Cinderella in the South | Page 9

I said. 'Yet not without hope,' he
answered. We were driving back about the same time next fore-noon. A
great fire was rushing wind-driven over that rolling upland. 'At last,' he
said. I sighed. A mile further on we came into the smiling green vlei.
'This was black a while back,' he said. 'Doesn't the fire help a bit after
all? Who wants that moldy stuffy old feed, isn't it parabolic of that
fusty Dutch-Anglo dorp and its prejudices? What are they meant for,
and it? 'Fuel of fire,' say I.' I smiled indulgently. Since we had got into
town things had happened. We had had our memorial services for the
Dead that last night, and this same morning. It was the week of All
Hallows and All Souls, a time that often tempts me to homesickness.
One is apt to think of hazy, yellow-leaved, dreamy times in old
England just about then not to speak of old familiar faces. That night of
the first Service was very starry, and the morning of the second Service
was brilliantly clear, the rain seemed to be very far away for the time
being. People had come at night rather well. Not to speak of one of the
school managers having died quite recently, news of one of our police's
death out scouting had leaked through from German East. I preached
Paradise to that attentive congregation in the iron-roofed church that
natives had been so discouraged from attending. I was glad one
straggled into the back seats I had battled for, just to demonstrate one's
principle of barring out the color-bar. It was all very soul-soothing,
thought I, that Memorial Evensong, the stars outside, and the golden
evening brightening in the west of the hymn, and the lesson about
white robes and palms, presumably of victory or harvest-homing. My
friend waited for me outside under the lamp. 'Very fine,' he said in his
grimmest way, 'the Anglican view of hopeful souls turned
promiscuously into a sort of orchard and rose-garden with plenty of
light to gild them, and rest to wrap them.' I smiled. 'True enough in its
way,' I said. 'There's another side doubtless, yet the preaching of that
doesn't appeal to me particularly. I don't want to work on people's
apprehensions. But don't let me stand in your light. You're a lay reader
with a bishop's license. You can preach and welcome to-morrow

morning.' 'Trust me not to refuse,' he said. 'I don't want to play up to
apprehensions exactly. I want to state what seem to me to be relentless
laws of cause and effect, and to show the only way with any sort of
hope in Christ that I happen by faith to see.' So he had preached that
morning. He preached quite simply on the trying of every man's work,
on the burning of flimsy work, on the saving of the workman, yet so as
by fire. There was a small but select gathering in the Church of Saint
Tertullian; two of the school managers even were there. Surely I had
baited the trap, I thought guiltily as I looked upon them, by my
over-amiabilities of the night before.
Yet that side was true enough, the side I had preached. And was not
this side also true in its way? The preacher seemed at first to be
referring to my own obsession with the words 'resist not evil,' my
following of Tolstoy in my own evangel. He was warm in his
commendation. 'And yet,' he said, 'let us remember a just God's
resistance to evil. He resists and judges righteously, where we may
neither resist nor judge. If we agree not to resist evil violently for Jesus'
sake, yet ought we not to warn people of their God's unrelenting
resistance? While we would not obscure the fear of our just God by the
fear of us unjust men, let us remember our just God!' He spoke of
judgment and of purgation, of what seemed to be indicated hereafter by
the stupidity and cruelty of people's prejudices in South Africa. He
painted quite luridly the purgation he anticipated as likely for such as
would dare to wreck a child's education, and possibly her life for a
color-scruple. He glowed and kindled. There was no mistaking his drift.
He painted the fires of purgation. He painted, too, their presumable fuel,
much as I believe old preachers limned the flames of hell and their
denizens. 'And it may lengthen out into hell! Who knows?' he kept
interjecting. 'Who knows but that that prejudiced spirit you play with
may be a damned spirit after all, fuel for the fire that is not quenched,
food for the worm that does not die?'
T could not have preached happily on his lines, but for all