Fire Curtain
FIRE CURTAIN
On the night of February the ninth, in the year 1709, the Rectory of Epworth was in flames.
It was a substantial: house of old beams and plaster and it was covered with a deep thatch.
It burned like matchwood, and the neighbors said that the old Rector had set it on fire himself.
Now the Rev. Samuel Wesley, A.M., might be a fool, but he was not just that kind of a fool.
It was likely enough that he was the culprit, but withal an innocent one.
His wife was ill and could not follow him round putting to rights his inadvertencies, and it was reasonable to suppose that he had been careless with his candle when he locked the Rectory up for the night. He had given a look to the corn room, just through the door from the main house-place, and could so easily forget about the thatch above his head as he raised his lighted candle to see that no one had run away with his bags of meal. The head of the Rector of Epworth was full of jingling rhymes and his soul was elevated by the heroism of the Duke of Marlborough, and candles and thatch simply did not exist.
Glorious it was, and it made the flesh tingle to think of that eagre on the Trent, the poet's own river, and remember how, a few years before, it had upswelled its waters for the advent of the conquering
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hero.
How had the Rector made it go now in his lovely lines and his tingling enthusiasm?
"Nor my lov'd Trent unmov'd; though calm before, She with a double eagre sweeps the shore;
They only echo to the voice of Fame, Conquest and Marlborough they all proclaim."
Samuel Wesley's wife, the incomparable Susanna, had no sort of illusions about this husband of hers. She knew he was a fool in worldly matters.
Also she had not carried nineteen of his children without herself being ready for all emergencies. They met in the smokefilled hall of the old Rectory that night and she needed none to tell her that her husband had, of course, forgotten the key to the front door and to safety. And yet even in the fierceness of her scorn she had to acknowledge that he was himself something of a hero after all. She could not but admire the way he pelted up those burning stairs to retrieve the key whilst, as swiftly, she pitied the grotesque figure of him waving above his head a most ridiculous pair of trousers.
But it had always been like that all their married life. She could never really rid her heart of the love of him.
She found marriage with a poet uphill work, and yet perhaps it was this very poetry which made people keep on forgiving the old man his sins. Now with his jingling enthusiasm he had set the Rectory on fire when Susanna could least afford to be homeless, and here he was playing the same old double role of defeating her rage and stirring her anger at one and the same time.
There were all sorts of queer gaps in
FIRE CURTAIN
that night's work.
Susanna Wesley suspected that her husband had been more anxious to save his books than his children, for Master John Wesley had almost perished in the flames.
His father had heard the alarm, but had knelt down and committed the child's soul to God instead of going through hell to bring him out alive.
Susanna had waded through flame to her knees, and when she had next seen her husband she could scarcely speak from cruelly smokeblackened lips.
She was very near her time and no one had given her a hand through the window, where the others escaped, so she had walked through lambent flame to collapse in the garden.
She was laid on an improvised bed and, though hardly able to form the words, she did manage to get in a daggerthrust about those books.
Yet, almost in the same moment, her forgiveness was ready for this pitiable husband of hers, for she could afford to be generous when Master Jacky was at last safe by her side and the man did cut something of the hero's figure once again in that night of despair.
She saw him stand up and face those peering neighbors who hated them and secretly rejoiced at their downfall with a pride like
Lucifer's for all his poor five feet of stature.
He was begrimed and clad in one crazy stocking, but by a miracle had connected himself with those whirling trousers.
Into the dark night of terror and loss his voice rang out in challenge telling all Epworth that the wreck of his fortunes was nothing—absolutely nothing!
Had he not saved wife and child and was not that fortune enough?
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In that terrible night of smoke and drifting shadows little John Wesley snuggled up to his mother's side.
He had been rescued by the neighbors from the nursery window and had been brought straight to her.
If his father forsook him, then his mother would take him up.
It was really her own sweet reasonableness that had saved him. Through six years of a strenuous life she had taught him first how to reason and then how to act. The child had been left behind asleep when the nursemaid, with brother
Charles in her arms, had fled to safety.
John had awakened in a strange light room and reasoned shrewdly that it must be morning.
It followed from this that he must call his nurse to take him up, for his mother was adamant about that.
But there was none that answered.
Again his mother had taught him not to scold and cry out upon such inaction but to investigate the cause, and when nothing could be done about it he must "just 'thole."
So out of the bed-curtains came his little head. He saw the streaks of fire playing on the ceiling as his father saw them
"like a lamp."
This surely needed investigation.
Consumed by insatiable curiosity, John Wesley went to the door to see what was the matter and to force an entrance to his mother's protection.
But here an added wonder met him as also a great burning and crackling of fire.
Lest this should kindle upon him, he hastily withdrew.
His mother's rules again were adamant about children and fire.
That way of escape was quite cut off, so, by a careful process of elimination, there remained but one way more.
FIRE CURTAIN
Jacky Wesley escaped to life by the bedroom window and the kindly shoulders of rescuing farm hands, who had seen his questing face at the lattice.
His sister Hetty had felt the burning thatch fall on her feet and she had gone straight to her father.
John, after using his mother's weapon of reason, found her at last, and by her side the rough places were made plain.
Hetty's confidence was misplaced as it was the gardener who rescued her in the end, but John with unerring judgment knew the utter trustworthiness of his mother.
Hetty's life would come to be devastated by her father.
John Wesley's whole career would stand or fall by his mother.
He would look for her protection in the dangers of life and he would always reason with fire.
Susanna, for her part, never forgot that night of terror and how the little boy was saved from dreadful death.
Her mind dwelt in a special way upon this child and his deliverance, and she was never tired of pointing that moral and adorning that tale.
His tender ears were never allowed to forget the roar and crackle of flames, and around his innocent head played those queer intangible flames of hell which could only be kept at arm's length by Herculean effort.
God's demands for his ultimate salvation became as adamant as his mother's rules for his walk and conduct.
She called him the Brand plucked from the burning, and when she was alone made pious vows on his behalf: "I do intend to be more especially careful of the soul of this child."
So it came about that the imagery of the child's mind had in it a special place for leaping
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flames, and an unconscious fear lurked somewhere deep down in his being.
That Epworth fire made a cruel reality of the Puritan's Hell, and it behooved the child to walk delicately ever afterwards.
John Wesley believed that he had actually managed to reach the age of ten years without sinning away that sign of the God who answers by fire.
Given Susanna Wesley as a mother and ten years of life in Epworth Rectory and the thing was done.
At the mature age of thirty-four the little Brand plucked from the burning would inevitably couch the terms of his loveletters in the metaphors of fear and flames: "I find,
Miss Sophy, I can't take fire into my bosom and not be burnt.
I am therefore retiring for a while to desire the direction of God. Join with me, my friend, in fervent prayer that He would show me what is best to be done."
SUSANNA WESUDEY
THE eighteenth century was a reasonable age and in no wise squeamish.
John Wesley was as reasonable and unashamed as any modern psychologist when he declared that his destiny was fixed even before that night of the Epworth fire.
With a shrewd flash of his inspired common sense he told his friend Adam Clarke that "If I were to write my own life I should begin it before I was born."
It really did all begin so far away as that, for the little body of God's firebrand was fashioned in a strangely quiet period of reconciliation between those parental protagonists
—Susanna and Samuel Wesley.
But it had been reconciliation after the fury of one tremendous quarrel.
Susanna Wesley was a woman of indomitable courage, but just then stark reality had nearly strangled the life out of her.
She had started out gaily enough upon the path of life as the beautiful and clever daughter of Dr. Annesley, the great Puritan Divine.
In that queer old house in Spital Yard, London, she had been wont to take all life and theology for her province.
She was accustomed to enter upon the great arguments of free will and foreknowledge absolute and drink delight of battle with her peers.
Her very maiden love of Samuel Wesley had been born in a theological argument.
The Dissenters were fast
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becoming Unitarians, but there had been something of the grand manner about the way that young Sam
Wesley had stayed her reasonable hands when she would have divested Christ of His Divinity.
There was something of beauty and of glory in the young man's jingles then—to be able to sing of a Hero's death like that:
"Behold the Saviour of Mankind Nailed to the shameful tree.
How vast the love that Him inclined To bleed and die for me."
She owed Samuel Wesley a debt of gratitude for that, and when the old man came to die that was all she cared to remember.
His sins were buried with him, and she restrained her son's ready epitaphs with just that face cut by village skill upon his tombstone in Epworth Churchyard:
HERE
LYETH ALL THAT WAS
MORTAL OF SAMUEL WESLEY,
A.M.
HE WAS RECTOR OF EP-
WORTH 39 YEARS AND DEPARTED
THIS LIFE 25 OF APRIL 1735
AGED 72.
AS HE LIV'D SO HE DIED
IN THE TRUE CATHOLICK FAITH
OF THE HOLY TRINITY IN UNITY,
AND THAT JESUS CHRIST IS GOD
INCARNATE: AND THE ONLY
SAVIOUR OF MANKIND