Gerhard Leibholz
Correspondence In the Long Shadow of the Third Reich 1938 1958 Andrew Chandler
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The George Bell-Gerhard Leibholz Correspondence
The Selected Letters and Papers of George Bell, Bishop of Chichester
GEORGE KENNEDY ALLEN BELL (1883–1958) was a figure of distinctive importance in many of the great political and religious landscapes by which we have come to recognize the history of the European twentieth century. He was a priest of the Church of England, a chaplain to an Archbishop of Canterbury, a Dean of Canterbury and then, for almost thirty years, Bishop of Chichester. Bell played a significant role in the development of that church, but his most distinctive contribution lay in the evolution of the international ecumenical movement. Bell became a leading light in the Life and Work movement and then the World Council of Churches, and a crucial bridge not only between the Church of England and other churches but between British Christianity and the churches of the world at large. In this context he came to know intimately such luminaries as Nathan Söderblom, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Willem Visser't Hooft and Eivind Berggrav.
In the context of the unfolding history of the Third Reich, Bell worked to support the persecuted, playing an important part in the German Church Struggle and also organizing relief to support refugee families who sought to escape abroad. He saved many lives. During the Second World War Bell repeatedly challenged British military and diplomatic policy, particularly over the obliteration bombing of German cities, and by his own secret initiatives he became a ready emissary of the German resistance against Hitler. Throughout his life Bell also sought to promote a new relationship between religion and the arts, commissioning work from the composer Gustav Holst and new drama from John Masefield, T.S. Eliot and Christopher Fry. He was, at the last, a figure of the twentieth-century world, a friend of Gandhi and Radhakrishnan, of the pastor Martin Niemöller, the constitutional lawyer, Gerhard Leibholz and the artist Hans Feibusch.
The Selected Letters and Papers of George Bell, Bishop of Chichester seeks to represent the many, interrelating dimensions of the career of a man whom the German pastor Heinrich Grűber considered as great a presence in his lifetime as Albert Schweitzer, Martin Buber and Martin Luther King.
Forthcoming:
The Speeches, Writings andSelectedSermons ofGeorge Bell, 1929–1958, edited by Andrew Chandler The George Bell-Alphons Koechlin Correspondence, 1933–54, edited by Andrew Chandler and Gerhard Ringshausen
I am a learner from you, but I agree whole-heartedly with you.
George Bellto GerhardLeibholz, 11December 1942
I really think you are the living Christian conscience of this country and I only feel it a little painful that the other acting Archbishops and Bishops have not taken the opportunity of openly supporting you in a matter which concerns them too. In any case, at a time when the political leaders are obviously not able to see the implications of their policy it is a comfort to know that there are in this country personalities who have the courage to stand up against public opinion and to warn the nation in a truly prophetic way of the dangerous road they are taking.
GerhardLeibholz to George Bell, 14February 1944
The George Bell-Gerhard Leibholz
Correspondence
In the Long Shadow of the Third Reich, 1938–1958
Edited by
Gerhard Ringshausen and Andrew Chandler
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The Text: Editorial Conventions
The Letters
Appendices
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
The editors are glad to acknowledge with gratitude a gift from the late Hans Florin and his wife, Ev. It is this that has made possible the publication of the complete correspondence of George Bell and Gerhard Leibholz.
We remember with gratitude Marianne Leibholz, who kept her father’s letters to George Bell for many years and gave permission for their publication, and who died in Göttingen on 30 January 2017.
We owe much to the kindness of the archivists and librarians of Lambeth Palace Library in London and of the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz. We also wish to thank the staff at the World Council of Churches archive in Geneva and the Evangelisches Zentralarchiv in Berlin. We are also grateful to the librarians at Leuphana University of Lűneburg and the University of Chichester for their continuing support.
Gerhard Ringshausen thanks the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for a grant to support his research work in Lambeth Palace Library.
We are truly grateful to Rhodri Mogford, our admirable editor at Bloomsbury, and to the meticulous, and patient, staff at Bloomsbury. It is a pleasure to express our continuing gratitude to our wives and families, to Ellen Ringshausen in Lűneburg and to Alice Chandler in Tangmere.
Introduction
At the end of August 1938 the bishop of Chichester, George Bell, received a letter from his German friend, the young German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer. By this time they had come to know each other well, as friends but also as fast allies. Their paths had first crossed at a meeting of the Universal Christian Council for Life and Work in Novi Sad at the end of 1933, but it was when Bonhoeffer had come to London to be the pastor of a German congregation in Forest Hill that their relationship had assumed a far greater importance in the context of the unfolding German Church Struggle. This was now an intimate connection which showed the many proofs of a personal rapport and a creative moral affinity.
Before 1933 George Bell had cultivated close links with German theologians and scholars both within the contexts of the Life and Work movement, in which he had soon become a leading light, and within an occasional, though purposeful and productive, series of Anglo-German exchanges between 1927 and 1930. While these expressed an emerging ecumenical consciousness they also represented a contribution to the ongoing labours of men and women of goodwill in both Britain and Germany to foster the harmony of two nations only recently embroiled in a catastrophic war. It was a war in which George Bell had lost two brothers.
Bell was no Germanist: he did not speak or read German and his sense of German theology, philosophy and thought at large was not profound. But if the interior theological world of German
Protestantism remained, to a certain extent, obscure to him, a public crisis of Church and State was something that he, like many other British Christians, intuitively recognized. Bell was in no doubt that this is what he saw at work in Germany after January 1933, the month which brought Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist movement to power. Four days after Hitler had been appointed chancellor of a coalition government, and on Bell’s fiftieth birthday, the Executive Committee of the Universal Christian Council for Life and Work met in Berlin. It is difficult not to wonder at the conversations which must have occurred between the formal sessions of this gathering. For already the atmosphere was one precariously poised between moods of popular excitement and of public dread. National Socialism had many admirers in provincial life, but many critics in Berlin itself, a diverse, creative city which would never be profoundly reconciled to its principles or manifestations. Bell’s first impressions of National Socialism were early ones, and vivid ones too.
The National Socialist state almost at once threw up a plethora of new, and often intense, fears, and not only in Germany. Across Europe observers viewed the coming of this new power as a danger to the security of nations and also a threat to the idea of democracy at large. For all its protestations of ‘national revolution’, the fundamental reality of the new regime was that of persecution: of political opponents, of pacifists and, above all, of Jews. Unscripted acts of hostility by party zealots were now purposefully reinforced by legislation passed by a new, supportive Reichstag. On 21 March 1933 a Malicious Practices Act was passed to license the detention of critics. On 1 April 1933 a boycott of Jewish businesses was imposed. In the same month the Reichstag passed the law for the Restoration of the Civil Service which removed from their positions all German Jews. It would be the first of a succession of ‘Aryan paragraphs’ which would seek to classify Jews as ‘full or half non-Aryans’ and enforce discrimination against them across German society. In April 1933 limits were imposed on the number of places allowed to Jewish students in German universities while Jews working in the medical or legal spheres faced growing penalties and even found that they
could no longer practice at all. In the new climate further laws against German Jews accumulated across the provinces. Such measures identified and ostracized countless numbers of what had until 1933 been a secure and prosperous middle class. It was inevitable that thousands of German-Jewish families began to ask if they had a future in Germany at all. The numbers of those escaping into exile began to rise.
No one could deny that this national drama represented a new international crisis in the Europe created by the Versailles settlement. Democracy was again seen to be retreating; the politics of self-determination were now to provide the grammar for a ruthless new imperialism. After January 1933 politicians, journalists, intellectuals and humanitarians recognized that the world in which they lived had become more brutal and more dangerous. In such a context the churches, too, sensed new responsibilities. Christian institutions and charitable organizations of all kinds stirred into life, some of them philanthropic and others committed to protest. George Bell became a leading figure in this response, both within the international forms of the ecumenical movement and the national landscape of Britain itself. By the summer of 1933 he was widely regarded as an authoritative voice on the crisis in the German churches and on the plight of the persecuted Jews. For the next six years these preoccupations would fundamentally reconfigure his priorities as a bishop, his labours, his hours and days. Much of what he now did was practical: in the archive at Lambeth Palace no less than five stout volumes document his patient endeavours for refugee families as they sought to negotiate the difficulties of bureaucracy and the many practical obstacles of migration and settlement.1
It was in such a context that Bell encountered the beleaguered figures of Gerhard and Sabine Leibholz. A Volljude, Leibholz was married to Sabine Bonhoeffer, the twin sister of Bell’s friend Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It was Bonhoeffer who in September 1938 asked Bell to assist the couple. On 2 September 1938 Bell replied, eagerly: ‘I am delighted to act as a reference for your brother-in-law Professor Leibholz: and to do anything I can to help him’. The letters which
followed from this undertaking bring to life not merely a relationship of two individuals, brought together in a haphazard world of many dangers, but a civilization of ideas and endeavours, in which the intricate, daily uncertainties and frustrations of diasporic existence became intertwined with sophisticated intellectual argument, high personal drama, political intrigue and public endeavour. This was, arguably, a meeting of minds quite unique in the tumultuous history of the European mid-twentieth century.
Leibholz’s life until 1938
Gerhard Leibholz2 was born on 15 November 1901 in Charlottenburg, since 1920 a part of Berlin. His parents came from wealthy Jewish families; they were highly assimilated and the religious atmosphere at home was secular and liberal. Like his two brothers Gerhard was baptized in the Lutheran Church. In 1916, as a candidate for confirmation, he became a friend of the young Hans von Dohnanyi who introduced him to Klaus Bonhoeffer, an elder brother of Dietrich, and Justus Delbrück. These friendships led to marriages: in 1925 Hans von Dohnanyi married Christine Bonhoeffer and in 1930 Klaus Bonhoeffer married Emmi Delbrück, while it was in 1926 that Leibholz married Sabine Bonhoeffer (1906–99). They had two daughters, Marianne, born in 1927, and Christiane, born in 1930.
In 1919 Leibholz finished school at the humanist Mommsen Gymnasium and began to study philosophy, law and political economy at Heidelberg University. Here he fell under the influence of the liberal democrats, Richard Thoma and Gerhard Anschütz. It was under Thoma’s auspices that Leibholz completed his doctorate in 1921, a discussion of the German idealist Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the ‘Idea of Democracy’ which showed his interest in the law as it may be viewed in ideological and political contexts. In the same year Leibholz returned to Berlin and finished his academic studies with the First State Examination, duly awarded in 1922. Heinrich Triepel now became Leibholz’s doctoral supervisor and Triepel was also responsible for his postdoctoral lecturing qualification. His doctoral
thesis sought to interpret the principle of ‘Equality before the Law’ in a contemporary context in which the discussion of constitutional law3 had come to involve debates about the legitimacy and character of the law itself, not as something given but as something which might support a contemporary, value-orientated interpretation. For Leibholz the principle of equality was not a formal, theoretical condition which silently underlay the enactment of laws but an actual, practical demand which must be acknowledged by legislative authorities as they worked. He argued that equality was a basic element of justice itself,4 and while the idea of justice was not natural and bound to eternal values, its properties must be specified according to contemporary circumstances. The ‘suum cuique’, or just judgement, must express the ‘common legal consciousness of the people’.5 ‘In reality’, wrote Leibholz, ‘laws given by the political powers become right in a material sense only by the legal consciousness that subsists in the concrete community of the people, which accepts the law as motivated by justice and legitimates it as just law’.6
From 1926 to 1928 Leibholz pursued his research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Foreign and Public International Law, work which culminated in his inaugural lecture at the university, a discussion of the ‘Problems of Fascist constitutional law’. His analysis of the authoritarianism of Mussolini’s Italy was explicit: Fascism, he argued, ‘tries to combine the petrified common interest with vivid individuality’.7 Separation from liberal democracy seemed to be the current trend in a time of ‘striving for being embedded in a new Absolute’.8 In 1929 Leibholz’s postdoctoral thesis, ‘The Essence of Representation with a Special Focus on the Representative System’,9 examined ways in which parliamentary representation in Germany had evolved from a system which counted the votes of individual representatives to one in which those representatives had become dependent on political parties. Leibholz believed that such a transformation meant that while the practices of the German republic were legal, and in accordance with the wording of the 1919
Constitution, they had lost a vital legitimacy. In this he showed the influence of his friend and near-contemporary, the jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt. Manfred Wiegandt has observed, ‘Much of Leibholz’s analysis of the crisis of the representative system and of his understanding of the representative principle was nurtured by Schmitt’s ideas’.10 Leibholz and Schmitt were to remain friends until 1934, though by then their paths had clearly diverged.11
Leibholz had certainly won for himself an enviable reputation. He was not quite twenty-eight years old when, in 1930, he secured the chair in public law at Greifswald University. Only a year later he accepted the newly created chair for public law at Göttingen University. But the arrival of the National Socialist state was soon to catch up with him. At first he evaded the ‘Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service’ because he had participated in the activities of the ‘Free Corps’ after the war. But in January 1935 the leading figure in the ‘National Socialist Lecturers Association’, and future dean of the university, proposed to the political authorities that the law faculty be purged of three ‘non-Aryan’ members: Julius von Gierke, Franz Gutmann and Leibholz himself. Indeed, Leibholz looked increasingly vulnerable: a month later the National Socialist Students’ Association organized a campaign against him. It was because of this that he was required by the Minister of Science to take leave on 1 April 1935. The public career in which he had taken such pride had ended ignominiously and abruptly.
The Leibholz family now faced clearly the prospect of exile. Yet they were reluctant emigrants: their ties to the Bonhoeffer family in Berlin were precious and Leibholz also knew how difficult it was for German lawyers to secure employment abroad. When his brother-inlaw, Hans von Dohnanyi, informed him of government plans to stamp the passports of German Jews with a ‘J’ he knew that he must decide. On 9 September 1938 the family said their farewells to Göttingen. Leaving their children in Berlin, Gerhard and Sabine Leibholz travelled via Switzerland to Britain in search of the bishop of Chichester. The family was now almost without means. The German government would no longer pay Leibholz a pension. Because he
had left the country without official permission, his assets were frozen.
A life in exile
On 8 November 1938, three days after the Leibholzes arrived in London, Sabine reported to her twin brother their first contacts with members of his old congregation in the German Lutheran parish in Forest Hill.12 Evidently the couple were still gaining confidence: ‘Gert’, reported Sabine to her twin brother, ‘is still very inhibited in speaking. He does not yet want to visit uncle G[eorge]. I doubt that he will do much more in the next fortnight’.13 Bonhoeffer, however, urged them not to postpone the visit too long.14 It was not until the beginning of the new year that Leibholz first wrote to Bell, who answered promptly, inviting the family for a weekend in the middle of January 1939.15
These days in Chichester, later remembered fondly and vividly by Sabine Leibholz,16 were the beginning of what would become an intensive collaboration between the English bishop and the German professor. Yet for the first two years their correspondence was largely a discussion of personal practicalities. Bell did his best to secure for Leibholz a stipend from the World Council of Churches (then ‘in process of formation’) and then another, from Magdalen College in Oxford.17 Together with a grant from the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning Leibholz was able to cobble together a modest financial basis of £350 a year on which a family might live in London. The WCC stipend required that he give ‘a good portion of [his] time to the production of materials for the Study Department’ in Geneva, particularly ‘on the question of the “Corpus Christianum” and on “The Christian Conception of Freedom”’.18 In various ways this task would dominate Leibholz’s research work and publications in the years to come.
The stay in London did not last long. It was in the shadow of war that the Leibholz family first moved to the town of St. Leonards on Sea, a resort on the south coast, where the vicar, Cuthbert Griffiths,
was an ally of Bell and where a house owned by the parish had been turned into a hostel for refugees.19 This at least brought them within the borders of the diocese of Chichester. The Bells, meanwhile, moved out of the Bishop’s Palace in November 1939 and set up a home in nearby Hove. It soon became clear that this move out of London placed the Leibholzes in what became, virtually, a new front line of the unfolding war. The German invasion of the Netherlands and Belgium, and then the dramatic fall of France, provoked an invasion scare in Britain and the government responded with an often chaotic policy, first to clear the south coast of possible fifth columnists, then to classify foreign nationals as ‘aliens’ of one sort or another and intern those who had come from enemy states, whether they were sympathizers to the Nazi state or refugees from it. On 12 May 1940 Gerhard Leibholz was taken to the internment camp at Huyton in Lancashire. For ten days his wife did not even know where he was and a host of anxious letters of enquiry followed.20 Sabine Leibholz and the two girls were duly removed to Willand, a village in Mid Devon; a few weeks later they moved to Oxford. It was largely due to Bell that Leibholz was released on 26 July.
The experience of internment affected Leibholz deeply and strengthened his longing for a secure basis in Britain. Yet his financial s ituation remained precarious and his search for an academic position was frustrated. In Oxford he applied for a university lectureship and an official college fellowship, but to no avail. Like so many other thwarted intellectuals he began to look towards the United States. The energetic Presbyterian ecumenist William Paton made inquiries and, with the help of Reinhold Niebuhr in New York, Leibholz secured an invitation to the Episcopal Theological School at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in September 1940 and a further invitation to the Union Theological Seminary at New York in May 1941. The correspondence between Leibholz and Bell shows how strenuously and patiently a number of committed friends had to work in order to obtain such opportunities. But all of this could still be vulnerable to unavoidable financial obstacles: the Leibholz family needed money for the journey across the Atlantic
and for the costs of living once they were there. This made a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation and the transfer of Leibholz’s WCC stipend all the more precious. Yet, for all these efforts, the American ambition would remain unfulfilled. In February 1941 Leibholz managed to meet the first official requirements that were made, but negotiations with the American Consulate began to drag on. Meanwhile, the shipping companies made their own demands. The whole plan was eventually destroyed by new developments in the war itself. When German forces attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941 the American government issued new consular regulations and opportunities to travel by trans-Atlantic liners diminished.
These vicissitudes in themselves left a profound, if not exhausting, impression. But by this time Leibholz had begun to find in Bell not merely a practical, but an intellectual and political alter ego. Their friendship had ripened and to the Leibholz family Britain had become a new home. In November 1941 Leibholz acknowledged to Bell: ‘In any case it would not be easy, under the present circumstances, to leave this country where we have met with so much kindness and above all to lose you, my Lordbishop. You have cheered us up so often and have given us again and again not only help and protection whenever we needed them (and I needed them continuously) but also new hope and courage’.21 The entry of the United States into the war on 11 December had also raised a great many new uncertainties about what a future in that country might actually bring. Would Leibholz himself be interned once again? In January 1942 he wrote, ‘On the one hand I should like to go to America (especially with regard to the future after the war); on the other hand, I fully realize the risks and uncertainties as the result of the incalculable consequences of the new situation’.22
In wartime Bell had begun to extend his existing commitments in international and ecumenical affairs and to fashion a bold, new role in British public life. In particular he increasingly used the place in the House of Lords which, in July 1938, he had been given as a senior bishop of the Church of England. Leibholz, the sympathetic,
principled German constitutional lawyer now offered exactly the intellectual company that he needed. If Bell wished to be anything at all in such a context it was a thinker who could articulate not a national but an international argument, and one which rested on solid European foundations. In many ways Leibholz confirmed in Bell many ideas and understandings which were already his own. But he also contributed a new substance and weight, and not least a far more secure German dimension, developing his arguments critically and doing much to lift Bell out of clerical company into the richer perspectives of a wider civil society. Although Bell found a handful of allies to guide him in all that he said, it speaks volumes that the friend with whom he enjoyed the greatest rapport in these intense debates was not an eminent British churchman, politician or scholar, but a barely known refugee lawyer, exiled from the very state with which his own country was now at war.
The first fruits of this entente could be seen in the opposition to the policy of internment in 1940, a campaign which was widely judged to be successful – for the government was embarrassed time and again in both houses of parliament and eventually forced to disband what was widely condemned as illogical and compromised. For his part, Bell knew that as a refugee Leibholz had much to fear from obscurity in a new land. He searched out opportunities for employment, introduced him to new circles in which his ideas could feel the influence of other minds and grow, and also to the many editors and publishers who were known to him. In short, Bell did much to give Leibholz confidence that he did indeed have a place in his adopted country, and a voice too. Above and beyond all such things it is clear that the two men knew, intuitively, how to value each other.
Although he never secured an academic position at Oxford, Leibholz had very probably come to the right place. Bell himself had been a student at Christ Church and he retained a relationship with his old college and with the Oxford scene. A.D. Lindsay, a scholar who played a prominent part in contemporary political debates, was Master of Balliol; Leibholz had met William Beveridge on a visit to the city in March 1939. The Roman Catholic thinker Christopher
Dawson, never more eminent than now, lived nearby. The Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology, Leonard Hodgson, was a prominent member of the Faith and Order movement and had corresponded, if not quite fruitfully, with Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1935 and again in 1939.23 It was when Hodgson heard Leibholz speak at a conference of the ‘Christian Fellowship in Wartime’ that he had invited him to give four lectures on ‘Christianity, Politics and Power’ at Christ Church in January and February 1942.24 These found him to be very much more than an authority on the letter of the Law. In the same year Leibholz contributed a paper, ‘Christianity, Justice and Modern Society’,25 to a discussion of Natural Law at St Deiniol’s Library in Hawarden,26 a residential institution which was now run by the erudite and internationally minded scholar-priest, Alec Vidler. In all of this Leibholz showed not only that he had won confidence and clarity in the English language but also a measure of respect and recognition from his peers.
Thinking together
Both Bell and Leibholz were fortunate in finding a place in a flourishing world of writing, publishing and reading, where informed opinion found plenty of room for expression on all manner of subjects. The Victorian age had produced a great wealth in periodical literature, much of which still remained alive and available. Journals like the Fortnightly Review, the RoundTable, the Nineteenth Century (which had become the Nineteenth Century and After) and the Contemporary Review presented to the interested private reader new and diverse expositions by authors from all corners of public and private life, unfettered by specialization and the rigidities of academic disciplines. They were the forums of British democracy. Articles in such publications were widely read and could prove influential. Bell’s important essay, ‘The Church’s Function in Wartime’, appeared in the Fortnightly Review in November 1939. A month before Leibholz had already published his first English article, ‘National Socialism and the Church’, in the Contemporary Review.
This was soon the world of a newcomer, the Christian News-Letter, a striking venture pioneered by Bell’s ally J.H. Oldham, which offered information and comment on the great issues of the moment in a form easily pocketed and passed on in a society which was mobilized for a national campaign and often to be found in uniform. At the same time many other publishers were eager for new work that offered distinctive ethical and religious perspectives on the contemporary drama. It was Bell who wrote what became the first Penguin Special, Christianity and World Order, in 1940.27 This sold 80,000 copies.
Leibholz’s new British publications were concerned with the exploration of three propositions: the political task of Christianity and the Church, the foundation of human order by Natural Law, and the character of the totalitarian systems of the day. In ‘NationalSocialism and the Church’ he adopted firmly the term ‘totalitarianism’, then widely accepted in critical British circles, but also introduced it to the less widely favoured term, secularization, which was only steadily gathering ground in the debates of the ecumenists. ‘Under totalitarian governments’, Leibholz wrote, ‘such phenomena as class, race, the people in its biological sense, and the State as a realistic concept are deified’.28 National Socialism was a materialistic conception of the people, of its biological existence, and this idea was a result of ‘the revolutionary process of general secularisation’.29 He proceeded, ‘At the end of this development stands the man who deifies himself, no longer the servant of God, but the lord of the world, the self-appointed judge in the last resort over good and bad’.30 Such an assumption of power must involve the denial and destruction of absolute values: both reason and spirit had been ‘dethroned’. Christianity and National Socialism represented two different religions and now Europe as a continent was divided into two camps: ‘We now approach an epoch more closely akin to that of the religious wars than to one which professes to be characterised by the principle of the nation state’.31 In Germany itself the Confessing Church had understood its struggle not as a political confrontation but, primarily, as one involving the
maintenance of Christian integrity within the Church. Such a view had never been comprehensible in Britain. Leibholz showed that he agreed with British critics when he asserted unequivocally the utter dominance of politics: ‘For Christianity’, he argued, ‘has nothing in common with the quasi-religious needs of National-Socialism. . . . Nor can the Church to-day afford to live in self-contained seclusion, and to limit its activities to the proclamation of the Gospel. . . . Where every sphere of life is in the grasp of the politician, every attempt to escape must itself become political’.32
But in one particular matter public opinion was fast altering. Bell was insistent that a distinction must be drawn between the German people at large and the state which governed them. Such a view had been conventional in Britain in September 1939 but by the summer of 1940 defeat in France had provoked a far more rigid, and bitter, view. It was in 1941 that a former Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs at the Foreign Office, Sir Robert Vansittart, broadcast a series of lectures over the BBC which saw prompt publication as a pamphlet. This was Black Record, a powerful polemic against the historical, contemporary, moral and spiritual, military and perennially troublesome German nation. Vansittart had certainly found an audience. Within a month of its first publication Black Record had been reprinted six times.
Bell was sure that what soon became known as Vansittartism must be repudiated. Vanisttart himself was a powerful adversary, for his own public record was an impressive one and it was by no means clear that his views did not represent the mind of the government itself. Because Vansittart was, like Bell, a member of the House of Lords it was in this context that they confronted each other, time and again, throughout the war. This debate drew Bell and Leibholz still more closely together. Leibholz showed Bell how National Socialism might be distinguished from traditional nationalism. Moreover, he insisted that the Nazi regime could not ‘be considered as an embodiment either of the spiritual or social forces of Prussianism’.33 Because of this, Leibholz argued, ‘it is not so surprising that the opposition [to Hitler] has drawn relatively greater
strength from the “reactionary” old-Prussian forces than from former liberals, and that the army was and is regarded as a moderating influence against the Regime, and that to a certain extent hopes of a change of regime in Germany have been placed in the Army or in certain army circles’.34 Leibholz admired Bell’s Christianity and World Order as ‘a most admirable and illuminating book’.35 In a review which he wrote of it he drew particular attention to Bell’s insistence ‘that the West does not desire to crush Germany’, and that it ‘must aim at rebuilding the Christian civilisation of Europe upon planned co-operative lines, based on justice and truth. In a peace to come, each nation must play its contributory part’.36
Leibholz’s writing implied a differentiation of Germans and Nazis. The experience of internment in 1940 must certainly have sharpened these perspectives. Bell had also insisted on this; so too his friend, the first general secretary of the World Council of Churches in Geneva, Willem Visser ’t Hooft.37 As Leibholz explained in a memorandum discussing international affairs in 1940, it was its totalitarian structure which distinguished National Socialism from traditional nationalism. Equally, the Nazi regime could not be considered ‘as an embodiment either of the spiritual or social forces of Prussianism’.38 If such an insistence was looking increasingly outof-favour in wartime Britain, where strains of Vansittartism were often accommodated and fostered, they found a home, and a resonance, in the arguments of international ecumenism. Yet it was difficult not to sense that the dominant mood was set against them. British policy had hardened. Bell’s public interventions became more and more those of a critic. The publication of the Atlantic Charter of the Western powers on 14 August 1941 provoked a letter to the Times, published five days later. Here Bell repeated the view of British church leaders at large that only the principles of the Christian religion could yield a solid foundation for national policy and for a permanent peace in Europe.39 Leibholz agreed, adding that the ‘final destruction of Nazi tyranny’ as the main war aim ‘goes farther than the Versailles Treaty in so far as in it a promise of
general disarmament was held out. Herewith not only a Nazi regime but also any regime of military or conservative kind or tincture will be ruled out for Germany in future’.40 To this Bell replied: ‘Our present official Government policy tends to the fixing of the old plan of separate alliances with the certainty of a new war in the end and probably the division of Europe, as you suggest, into a Communist camp versus an Anglo-Saxon one. I myself cannot help thinking that it might be the Churches’ special task to keep the idea of the family of nations very much alive, and to give it concrete expression as against the idea of separate alliances’.41 Leibholz argued that British policy should ‘treat an Anti-Nazi government which may come out of an Anti-Nazi revolution and has not a communist character in the same way as Russia would treat a communist Germany’.42
In his lectures ‘Christianity, Politics and Power’, given at Christ Church, Oxford, in January 1942, Leibholz fortified and developed these ideas about the ‘intimate connexion between religion, theology and politics’.43 When they were published in a series of extended studies under the aegis of the Christian News-Letter, the references showed that the company in which the author was to be found was not merely national. Here he was seen to be rubbing shoulders with Archbishop William Temple, A.D. Lindsay, Michael de la Bedoyère, Nathaniel Micklem, Christopher Dawson, Arnold Toynbee, Alec Vidler, J.H. Oldham, Jacques Maritain, Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Barth (‘a modern Calvinist’), Oliver Quick, Leonard Hodgson, William Paton and Bell himself. Leibholz demanded a political answer by the Church: ‘the Christian faith is of incalculable political value’, while an ‘unpolitical faith . . . enables totalit[arian]ism to put God and His commandments aside’.44 Equally, political thought needed ‘a revival through the Christian creed’ because ‘all true political questions are religious’.45 He granted that the worlds of politics and religion were distinct: ‘the earthly city cannot be governed solely by the principles of the Kingdom of God’.46 He saw, too, that the Christian was a member of two orders, but these orders need not be in conflict, for both were created by God and both ‘are related to the same ultimate
end – the glory of God’.47 ‘The world’, Leibholz insisted, ‘is called upon to testify to the sovereignty of God’. It was when authority did not acknowledge this that it became tyranny. In such a context moral obligations were reordered: ‘Man’s spiritual integrity and his fellowship with God take precedence of his citizenship’. Such a vision certainly gave the Church much to do in the world: it was ‘powerfully and repeatedly to press into national and international life Christian principles such as the sacredness of the human personality, the sovereignty of God above all nations, the universal brotherhood of men, the Christian power of love and forgiveness and the existence of universal moral laws’.48 Such claims were themselves ‘totalitarian’, but not in any sense that could threaten ‘true human nature’ or challenge or subdue the State itself. They were indeed essential to principles of ‘justice, goodness and decency’ which were absolute and eternal. But here was no case for a Christian State. Leibholz’s thought was indeed changing, and the alteration was to be found most of all in his retrieval of the idea of Natural Law. Gone was the argument that the ‘common legal consciousness of the people’ must be the foundation, and authorization, of justice.49 Now he wrote, ‘the principles of Natural Law which every kind of human order must respect are inherent elements of justice and ultimately of Christianity’50 ; moreover, ‘those principles of law which are an inherent element of divine justice must also find their expression in the various forms of positive law’.51 Leibholz looked to Aquinas and to Luther, and among his contemporaries he may well have been influenced by Temple. Certainly he found himself at odds with his eminent brother-in-law in Germany. Even so, political totalitarianism, he maintained, expressed no authentic natural law at all, but replaced it with an invention of its own in ‘a new quasi-religious content’.52 In the totalitarian state law was merely ‘the expression of the naked will of man, and not the expression of justice and reason and of the transcendent will of God’. Because of this such a state could accept no other foundation: there was no room left for a religious sphere and especially none for Christianity. ‘At bottom’,
concluded Leibholz, ‘the deliberate adoption of the belief in force and power is nothing but the creed of nihilism in action’. This new international war was a conflict ‘between two principles, two attitudes towards the world, two schemes of human values. It is a struggle for the control of the human mind’. Furthermore, ‘the Western countries are actually fighting the present war for universal principles, ideas and values. This is why the present conflict has been compared to a kind of crusade, or to a holy war, or to a war of religion’. Modern liberal democracy represented an absolute contradiction of the political structure of modern totalitarianism. It is difficult to know how influential such ideas became, but Leibholz could at least be sure of one sympathetic reader. In December 1942 Bell wrote to him, ‘I agree whole-heartedly with you. I am sure that the position which you put before your readers is one which ought to be put forth on a large scale by the churches just now wherever they can find an opportunity’.53
The destruction of the German Resistance
Since 1942 both Bell and Visser’t Hooft had, in effect, become active ambassadors of the resistance in Germany, a direct consequence of their support for the Confessing Church before September 1939.54 Bell’s visit to Sweden in May/June that year, and his astonishing encounter with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans Schönfeld at Sigtuna, proved a fundamental turning point. In this many of the arguments which had come to define the Bell-Leibholz correspondence, and which had remained thinly substantiated and even speculative, came suddenly into an intense focus. What followed from this is well known: Bell brought his message to Whitehall, met the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, and received the judgement that it was not in the national interest that any reply should be made to such an overture.55 Bell never ceased to regard this as a blunder. But it was the announcement of a policy of ‘unconditional surrender’ at the Casablanca conference of January 1943 which showed decisively that Bell and Leibholz were now standing against a very powerful tide indeed. Whatever Churchill’s private misgivings, this declaration
set the will of the Allied powers in stone. Both Bell and Leibholz believed that such a policy offered Germans only a counsel of despair. Leibolz was at once fearful that such a policy now made far more distinct the prospect of a communist Germany. Bell agreed with him.
Any direct reports of developments in Germany itself remained sporadic. Even the channels kept open by international ecumenical agencies provided little information. For the most part both Bell and Leibholz were wholly in the dark. News of the arrest and incarceration of Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi on 5 April 1943 did not reach them at all. But news of the final attempted coup d’état on 20 July 1944 came suddenly and loudly, and from a variety of sources, not least official ones in Germany itself. With this calamity all hope was dashed: it was now a matter of watching bleakly as British newspapers re ported how participants in the German resistance were arrested, tried and executed. The dismay of Bell himself is vividly exposed by his letters to Leibholz, and also revealed by a desperate letter to Anthony Eden pleading that every effort be made to rescue any member of the resistance still at large. But in Britain official opinion was, at best, ambivalent. Churchill had been dismissive of the conspiracy and there were many sceptics besides. It was in this context that Bell and Leibholz now worked to present an account of the resistance which represented its integrity and resolve.56 As the war moved inexorably towards its conclusion they were left to fear not only for those who may have fallen into the hands of the Nazi state, but for the material well-being of other family members and friends. The letters of the last year of the war are fraught with anxious waiting, and peace itself would bring no easy resolutions. It was only in October 1945, and in the midst of the new divisions of the Cold War, that Bell was able to take off for Germany and find Bonhoeffer’s parents in Berlin.
Planning the future of Germany
Early in the war Gerhard Leibholz had seen that a post-war Europe would be dominated by the antagonism between the Western
understanding of freedom and the ideology of Communism in the East. The unfolding debate about the terms of a future peace acknowledged that in some way or other the mind of Germany must be altered, if not converted. Any policy that made this more difficult must fail to satisfy the many demands which the future itself must make, not least for international security. But what could this actually mean? Already in June 1944, Leibholz was profoundly pessimistic. In a new article on ‘Education in Post-war Germany’ he criticized plans for a re-education of the German population as ‘bound to fail in the end’,57 and wondered whether ‘the Western conception of life possesses enough strength in itself to be able to be transplanted into other countries’. This was not merely a political but a religious task, for it would be ‘an impossible undertaking to change the minds of a nation of more than 70 million people by the traditional methods of power politics’ with ‘a flavour of totalitarianism’.58 Furthermore, it must be carried out not by the victors but the vanquished: ‘A people can repent only of his own accord’.59 Leibholz saw, too, that those ‘thousands’ who had refused to accept Nazism and had known ‘all the fires of persecution’ might now offer ‘the basis for the spiritual regeneration and the rebuilding of life in Germany’.60 By the autumn of 1944 these apprehensions had crystallized. To J.H. Oldham he wrote, ‘Security and reconversion of Germany must be organically linked up with each other. In other words, the security policy itself must take on an ideological character. It is impossible to expect a reconversion of Germany with the help of the most drastic means of a national power policy.’61 Yet he looked still to the vision of a united Europe, ‘based not on power, but on the free consent and voluntary cooperation of the nations’.62 As the war neared its end it became more than ever clear to him that the policy of the Allied powers simply created division, and a division which must see an expansion of Soviet Communism. There soon lay before them no better prospect than an immense ideological confrontation in which ‘the Great Powers seek to secure spheres of influence and regimes which are akin to them. I hope’,
Leibholz added to Bell, ‘that they will not be the strategical positions for the next war’.63
Though the great tide of affairs did almost nothing to justify their hopes, both Bell and Leibholz looked earnestly beyond it towards an eventual vindication. In February 1945 Leibholz wrote to Bell that he had ‘not the slightest doubt that the time will come (even if it be too late) when the policy which you have advocated with such an admirable steadfastness and courage and with so great political wisdom in the last few years will one day be recognised as the only truly European policy’.64 But the stings of the present were still sharp. When the victorious Allied powers met at Potsdam in July and August 1945 Leibholz found their agreed statement a ‘phantastic and absurd document’.65 Europe was now to be broken into two antagonistic regions and Germany itself would know half-a-century of tragic division.
For Bell this new peace brought many tasks, none of them simple. The World Council of Churches at last stirred to life with an eloquent gathering in Geneva in 1946 and then a vast General Assembly in Amsterdam in 1948. The reconstruction of Germany itself became a fundamental preoccupation. Bell was deeply immersed in charitable enterprises but there were also more controversial initiatives. He intervened on behalf of those accused of war crimes at Nuremberg, at times led by his contacts to justify defendants whose record would turn out to be, at best, compromised. He looked for the vindication of his wartime arguments and vindication, when it came, was partial, late and even hollow. His old adversary, Robert Vansittart confessed in 1951 that much in his earlier views had been mistaken, as Bell reported to Leibholz himself. By then British policy towards Germany had altogether altered: the Federal Republic was now admitted as a partner in the coalition of Western powers.66 Churchill, too, had changed his tune. By this time Leibholz had come to support the austere, but constructive, policies of reconstruction framed by Konrad Adenauer.
The return to Germany
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gold and scarlet and crimson and russet blended by the misty autumn haze; but whether near or far always a splendor of color. The cornfields along the way were dotted with great sheaves of the harvested corn, among which the orange spheres of the pumpkins lay thick, and where the huskers were busy stripping the husks from the yellow ears that overflowed baskets and heaped wagons.
Orchards, too, there were, fruity with scent of the red-cheeked apples which loaded the trees. Occasionally they met loads of apples on the way to be made into cider. Once they passed a cider mill by the roadside, and stopped for a drink of the sweet juice as it came fresh from the press. At another time they drove under a tree overgrown by a wild grapevine, and Ben, standing on the seat, had gathered his hands full of the little, spicy-flavored, frost grapes. While scattered along the way were clumps of woodbine, its leaves flushed russet crimson; bittersweet with its clustered orange berries beginning to show their scarlet hearts; with lingering sprays of golden rod, and lavender drifts of the wild aster. The farmhouses at which Ben stopped to trade—for he was too faithful an employee to forget his business for any pleasure—had for the most part, it seemed to Posey, a cozy, homelike air, the yards of many gay with fall flowers that the frosts had not yet killed.
And how their tongues did run! Ben Pancost had to hear in its fullest detail Posey’s whole story, with especial interest in that part of her life with Madam Atheldena Sharpe.
“How many different cities you have seen!” he exclaimed once with an accent of almost envy.
“No, I never saw very much of them after all. You see, we always lived in a crowded part, so one was a good deal like another.”
“And how did you use to feel when you were pretending to be a spirit?”
“Oh, sometimes I thought it was sort of fun. One day, I remember, at school the teacher had us put our hands up and up as we sang, higher and higher, like this,” and she raised her arms in a gently undulating motion. “That evening I did it again as I came out, and the
people at the séance all held their breath and whispered, ‘Oh, how beautiful!’ You ought to have heard them,” and Posey laughed as she recalled the incident. “Yes, sometimes it was no end of fun, but most times I was tired and sleepy and it was so tiresome. The changing dresses, and wigs, and all that, and I used to think how stupid the folks were not to know that it was only me.”
“And were you frightened when they found you out?”
“Frightened? Well, I guess I was! I knew the Madam would be in a rage, and I didn’t know what they would do to me, either. They tore my wig off, and crowded round me, and everybody was talking at once, but I pulled away, somehow, and ran. My, how I did run; ’way up into the attic! I’d never been there before, but it was some place to hide, and it wasn’t so bad, for I stumbled onto an old mattress, only I was afraid there might be rats. But I wasn’t as afraid of the rats as I was of the people downstairs, and by and by, when it was all still, I went to sleep. Then in the morning when I waked up and went down the Madam was gone. She knew that I had no other place in the world to go to; but she never did care for anybody but herself. I tell you, it was awful to be turned out so, and not know what to do. I felt almost as bad as when you saw me this morning.”
“It was a shame,” Ben agreed heartily “But then she couldn’t have been a very good woman, anyway. And don’t you think it was just as wrong as lying to deceive people so?”
“I suppose it was,” Posey admitted simply. “My mamma always told me never to tell lies, and I don’t mean to; but I began to ‘manifest,’ as she always called it, when I was so little that I didn’t think anything about its being right or wrong. I should have had to done it whether I wanted to or not, for when Madam was cross I tell you I had to stand round. Besides, that was the way we made our living, and in the city folks have to have money to live. Here in the country you don’t know anything about it. Look at the apples in that orchard. I used to go to the market for Madam and buy a quart of apples. Just six or seven, you know. Sometimes I could get a market-woman to put on one more, and then I had that to eat for myself. And milk! Why, we never bought more than a pint at a time,
more often half a pint; and a half a pound or a pound of butter You don’t know how strange it did seem to go out and pick things off as they grew, and to see so much of everything.”
“I wouldn’t want to live that way,” admitted Ben.
“I guess not. Sometimes I felt so much older than the other girls of my age at Horsham. They had fathers and mothers who bought them everything. They never thought about the cost, and they all had spending money—not a great deal, but some—to use as they pleased. And I—why I can hardly remember when I didn’t have to think about the price of everything. When Madam gave me money to go out and buy things she used to say, ‘Now see how far you can make this go.’ She was always telling me how much my shoes and clothes and what I ate cost. And as for ever having any money to spend for my very own self, why I wouldn’t know what that was.” She paused and an accent of bitterness crept into her next words: “You may say what you please, but I believe God cares a lot more for some folks than He does for others. He gives them such a sight more. At any rate, I’m ‘most certain He doesn’t care anything for me,” and she gave the red dashboard a little kick by way of emphasis.
“Why, Posey!” Ben cried in astonishment, “God cares for everybody!”
“Well, then,” protested Posey fiercely, “why did He make my mother die, and why doesn’t He give me a home somewhere?”
Ben looked puzzled for a moment, then he brightened. “Did you ever ask Him to take care of you?”
“Yes, I did last night. I asked Him to help me, and take care of me. And where would I be now if it wasn’t for you?”
“Why, Posey!” cried Ben triumphantly. “Don’t you see that He sent me?”
“Do you think He did?” A sudden seriousness had come into Posey’s face.
“Of course. I know it. Why, once when I was a little boy I had a bow and arrow. One day I shot my arrow away so far I couldn’t find it, though I hunted and hunted. Finally I knelt right down in the grass and asked God to help me find my arrow; and do you believe me, when I opened my eyes the first thing I saw was my arrow, only a little way from me. Perhaps if you had asked God to help you before he would have done so.”
“But,” persisted Posey, “sometimes it doesn’t help people any when they do pray. There was a woman in Horsham whose daughter was sick this summer, and she had folks come and pray for her to get well, but she died all the same.”
As she was speaking Ben drew out a handsome pocketknife. “Isn’t that knife a dandy?” he asked, holding it out in his hand. “Five blades, all the very best steel, and the handle inlaid. When I was seven years old my Uncle Ben, in Nebraska, that I was named for, sent it to me. Father said I was too little to have such a knife then, that I would be apt to break it, and to cut me with it, so he laid it away till I was older. Well, I wanted it then, and I used to tease and tease father for it, and almost think it was unkind and mean in him to keep my own knife away from me. The day I was ten years old he said:
“‘Ben, here is your knife. If I had given it to you at the first, as you wanted me to, very likely it would by this time be broken or lost, and you might have been badly hurt with it. Now you are old enough to value and use it carefully. And when you look at it remember this, my boy, that God often has to do by us as I have by you—refuse us the thing we ask for because it might hurt us, or because the time has not yet come when we are ready for it. Refuses us simply because He loves us.’”
“Why, Ben!” exclaimed Posey with wide-open eyes, “I never heard anything like that before. And you talk just like a minister.”
“I’m only telling you what my father said. Perhaps because he died so soon afterwards is one reason I’ve always remembered it. And he was good as any minister. I don’t believe there ever was a better father,” and there was a tremble in Ben’s voice.
“Tell me about yourself now; I’ve told you all about myself,” urged Posey.
CHAPTER X
BEN’S STORY
“I haven’t much of anything to tell,” Ben answered slowly. “You see, I always lived in the country, and in just one place till father and mother died four years ago. But, oh, it was so pleasant there! Back of the house was the orchard, and beyond that a long hill where we went coasting in the winter, Theodore and I—he’s my brother three years older. At the foot of the hill was a little creek where we used to go fishing in spring. The fish were mostly suckers. I suppose some folks wouldn’t have cooked ’em; but then mothers will do ’most anything for boys; at any rate, such a mother as ours would, and my, but they did taste good! We used to skate on the creek, too, in the winter. But you’ve never been in the country in the winter; you don’t know what fun it is: sliding down hill, sleighriding, and snowballing, all such fun,” and Ben’s eyes sparkled as he named them.
“The house, too, was so cozy. A red house with a trumpet-vine growing over it, and a long porch in front. I always like to see a red house because it makes me think of home. And out in the orchard there were strawberry apples, and seek-no-furthers, and nonesuches. A big grapevine ran all along the woodhouse. There was a black-walnut tree in the back yard, some chestnut trees in the pasture, beside hickory trees in the north woods. And didn’t we go nutting in the fall, just didn’t we! Whole bags of nuts to crack in the winter evenings and eat with apples, though the getting ’em is better than the eating, after all.
“On the edge of the creek was the sugar bush, and in the spring we used to help father gather the maple sap from the trees and boil it down in the old sugar house. It was hard work, but there was fun with it—the sugaring off, and making wax on the snow, and stirring the warm sugar. I tell you I feel awful sorry for boys who have never lived in the country and had any of the good times. Of course we
went to school, not quite a mile over the hill, and Sundays we went three miles to church.
“And best of all were father and mother! I couldn’t begin to tell you how good they were. Mother used to tell us stories, and help us make balls and kites; and father would take us with him, and let us follow him about the farm, when I suppose we hindered a good deal more than we helped. He was always ready to answer our questions, too, and to help us with a hard lesson, and he used to give us calves and lambs for our very own. I don’t believe there ever was a father and mother did more to make two boys happy,” and Ben drew a tremulous sigh.
“Mother was always delicate,” he went on after a moment’s pause, “and father and we boys used to do all we could to help her. But one fall she took a hard cold—none of us once thought of it being anything more than a cold. All winter she coughed so hard, and nothing the doctor gave her did any good. Theodore and I used to say to each other, ‘When it comes spring then mother will be well again,’ and we were so glad of the warm days, for they would make mother better She didn’t get better, though; she kept growing weaker and weaker, and the children at school began to ask me did I know my mother was going to die? It made me so angry to have them say such things; and sometimes I would wake up in the night and find Theodore crying, for he is older, you know, and realized more what was coming. Then I would put my arms around his neck and say, ‘Don’t cry, Theodore; of course mother will get well. Why, we can’t live without her!’
“So it went on till September, and by that time she could only walk around the house a little, and had to lie on the sitting-room lounge most of the time; but so sweet and patient, there was never any one like her, I’m sure. Father used to come in from his work every little while and sit beside her, and when he went out I would see the tears in his eyes, for I suppose it was hardest of all for him. In September the men came with the thrashing-machine to thrash the wheat and oats. It was a chilly day for that time of the year, with one of those raw, sharp winds that cuts right through you. The dust of the thrashing always made father about sick, and with that and the
weather he took a sudden cold that settled on his lungs. That night he was so sick Theodore had to go for the doctor, and, Posey, he only lived three days.
“I couldn’t believe it. He had always been so strong and well that I had never thought of his dying. I knew the doctor thought he was very sick, and we were all frightened, but I didn’t once think he was going to die. And when he called us to him to bid us good-by, and told us to do all we could for mother, and to be good boys and good men, and live so that we should be ready for God’s call when it came for us—I didn’t believe it even then—I didn’t believe it till he was— gone.”
Ben’s voice had grown husky, and he stopped for a little before he could go on. “For about two weeks after that mother kept about as she had been, and what with the shock and excitement even seemed a little stronger. But one night we had to help her into her room and the next morning she said she felt so weak she wouldn’t try to get up. And she never left her room again. She failed so fast it seemed as though we could just see her slipping away from us; and she was so happy to go, except as she was sorry to leave us boys. She told us how we had better manage, and what she wanted us to do and be; and I don’t believe either Theodore or I will ever forget what she said to us or the promises we made to her.
“When father died it was hard enough, though there was mother left. But when she went, only three weeks after him, I tell you it was awful. I never shall forget as long as I live the evening after mother’s funeral. You see, father had only one brother, Uncle Ben, out in Nebraska, so of course he couldn’t come. Uncle John, mother’s only brother, lived fifty miles away, and George, his boy, was sick with a fever, so he had to go right back; that left us all alone with Matty, the girl. And after we had looked after the chores and went in and sat down everything was so strange and empty and lonesome, I never shall forget it.
“Every night since we could remember father, or mother if he was away, had read a chapter in the Bible and had prayers. After father died Theodore had read the chapter and mother had prayed, if it was
only a word or two, till the very last night she lived. She had said she hoped we would try and do as near as we could as we always had when she and father were with us, so Theodore thought we’d better have prayers; that they’d want us to. He read the chapter—I don’t see how he did it—and said he thought we could say the Lord’s prayer, anyway, and we kneeled down and began. But all at once it came over us like a great wave how everything was changed and always would be, and it broke us all up so we couldn’t go through with it.” And Ben’s voice choked and failed him at the recollection, while unchecked tears of sympathy ran down Posey’s cheeks.
“When Uncle John went away he told us to do the best we could and as soon as George was better and he could leave home he would come and help us settle everything up. There wasn’t so very much to do beside the everyday work except to gather the apples and harvest the corn. We had a big field of corn that year, but we managed to get it cut up and began to husk it. But it was slow work, for I was only a little shaver—not quite eleven years old, and Theodore isn’t strong like I am. It came on cold early that fall and we got pretty discouraged. One night there was a circle round the moon, and Theodore said he was afraid we were goin’ to have a snowstorm. That would make the husking harder, and we both felt real worried. But what do you think? When we went out in the field the next morning the corn was all husked and in heaps ready to draw in! It had been a moonlight night and the neighbors had all turned in and done it for us. They were all so good to us I shall never forget it of them.
“As soon as he could Uncle John came back, and then we sold the farm. We hated to, but he thought that was best, for though it was only a small one we were too young to manage it. When everything was settled there was eight hundred dollars apiece for Theodore and me. Uncle John put this out at interest for us, secured by mortgage so it should be safe, and took us home with him. But Uncle John isn’t rich by any means, and he has five children of his own, so though they are all kind as can be we didn’t want to live on him. For two years now, I’ve been driving this tin-cart summers. I get twenty dollars a month and my expenses, and I’ve a hundred dollars in the
bank I earned myself. Winters I live at Uncle John’s and go to school. He won’t take anything for my board, but I buy dresses and things for Aunt Eunice and my cousins; they are so good to me I want to do what I can for them. With what I earn and the interest on my own money, as soon as I’m old enough I mean to buy a farm. I would like a store, but Uncle John thinks a farm is safer, and perhaps I’ll buy the old farm back.”
“How nice that would be!” cried Posey.
“Why, see here, Posey,” with the force of a sudden idea, “when I get a farm I shall need somebody to keep the house, and I’ll tell you what I’ll do, I’ll marry you. Then you can have a home, too; we’re both orphans and haven’t either of us one now.”
Posey clapped her hands. “That will be splendid! I know I should just love to live on a farm, and I will learn to make butter, and do all the things they do on farms. But,” and her face sobered, “won’t your brother want to live with you?”
“No; Theodore doesn’t take to farming. He’s teaching now, a summer school up in Michigan. His plan is to go to college and then be a minister. He’ll make a tiptop one, too.”
“I think you ought to be a minister,” said Posey. “You talk good enough for one.”
“Me? Shucks,” and Ben gave a long whistle. “I ain’t good enough for a minister. Besides, I never could talk before folks as Theodore can. I wish you could hear him lead the Endeavor meeting. I tried to once, and my, I was so scared I didn’t know whether I was afoot or horseback.”
Posey’s eyes had grown wide. “Why, I thought it was only grownup people who were Christians and dreadfully good, like old Deacon Piper and Mr. Hagood, who spoke in meetings.”
“W I I ”—Page 143
“This was just Endeavor meeting. But then that isn’t so at all.” Ben’s tone was emphatic. “Boys and girls can be Christians; mother explained that to me years ago. It’s just loving God best of all, and trying to do as He wants us to. Folks don’t have to wait till they are grown up to do that, or are awfully good, either. I’m glad they don’t, or there wouldn’t be much show for me; my temper boils over about as quick as Aunt Eunice’s teakettle. But I keep pegging away at it, and I can hold on better than I could, I know, for some of the folks I trade with are enough to provoke a saint. But that’s the only way to grow good—keep trying. You can do that as well as anybody. And you love God, don’t you?”
She shook her head as she answered mournfully, “I’m afraid not. I know I don’t feel about Him as you do.”
“I’m sorry,” Ben said simply. “I wish you did. You don’t know what a comfort it is when you get in a tight place and things seem to be mixed up all in a tangle, to feel that God will make everything come out just as is best for you. I really wish you did.”
Posey made no answer. She only reached up and caught a handful of leaves from a tree they were passing under, and asked Ben what kind of leaves they were. At the same time the fact that Ben Pancost, a boy who had a freckled face, who laughed and joked and told funny stories, who loved to skate, to coast, to play baseball, and in short enjoyed all the things that boys did, should talk about loving God, and God’s taking care of him, as though this was the most natural thing in the world, made a deep impression on her mind, and one that never was forgotten.
CHAPTER XI
A STORM, AND A SHELTER
Ben’s story, here given as a whole, had really been interrupted by one or two business calls. It was evident, even to Posey, that Ben was a decided favorite along the route; for in addition to his boyish good-humor, his obliging ways, as well as his truthfulness and honesty, had won for him many customers, and many friends among his customers. Posey could hardly have told if she more admired or was amused by the brisk, alert way in which he sorted over the bags of rags brought out to him, made his bargains, and marshalled his array of tinware.
“The fact of the matter is,” he explained to Posey as he was making a memorandum in his note-book of one quart, and one twoquart basin to be brought the next trip, “I’m pretty well sold out of stock, except milk pails, tin dippers, and nutmeg graters and the graters are a fancy kind at twenty-five cents. That’s a little too high for them to go easily. I guess I’ll tell Mr. Bruce—he’s the man I work for—that he’d better not order any more; things that run from ten to twenty cents sell the best. That’s about what a common bag of rags comes to, and folks would rather not pay money besides. I’d rather not pay money, either, for, you see, besides the profit on the rags I buy, there’s the profit on the goods I sell; so when I haven’t what they want, if they will wait I bring it next time I come, and I always take pains to pick out what I think will suit, too.”
As it drew towards noon Posey suggested that they share the rest of the contents of her basket. But Ben urged, “Wait a little.” And when a few moments later coming over a hill they entered a small country village he drew up before its modest hotel with a flourish, remarking as he did so, “This train stops twenty minutes for refreshments.”
“But, Ben,” expostulated Posey, “I’m sure there’s enough for us both in the basket.”
“That will do for lunch this afternoon. I tell you, the afternoons are pretty long.”
“But you know,” and Posey hesitated over the words, “we will have to pay if we eat here, and I haven’t any money.”
“Ho!” scoffed Ben. “I guess when I ask a young lady to take a ride with me I can get her a bite to eat; that’s the proper thing to do. Besides, I never took a girl riding before, that is, except my cousins, and I want to do it up swell. Why, lots of the boys I know are always asking the girls to go somewhere, though what they can find to say to each other is more than I can imagine. And Fred Flood, only a year older’n I am, has been engaged. He was engaged to Millie Grey for two weeks, then they quarreled out, he burned all her letters in the back yard, and they haven’t spoken to each other since.
“I s’pose, though,” Ben’s tone was reflective, “I shall come to it some day; write notes to the girls, and go after ’em in my best clothes an’ with a choke collar, as Cousin George does. But I guess it will be some time first,” and Ben laughed.
“It must make one feel real grown-up-like, though, to have a written invitation,” remarked Posey. “I had a letter from a boy once,” the dimples in her cheeks showing at the recollection.
“What was in it?”
“Oh, there was a shield made with red and blue crayons, and ‘U. S.’ in big letters at the top and bottom of the paper; then it said, “‘D P ,
‘If you love me, As I love you, No knife can cut Our love in two ’
The boy sent it to me in school one day.”
“What did you write back?”
“Nothing. I didn’t like the boy, anyway Besides, I shouldn’t have known what to write.”
“You might have written, “‘The rose is red, The violet blue, Tansy is horrid, And so are you.’”
And then they both laughed.
By this time a leisurely landlord in his shirtsleeves had made his appearance, and with a hand on each hip, stood calmly looking them over. “I would like my horse fed, and dinner for myself and this lady.” Ben’s tone had its business accent as he jumped down and helped Posey from the high seat to the ground.
“All right,” and stepping forward the landlord took the lines. “But seems to me you’re rather a young couple. Wedding trip, I s’pose?”
“Tin wedding!” and Ben gave a jerk of his thumb towards the cart.
What a sumptuous banquet to Posey seemed that dinner. Surely fried chicken was never before so good, and baked potatoes and squash so toothsome, or peaches and cream so delicious; even the decidedly slabby cake she ate with a relish. She had recovered from her fatigue, her eyes shone, her cheeks were flushed with pleasant excitement; she was ready to laugh at all of Ben’s nonsense, and the pleasantries of the good-natured landlord who served them. While Ben, delighted at her happy mood, as he looked at her and listened to her merry laugh, could hardly realize that this was the same woeful little figure he had met so few hours before.
They had not been long on the road again when Ben began to cast doubtful glances at a dark cloud swiftly rising in the west. “I’m afraid we’re going to have a shower,” he said at last. And then after a few moments, “I know we are. I see the rain coming over those woods now. It’s a mile or more away, but it’s working this way fast.”
“What will you do?” Posey questioned anxiously.
“I must try and get in somewhere. I’m pretty well fixed for storms, with a big umbrella and oilcloth apron. I’ve a cover for the load, too, but the trouble is I’ve got so many rags on now it won’t go over, so I must find some place to drive in. Hurry up, Billy,” and he shook the lines over the stout bay’s back. “I don’t know this road, either. I always go the one next south; it has more houses, but the landlord said there was a bridge down on it an’ I would have to come this way.”
“It’s beginning to sprinkle,” and Posey held out her hand. “I feel the drops. But there’s a house just ahead; perhaps you can find a place there.”
As they neared the white farmhouse they saw that a long woodhouse stretched from one side, its old-fashioned arched opening toward the road. “Can I drive under your shed?” Ben shouted to an old lady he saw just inside. And then as the first gust of the swift-coming storm began to patter thick about them, hardly waiting for a reply, he turned Billy at a swinging trot up the drive, and in another moment they were safe under shelter, while a whitely driving sheet of rain blotted out all the outer world.
“You was just in the nick o’ time, wasn’t you?” said the little roundfaced old lady, who was busy catching and putting in a box a flock of little turkeys that flew about the woodhouse squawking and fluttering, while the mother turkey shook her red head and uttered a dissonant protest.
“You see,” she explained, “if turkey chicks get wet it’s almost sure to kill ’em. They’re the tenderest little creatures that ever was to raise, an’ the hen turk’s no more sense than to trail out in the rain with ’em, so I’m goin’ to put ’em where they’ll be safe. It’s dreffle late to have little turks, but that hen beats all to steal her nest, an’ seein’ she’s hatched ’em I thought I’d try an’ help her raise ’em. They’ll be good eatin’ along in the winter.”
When the last scantily-feathered, long-necked turkey chick had, with Ben and Posey’s help, been captured and placed in the box, and the mother turkey had mounted the edge of it, they had time to notice the neat rows in which the wood was piled, the ground swept
hard and clean as a floor, and the tin wash-basin hanging over a bench beside the pump scoured till it shone like silver. “I guess it ain’t nothin’ but a shower,” chirruped their hostess; “come into the house an’ hev some cheers while you wait. I’m glad you happened along, not that I’m afraid, but it’s sort o’ lonesome-like to be alone in a storm.”
As she talked she led the way through the kitchen into a big sitting-room, where a new rag carpet made dazzling stripes on the floor, and the lounge and rocking-chair were gay with the brightest of chintz. Posey had already decided that this was almost the nicest old lady she had ever seen; there was something at once placid and cheerful in both tone and manner, and a kindly good-nature seemed to radiate even from her black silk apron. “I declare, for’t, if the rain isn’t blowin’ in at that winder,” she exclaimed as she lowered a sash.
“Aren’t you afraid the wind will blow down those great trees on the house?” asked Posey, as she glanced out a little fearfully at the branches bending and twisting in the storm.
“La, no, child,” was the placid answer; “they’ve stood worse storms than this. I don’t know what you would have done to have lived here as I did when I was your age. Right in the woods we was then, with the tall trees all around the log house; an’ in a big storm you could hear crash, crash—the trees comin’ down in the woods, an’ didn’t know what minute one would fall on the house. Once there come a real tornado—a windfall, they called it them days; a man in the next town just stepped to the door to look out, an’ a tree struck an’ killed him. Father cleared away around our house, so there shouldn’t be any danger, as soon as he could.”
“And did you live here when it was new as that?” asked Ben, whose interest was at once aroused by anything that smacked of old-time stories.
“To be sure I did. This part of Ohio was all woods when I come here. We come all the way from Connecticut in a wagon, for there wasn’t any other way o’ comin’ then; my father drove a ‘spike team,’ that is, a horse ahead of a yoke of oxen; we brought what housen goods we could in the wagon, an’ was forty days on the way. There
wasn’t a family in two miles at first, an’ nights we used to hear the wolves howlin’ ’round the house.”
“And how did you feel?” asked Posey breathlessly
The old lady laughed. “I was some scared along at first, though we hadn’t no great call to be afraid o’ them, it was the sheep an’ young cattle they was after. Why, along the first o’ father’s keepin’ sheep he had to shut ’em up every night in a high pen; an’ after neighbors got so thick we had a school a bear caught a pig one day, right in sight o’ the schoolhouse.”
“What did you do?” questioned Ben.
“Oh, some of the boys ran for Mr. James, who lived nearest. He came with his gun, but the bear got away.”
“I wish I could have lived in those days,” and Ben gave a longdrawn sigh over the safe, commonplace period in which his lot had been cast.
“I think myself mebby we took more comfort then,” the old lady agreed with fond retrospection. “We spun an’ wove all the cloth we had; the shoemaker came around from house to house to make the shoes—‘whippin’ the cat,’ they called it; when a deer was killed all the neighbors had a share of the venison, cooked before the big fireplace. To be sure, there were some things that wasn’t so pleasant. I remember once we went without shoes till into December ’cause the shoemaker couldn’t get around before; an’ another time father went to mill—twenty miles through the woods it was—he had to wait three days for his grist to be ground; we hadn’t a mite o’ flour or meal in the house, an’ mother sifted some bran to get the finest an’ made it into bran bread. I tell you, the boys an’ girls o’ to-day hain’t much idee o’ them times.”
She paused and looking at her listeners asked Ben abruptly, “Is this your sister?”
Posey’s heart went pit-a-pat, but Ben answered promptly, “No, ma’am, but she wanted to go my way, so I’m giving her a ride.”
She nodded. “I thought you didn’t favor one another.”
At that moment the slamming of a blind in an adjoining room called the old lady away for a moment, and Posey seized the opportunity to whisper to Ben, “She looks so nice and kind, do you suppose she would let me live with her?”
“Can’t say,” he whispered back, “but it won’t do any harm to ask her.”
So when she returned, bringing a plate of seed cookies for her guests, Posey hesitatingly made the request.
“La, child, I don’t live alone,” was the smiling answer. “My daughter Manda, an’ Henry Scott, her husband, have lived with me ever since my husband died. Not that I couldn’t live alone,” she added quickly, “for though I’m seventy-five I hold my age pretty well, an’ chore about a considerable. The reason I’m alone to-day is that Henry’s mother is here on a visit. She’s one o’ them wimmen that’s always on the go, an’ to-day there wa’n’t no hold up but they must go over to see Manda’s cousin Jane. They wanted me to go with ’em, but I said no, I wasn’t gwine joltin’ off ten mile as long as I had a comfortable place to stay in. When folks got to my age home was the best place for ’em, and I was gwine to stay there,” and she gave a chirruping little laugh.
“Henry’s mother is younger’n I be—three years, five months an’ fifteen days younger, but she don’t begin to be so spry. Has to have a nap every day; an’ she’s got eight different medicines with her, an’ what she don’t take she rubs on. It keeps her pretty busy a takin’ an’ a rubbin’ on,” and she chuckled again at what evidently seemed to her very amusing in one younger than herself.
“How old be you?” she asked, her mind coming back from Henry’s mother to Posey, who was waiting with wondering eagerness.
“I shall be fourteen in December.”
“You ain’t very big of your age.”
“But I’m real strong,” urged Posey, who experienced a sudden sense of mortification that she was not larger.
“You look as though you might be,” and the old lady looked over her glasses at the well-knit, rounded little figure. “Where have you been livin’?”
“Some fifteen miles from here,” answered Posey, who felt that exact information would not be prudent. “But I couldn’t stay there any longer,” she hastily added, “and as I haven’t any father or mother, I’d like to find some nice people who wanted a girl to live with and help them.”
“I really wish I knew of such a place for you, but Mandy, my daughter, has all the family she can see to; and none of the neighbors needs any one. But I dare presume you won’t have no trouble in findin’ some one who wants just such a little girl.” So the old lady cheerfully dismissed the subject without dreaming how absolutely homeless she really was; and as the storm had now passed over filled both their hands with cookies and with a smiling face watched the tin-wagon on its way again.