The Dwelling Place of Light | Page 4

file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making
an entire meal of them. D.W.]

[NOTE: This author is a cousin of Sir Winston Churchill the Prime
Minister of England during World War II.]

THE DWELLING-PLACE OF LIGHT
By WINSTON CHURCHILL
1917

VOLUME 1.

CHAPTER I
In this modern industrial civilization of which we are sometimes wont
to boast, a certain glacier-like process may be observed. The
bewildered, the helpless-- and there are many--are torn from the parent
rock, crushed, rolled smooth, and left stranded in strange places. Thus
was Edward Bumpus severed and rolled from the ancestral ledge, from
the firm granite of seemingly stable and lasting things, into shifting
shale; surrounded by fragments of cliffs from distant lands he had never
seen. Thus, at five and fifty, he found himself gate-keeper of the
leviathan Chippering Mill in the city of Hampton.
That the polyglot, smoky settlement sprawling on both sides of an
historic river should be a part of his native New England seemed at
times to be a hideous dream; nor could he comprehend what had
happened to him, and to the world of order and standards and religious
sanctions into which he had been born. His had been a life of
relinquishments. For a long time he had clung to the institution he had
been taught to believe was the rock of ages, the Congregational Church,
finally to abandon it; even that assuming a form fantastic and unreal, as
embodied in the edifice three blocks distant from Fillmore Street which
he had attended for a brief time, some ten years before, after his arrival
in Hampton. The building, indeed, was symbolic of a decadent and
bewildered Puritanism in its pathetic attempt to keep abreast with the
age, to compromise with anarchy, merely achieving a nondescript
medley of rounded, knob-like towers covered with mulberry-stained
shingles. And the minister was sensational and dramatic. He looked

like an actor, he aroused in Edward Bumpus an inherent prejudice that
condemned the stage. Half a block from this tabernacle stood a Roman
Catholic Church, prosperous, brazen, serene, flaunting an eternal
permanence amidst the chaos which had succeeded permanence!
There were, to be sure, other Protestant churches where Edward
Bumpus and his wife might have gone. One in particular, which he
passed on his way to the mill, with its terraced steeple and classic
facade, preserved all the outward semblance of the old Order that once
had seemed so enduring and secure. He hesitated to join the decorous
and dwindling congregation,--the remains of a social stratum from
which he had been pried loose; and--more irony--this street, called
Warren, of arching elms and white-gabled houses, was now the abiding
place of those prosperous Irish who had moved thither from the
tenements and ruled the city.
On just such a street in the once thriving New England village of
Dolton had Edward been born. In Dolton Bumpus was once a name of
names, rooted there since the seventeenth century, and if you had cared
to listen he would have told you, in a dialect precise but colloquial, the
history of a family that by right of priority and service should have
been destined to inherit the land, but whose descendants were preserved
to see it delivered to the alien. The God of Cotton Mather and Jonathan
Edwards had been tried in the balance and found wanting. Edward
could never understand this; or why the Universe, so long static and
immutable, had suddenly begun to move. He had always been prudent,
but in spite of youthful "advantages," of an education, so called, from a
sectarian college on a hill, he had never been taught that, while
prudence may prosper in a static world, it is a futile virtue in a dynamic
one. Experience even had been powerless to impress this upon him. For
more than twenty years after leaving college he had clung to a clerkship
in a Dolton mercantile establishment before he felt justified in marrying
Hannah, the daughter of Elmer Wench, when the mercantile
establishment amalgamated with a rival--and Edward's services were
no longer required. During the succession of precarious places with
decreasing salaries he had subsequently held a terrified sense of
economic pressure had gradually crept over him, presently growing

strong enough, after two girls had arrived, to compel the abridgment of
the family ....It would be painful to record in detail the cracking-off
process, the slipping into shale, the rolling, the ending up in Hampton,
where Edward had now for some dozen years been keeper of one of the
gates in the frowning brick wall bordering the canal,--a position
obtained for him by a compassionate but not too prudent childhood
friend who had risen in life and knew the agent of the Chippering Mill,
Mr. Claude Ditmar.