The Zeit-Geist Part 10

Ann sat quite still; she had a feeling that if she moved to make any other sound, however slight, than that of speech some spell would be broken. In the darkness Bart had awakened out of the stupor of his injury; and although Ann could not have expressed it, she felt that his voice came like the speech of a soul that is not a part of the things we see and touch. It was so strange to her that he did not ask her where he was. For a few minutes more at least she did not want to bring the least rustle of material surroundings into their talk. She was still incredulous; it is only a very weak mind that does not take time to grow into a new point of view.

"Bart, was G.o.d with father when he tried to kill you and tied you to the tree?"

"Yes."

"How do you know?"

"You can't think of G.o.d being less than something else. If G.o.d was not in your father, then s.p.a.ce is outside G.o.d's mind. You can't think that G.o.d wanted to save your father from doing it and didn't, unless you think that the devil was stronger than G.o.d. You can't think that you are more loving than G.o.d; and if He is so loving, He couldn't let any one do what wasn't just the best thing. I tell you, it's a love that's awful to think of that will go on giving men strength to do wrong until through the ages of h.e.l.l they get sick of it, rather than make them into machines that would just go when they're wound up and that no one could love."

"Do they know all this in church, Bart?" Ann asked. It had never occurred to her before to test her beliefs by this standard, but now it seemed necessary; she felt after tradition instinctively. The nakedness of Bart's statements seemed to want tradition for a garment.

Bart's words were very simple. "When I was fastened on that log and saw all this, I saw that Jesus knew it all, and that that was what all His life and dying meant, and that the people that follow Him are learning to know that that was what it meant; it takes them a long, long time, and we can't understand it yet, but as the world goes on it will come clearer. Everybody that knows anything about Him says all this in church, only they don't quite understand it. There's many churches, Ann, where the people all get up and say out loud, 'He descended into h.e.l.l.'

I don't know much, for I've only read the Bible for one year; but if you think of all that Jesus did and all that happened to Him, you will see what I mean. People have made little of it by saying it was a miracle and happened just once, but He knew better. He said that G.o.d had been doing it always, and that He did nothing but what He saw G.o.d doing, and that when men saw Him they would know that G.o.d was like that always.

Haven't I just been telling you that G.o.d bears our sins and carries our sorrows with us until we become blessed because we are holy? We can always choose to be that, but He will never _make_ us choose. Jesus never _made_ anybody do anything; and, Ann, if there are things in the Bible that we don't understand to mean that, it is because they are a parable, and a parable, Ann, is putting something people can't understand in pictures that they can look at and look at, and always learn something every time they look, till at last they understand what is meant. People have always learned just as much from the Bible as they can take in, and made mistakes about the rest; but it is G.o.d's character to make us learn even by mistakes."

Ann's interest began to waver. They were silent awhile, and then, "Bart, do you know where you are?" she asked.

"I don't seem to care much where I am, as long as you are here." There was a touch of shyness in the tone of the last words that made all that he had said before human to her.

"If it hadn't been that I thought it was father, I'd have taken you home." She told him how she had brought him. "If it had been a boat,"

she said, "I'd have found out who it was before we got here, but the canoe was too narrow."

CHAPTER XVI.

Ann dosed where she sat. Toyner slept again. At length they were both aware that the level light of the sun was in the room.

Ann sat up, looking at the door intently. Then her eyes moved as if following some one across the room.

"What is it?" asked Toyner.

Ann started up with one swift look of agonised entreaty, and then it seemed that what she had seen vanished, for she turned to Bart trembling, unable to speak at first, sobs struggling with her breath.

"It was father--I saw him come to the door and come in. He's dead now."

"What did he look like?" Toyner's voice was very quiet.

"He looked as if he was dead, but as if he was mad too--his body as if it was dead, and himself wild and mad and burning inside of it." She was crouching on the floor, shaken with the sobs of a new and overwhelming pity. "O Bart! I never cared--cared anything for him before--except to have him comfortable and decent; but if I thought he was going to be--like that--now I think I would die to save him if I could."

"Would you die to save him? So would G.o.d; and you can't believe in G.o.d at all unless you know that He does what He wants to do. And G.o.d does it; dies in him, and is in him now; and He will save him."

Bart's eyes were full of peace.

"Can't you trust G.o.d, Ann? When He is suffering so much for love of each of us? He could make us into good machines, but He won't. Can't you begin to do what He is doing for yourself and other people? Ann, if He suffers in your father and in you, He is glad when you are glad. Try to be glad always in His love and in the glory of it."

Ann's mind had reverted again to the traditions of which she knew so little. "I don't want to go to heaven," she said, "if father is in some place looking like he did just now."

"Heaven" (Bart repeated the word curiously), "heaven is inside you when you grow to be like G.o.d; and through all ages and worlds heaven will be to do as He does, to suffer with those that are suffering, and to die with those that are dying. But remember, Ann, too, it means to rejoice with those who are rejoicing; and joy is greater than pain and heaviness. And heaven means always to be in peace and strength and delight, because it is along the line of G.o.d's will where His joy flows."

Ann rose and ran out of the house. To be in the sunshine and among the wild sunflowers was more to her just then than any wisdom. The wave of pity that had gone over her soul had ebbed in a feeling of exhaustion.

Her body wanted warmth and heat. She felt that she wanted _only_ that.

After she had sat for an hour near the bank of the rippling stream, and all her veins were warmed through and through with the sunlight, the apparition of her father seemed like a dream. She had seen him thus once in life, and supposed him a spirit. She was ready to suppose what she had now seen to be a repet.i.tion of that last meeting, coming before she was well roused from her sleep. She took comfort because her pulses ran full and quiet once more. She thought of her love to Bart, and was content. As to all that Bart had said--ah well! something she had gathered from it, which was a seed in her mind, lay quiet now.

At length Toyner found strength to walk feebly, and sat down on the doorstep, where he could see Ann. It was his first conscious look upon this remote autumn bower, and he never forgot its joy. The eyes of men who have just arisen from the dim region that lies near death are often curiously full of unreasoning pleasure. Within himself Toyner called the place the Garden of Eden.

"If only I had not brought you here!" said Ann. "If only I had not left the canoe untied!"

For answer Bart looked around upon the trees and flowers and upon her with happy eyes that had no hint of past or future in them. Something of the secret of all peace--the _Eternal Now_--remained with him as long as the weakness of this injury remained.

"Don't fret, Ann" (with a smile).

"I'm afraid for you; you look awful ill, and ought to have a doctor."

He had it in his mind to tell her that he was all right and desired only what he had; but, in the dreamy reflective mood that still held him, what he said was:

"If all the trouble in earth and heaven and h.e.l.l were put together, Ann, it would be just like clouds pa.s.sing before the sun of joy. The clouds are never at an end, but each one pa.s.ses and melts away. Ann! sorrow and joy are like the clouds and the sun."

It is never destined that man should remain long in Eden. About noon that day Ann heard a shout from the direction of the lake outside among the dead trees; the shout was repeated yet nearer, and in a minute or two she recognised the voice and heard the sound of oars splashing up the narrow channel made by the running creek. The thought of this deliverance had not occurred to her; yet when she recognised the voice it seemed to her natural enough that David Brown should have divined where his canoe might have been brought. She stood waiting while his boat came up the creek. The young athlete sprang from it, question and reproach in his handsome young face. She found no difficulty then in telling him just what she had done, and why. She felt herself suddenly freed from all that life of frequent deception which she had so long practised. She had no desire to dupe any man now into doing any service.

Something in the stress of the last days, in her new reverence for Bart, had wrought a change in the relative value she set on truth and the gain of untruth. She held up her head with a gesture of new dignity as she told David that she had sought her father and found Bart.

"Father has half killed him, and now it hurts me to see him ill. Bart is a good man. O David, I tell you there is no one in the world I mind about so much as Bart. Could you take him in your boat now to the hospital at The Mills? He would have done as much for you, and more, if you had got hurt in that way."

So David took the man Ann loved to the hospital at The Mills. He did it willingly if he did it ruefully. Ann went home, as she had come, in the canoe, except that she had gone out in the dead of night and she went home in broad daylight.

No one blamed Ann when they knew she had gone out to help her father; no one smiled or sneered when they found that she had succeeded in saving Toyner's life.

A few days pa.s.sed, and poor Markham was found drowned in a forest pool.

They brought him home and buried him decently at Fentown for his daughter's sake.

Toyner lay ill for weeks in the little wooden hospital at The Mills.

CHAPTER XVII.

When Toyner was well he came home again. His mind was still animated with the conception of G.o.d as suffering in the human struggle, but as absolute Lord of that struggle, and the consequent belief that nothing but obedience to the lower motive can be called evil. The new view of truth his vision had given him had become too really a part of his mind to be overthrown. It was no doubt a growth from the long years of desultory browsing upon popular science and the one year that had been so entirely devoted to the story of the gospel and to prayer. He could not doubt his new creed; but no sooner had he left the hospital walls than that burden came upon him of which the greatest stress is this, that in trying to fit new light to common use we are apt to lose the clearer vision of the light itself.

In Toyner's former religious experience he had been much upheld by the knowledge that he was walking in step with a vast army of Christians.

Now he no longer believed himself in the ways of exclusive thought and practices in which the best men he knew were walking. The only religious thinkers with whom he had come in contact gave up a large cla.s.s of human activities and the majority of human souls to the almost exclusive dominion of the devil. As far as Toyner knew he was alone in the world with his new idea. He had none of that vanity and self-confidence which would have made it easy for him to hold to it. It did not appear to him reasonable that he could be right and these others wrong. He did not know that no man can think alone, that by some strange necessity of thought he could only think what other men were then thinking. He felt homesick, sick for the support of those faithful ones which he had been wont to see in imagination with him: their conscious communion with G.o.d was the only good life, the life which he must seek to attain and from which he feared above all things to fall short; and that being so, it would have been easier, far easier, to call his new belief folly, heresy, nay, blasphemy if that were needful, and to repent of it, if he could have done so. He could not, do what he would; he saw his vision to be true.

The thing had grown with his growth; he believed that a voice from heaven had spoken it. Is not this the history of all revelation?

When I say that Toyner could not doubt his new conception of G.o.d and of the human struggle, I mean that he could not in sincerest thought hold the contrary to be true. I do not mean to say that daily and hourly, when about his common avocations, his new inspiration did not seem a mere will-o'-the-wisp of the mind. It took months and years to bring it into any accustomed relation to every-day matters of thought and act; and it is this habitual adjustment of our inward belief to our outward environment that makes any creed _appear_ to be incontrovertible.