knew him, as I knew him, that friend would not have

stooped to examine them. His reply would have been, “I know this

man, and though I am aware that he can be prejudiced, stubborn,

overbearing, irritable, and that faults of temper, errors of

judgment, and the like, may be laid to his charge, I know him well

enough to be sure that of what is base he is incapable. Were all the

facts before me, they would do no more than reveal him, possibly in a

quixotic, but at least in a nobly chivalrous light.”

 

For all his quixotism, chivalry, and hot-headedness, Stone held so

strongly that, as Christ’s minister, a clergyman must in certain

matters be so entirely beyond even a shadow of reproach, that he was

singularly wise and guarded in his dealings with the other sex. The

foolish girls or women who go simpering to a clergyman, especially if

a bachelor as Stone was, to ask advice on love-affairs and the like,

he instantly if considerately dismissed to seek the advice of their

mother or of some good woman known to him; and at all times, and upon

all questions, he avoided seeing women-callers alone--not because he

feared evil in them or in himself, but because he felt he owed it to

his sacred office to avoid even the appearance of anything upon which

evil-thinking folk might choose to put an evil construction.

 

He was not without experiences--what clergyman is?--of, in other

respects, worthy and well-meaning women who, even in connection with

Church work, contrive to set people by the ears, or otherwise to

cause dissension and trouble. With these he was impatient. He did not

hesitate to deal summarily with them, nor firmly, if considerately,

to speak his mind; but Womanhood, I might almost say every woman, he

held, if only for his own mother’s sake, if only because of a woman

the Saviour of the world was born, in a reverence that no folly or

sin could altogether break down. I have heard him speak to the poor

harlot of the street--his “Sister” as he would not have hesitated to

call her--with sorrowful courtliness, and with the pitifulness, the

gentleness, and the consideration, which one uses to (as indeed not a

few of such unhappy women are) an erring and ignorant child.

 

I remember, on another and very different occasion, a girl of the

soft and silly type coming to the vicarage one day when I was with

Stone--I think she came about a Confirmation Class. She had a certain

innocence in her face; not the challenging, starry purity that one

sees in some faces, but a negative, babyish innocence, which was

pretty enough, and appealing in its way, but that meant no more,

probably, than that the girl had not yet had to make choice for

herself between good and evil.

 

“Did you notice the flower-like beauty of that child’s face?” Stone

asked me, when she had gone. “In the presence of such exquisite

purity and innocence,” he went on gravely, and with intense reverence

in his voice, “one feels convicted of sin, as it were. One is so

conscious of one’s own coarseness, grossness, and impurity as to feel

unworthy to stand in such presence!”

 

And all the time, the white armour of purity in which he was clad,

the armour and purity of his own soul’s--a strong man’s--forging,

was compared with hers, as is the purity of fine gold tried in the

furnace to metal mixed with base earth and newly brought all untested from a mine.