finally they
overwhelmed him, whenever there was occasion for any exertion his
wife fell back upon pains and her "condition," and God sent them many
children, most of whom died, and so, by their coming and going, gave a
double exercise in the virtues of submission.

Resignation to God's will was the common device of these people in
the face of every duty and every emergency. There were no books in the
house; I doubt if either of them had retained the capacity for reading
consecutively for more than a minute or so, and it was with amazement
that day after day, over and above stale bread, one beheld food and
again more food amidst the litter that held permanent session on the
living-room table.

One might have doubted if either of them felt discomfort in this
dusty darkness of existence, if it was not that they did visibly seek
consolation. They sought this and found it of a Sunday, not in strong
drink and raving, but in imaginary draughts of blood. They met with
twenty or thirty other darkened and unclean people, all dressed in dingy
colours that would not show the dirt, in a little brick-built chapel
equipped with a spavined roarer of a harmonium, and there solaced their
minds on the thought that all that was fair and free in life, all that
struggled, all that planned and made, all pride and beauty and honour,
all fine and enjoyable things, were irrevocably damned to everlasting
torments. They were the self-appointed confidants of God's mockery of
his own creation. So at any rate they stick in my mind. Vaguer, and yet
hardly less agreeable than this cosmic jest, this coming "Yah, clever!"
and general serving out and "showing up" of the lucky, the bold, and the
cheerful, was their own predestination to Glory.

"There is a Fountain, filled with Blood
Drawn from Emmanuel's Veins,"

so they sang. I hear the drone and wheeze of that hymn now. I hated them
with the bitter uncharitable condemnation of boyhood, and a twinge of
that hate comes back to me. As I write the words, the sounds and then
the scene return, these obscure, undignified people, a fat woman with
asthma, an old Welsh milk-seller with a tumour on his bald head, who was
the intellectual leader of the sect, a huge-voiced haberdasher with
a big black beard, a white-faced, extraordinarily pregnant woman, his
wife, a spectacled rate collector with a bent back.... I hear the talk
about souls, the strange battered old phrases that were coined ages ago