The Zeit-Geist Part 9

The sun rose, and a level golden beam struck through between the trunks of the trees, touching the flowers and branches here and there with moving lights, and giving all the air a brighter, mellower tint. There was something that Bart did feel a desire to say--a great thought that at another time he might have tried in a mult.i.tude of words to have expressed and failed. He saw Ann, whom he loved, and the paradise about her; he wanted to bring the new knowledge that had come to him in the light of his vision to bear upon her who belonged now to the region of outward not of inward sight and yet was part of what must always be to him everlasting reality.

"What were you going to say, Bart?" she asked again tenderly.

And again he summed up all that he thought and felt in one word:

"G.o.d."

"Yes, Bart," she said, with some sudden intuitive sense of agreement.

Then, seeming to be satisfied, he closed his eyes and went back into the state of drowsiness.

CHAPTER XIV.

Ann went up to the house. It was a great relief to her to remember that the man for whom she was going to ask help was no criminal. She could hold up her head and speak boldly.

Another minute and she began to look curiously to see how long the gra.s.s and weeds had grown before the door. It was some months since David Brown had been here. The doubt which had entered Ann's mind grew swiftly. She knocked loudly upon the door and upon the wooden shutters of the windows. The knocks echoed through empty rooms.

She had no hesitation in house-breaking. In a shed at the back she found a broken spade which formed a sufficiently strong and sharp lever for her purpose. She pried open a shutter and climbed in. She found only such furniture as was necessary for a temporary abode. A small iron stove, a few utensils of tin, a huge sack which had been used for a straw bed, and a few articles of wooden furniture, were all that was to be seen.

Upon the canvas sack she seized eagerly. Bart might be dying, or he might be recovering from some injury; in either case she had only one desire, and that was to procure for him the necessary comforts. Having no access to hay or straw, she began rapidly to gather the bracken which was standing two and three feet high in great quant.i.ties wherever the ground was dry under the trees. She worked with a nervous strength that was extraordinary, even to herself, after the toilsome night. When she had filled the sack, she put it upon the floor of the lower room and went back to the canoe. She saw that Bart had roused himself and was sitting up. He was even holding on to the rushes with his hand--an act which she thought showed the dreamy state of his mind, for she did not notice that the rope had come undone. She helped Bart out of the canoe, putting her arm strongly round him so that he was able to walk. She saw that he had not his mind yet; he said no word about the help she gave him; he walked as a sleeping man might walk. When she laid him down upon the bed of bracken and arranged his head upon the thicker part which she had heaped for a pillow, he seemed to her to fall asleep almost at once; and yet, for fear that his strange condition was not sleep, she hastily opened the bag of food and the flask of rum.

She stripped the twigs from a tiny spruce tree, piling them inside the old stove. When they had cracked and blazed with a fierce, sudden heat, Ann could only break bread-crumbs into a cupful of boiling water and put a few drops of rum in it. She woke Bart and fed him as she might have fed a baby. When he lay down again exhausted, with that strange moan which he always gave when he first put back his head, she had the comfort of believing that a better colour came to his cheek than before.

She resolved that if he rested quietly for a few hours and appeared better after the next food she gave him, she would think it safe to cushion the canoe with bracken and take him home. This thought suggested to her to moor the canoe.

She went down to the creek again, but it was too late. The water running gently and steadily had done its work, taken the canoe out from among the rushes, and floated it down between the mosses of the swamp. Making her feet bare, she sprang from one clump of fern root to another, sometimes missing her footing and striking to her knees through the green moss that let her feet easily break into the black wet earth. In a few minutes she could see the canoe. It had drifted just beyond the swamp, where all the ground was lying under some feet of water; but there a tree had turned its course out of the current of the creek, so that it was now sidling against two ash trees, steady as if at anchor.

So few feet as it was from her, Ann saw at a glance that to reach it was quite impossible. Realising the helplessness of her position without this canoe, she might have been ready to brave the dangers of a struggle in deep water to obtain it, but the danger was that of sinking in bottomless mud. The canoe was wholly beyond her reach. Retracing her steps, she washed her feet in the running creek, and, as she put on her shoes, sitting upon the gra.s.sy bank in the morning sunlight, she felt drowsily as if she must rest there for a few minutes. She let her head fall upon the arm she had outstretched on the warm sod.

When she stirred again she had that curious feeling of inexplicable lapse of time that comes to us after unexpected and profound slumber.

The sun had already pa.s.sed the zenith; the tone in the voices of the crickets, the whole colouring of earth and sky, told her, before she had made any exact observation of the shadows, that it was afternoon.

She prepared more food for the sick man. When she had fed him and put him to rest again, she went out to discover what means of egress by land was to be found from this lonely dwelling. She followed the faint trace of wheel-ruts over the gra.s.s, which for a short distance ran through undergrowth of fir and weeds. She came out upon a cleared s.p.a.ce of some acres, from which a fine crop of hay had clearly been taken, apparently about a month before. Whoever had mowed the hay had evidently been engaged also in a further clearing of the land beyond, and there was a small patch where tomatoes and pea vines lay neglected in the sun; the peas had been gathered weeks before, but the tomatoes, later in ripening, hung there turning rich and red. Ann went on across the cleared s.p.a.ce. Following the track, she came to a thick bit of bush beyond, where a long cutting had been made, just wide enough for a cart to pa.s.s through.

There was no other way out; Ann must walk through this long green pa.s.sage. No knight in a fairy tale ever entered path that looked more remote from the world's thoroughfares. When she had walked a mile she came to an opening where the ground dipped all round to a bottom which had evidently at some time held water, for the flame-weed that grew thick upon it stood even, the tops of its magenta flowers as level as a lake--it was, in fact, a lake of faded crimson lying between sh.o.r.es of luxuriant green. The cart-ruts went right down into the flame-flowers, and she thought she could descry where they rose from them on the other side. Evidently the blossoming had taken place since the last cart had pa.s.sed over, and no doubt many miles intervened between this and the next dwelling-house. Nothing but the thought of necessities that might arise for help on Bart's account made her make the toilsome pa.s.sage, knee-deep among the flowers, to see whether, beyond that, the road was pa.s.sable; but she only found that it was not fit for walkers except at a time of greater drought than the present. The swamp crept round in a ring, so that she discovered herself to be upon what was actually an island. Ann turned back, realising that she was a prisoner.

On her way home again she gathered blood-red tomatoes; and finding a wild apple tree, she added its green fruit to what she already held gathered in the skirt of her gown; starvation at least was not a near enemy.

She had made her investigation calmly, and with a light heart; she felt sure that Bart had grown better and stronger during the day, and that was all that she cared about. She never paused to ask herself why his recovery was not merely a humane interest but such a satisfying joy.

The knowledge of her present remoteness from all distresses of her life as a daughter and sister came to her with a wonderful sense of rest, and opened her mind to the sweet influences of the summer night and its stars as that mind had never been opened before.

She cooked the apples and tomatoes, making quite a good meal for herself. Then she roused Bart, and gave him part of the cooked fruit.

CHAPTER XV.

The darkness closed in about eight o'clock. Ann sat on the doorstep watching the lights in the sky shine out one by one. Last night had been the only night which had ever possessed terrors for her, and now that she believed her father to be still alive she thought no longer with any horror of his apparition. She wondered where he was wandering, but her heart hardened towards him. She rested and dozed by turns upon the doorstep until about midnight. Then in the darkness she heard a voice from the bracken couch that a.s.sured her that Bart's mind had come back to him again.

"Who is there?" he asked.

"I am going to give you something to eat," she said, letting her voice speak her name.

"Is it very dark?" he asked, "or am I blind?"

"You can see right enough, Bart," she said gently; "you can watch me kindle the fire."

She left the door of the stove open while the spruce twigs were crackling, and in the red, uncertain, dancing light he caught glimpses of the room in which he was, and of her figure, but the fire died down very quickly again.

"I was thinking, Ann," he said slowly, "that it was a pity for Christa to be kept from dancing. She is young and light on her feet. G.o.d must have made her to dance."

"Christa's well enough without it," said Ann, a little shortly.

She thought more coldly of Christa since she had come up to a higher level herself.

"Well, I only meant about Christa that I think I made a mistake," said Bart slowly.

"How a mistake?" she asked.

It was a very hard question to answer. A moment before and he thought he had seen what the mistake was and how to speak, but when he tried, all that manifold difficulty of applying that which is eternal to that which is temporal came between his thought and its expression.

He could not know clearly wherein his difficulty lay; no one had taught him about the Pantheism which obliterates moral distinctions, or told him of the subjective ideal which sweeps aside material delight. He only felt after the realities expressed by these phrases, and dimly perceived that truth lies midway between them, and that truth is the mind of G.o.d, and can only be lived, not spoken. For a while he lay there in the darkness, trying to think how he could tell Ann that to his eyes all things had become new; after a little while he did try to tell her, and although the words were lame, and apparently contradictory to much that they both knew was also true, still some small measure of his meaning pa.s.sed into her mind.

"G.o.d is different from what I ever thought," he said; "He isn't in some things and not in others; it's wicked to live so as to make people think that, for they think they can get outside of Him, and then they don't mind Him at all."

"How do you know it?" she asked curiously.

"I saw it. Perhaps G.o.d showed me because I was so hard up. It's G.o.d's truth, Ann, that I am saying."

The room was quite dark again now; the chirping of the crickets outside thrilled through and through it, as if there were no walls there but only the darkness and the chirping. Ann sat upon a wooden chair by the stove.

She considered for a minute, and then she said, with the first touch of repentance in her heart: "Well, I reckon G.o.d ain't in me, any way. There isn't much of G.o.d in me that I can see."

"I'll tell you how it is if I can." Toyner's voice had a strange rest and calm in it. He spoke as a man who looked at some inward source of peace, trying to describe it. "Supposing you had a child, you wouldn't care anything about him at all if you could just work him by wires so that he couldn't do anything but just what you liked; and yet the more you cared about him, the more it would hurt you dreadfully if he didn't do the things that you knew were good for him, and love you and talk to you too. Well now, suppose one day, when he was a little fellow, say, he wanted to touch something hot, and you told him not to. Well, if he gave it up, you'd make it easier for him to be good next time; but suppose he went on determined to have his own way, can't you think of yourself taking hold of his hand and just helping him to reach up and touch the hot thing? I tell you, if you did that it would mean that you cared a great sight more about him than if you just slapped him and put it out of his reach; and yet, you see, you'd be helping him to do the wrong thing just because you wanted to take the naughtiness out of his heart, not because you were a devil that wanted him to be naughty. Well, you see, between us and our children" (Toyner was talking as men do who get hold of truth, not as an individual, but as mankind) "it's not the same as between G.o.d and us. They have our life in them, but they're outside us and we're outside them, and so we get into the way, when we want them to be good, of giving them a punishment that's outside the harm they've done, and trying to put the harm they are going to do outside of their reach; and when they do the right thing, half the time we don't help them to do it again. But that isn't G.o.d's way. Nothing is ever outside of Him; and what happens after we have done a thing is just what must happen, nothing more and nothing less, so that we can never hope to escape the good or the evil of what we have done; for the way things must happen is just G.o.d's character that never changes. You see the reason we can choose between right and wrong when a tree can't, or a beast, is just because G.o.d's power of choice is in us and not in them.

So we use His power, and when we use it right and think about pleasing Him--for, you see, we know He can be pleased, for our minds are just bits of His mind (as far as we know anything about Him; but of course we only know a very little)--He puts a tremendous lot of strength into us, so that we can go on doing right next time. Of course it's a low sort of right when we don't think about Him, for that's the most of what He wants us to do; but I tell you" (a little personal fire and energy here broke the calm of the recital), "I tell you, when I do look up to G.o.d and say, '_Now I am going to do this for Your sake and because You are in me and will do it_,' I tell you, there's _tremendous power_ given us.

_That's the law that makes the value of religion_; I know it by the way I gave up drinking. But now, look here; most of the time we don't use G.o.d's will, that He lends us, to do what's right; well, then He doesn't slap us and put the harm out of our reach. He does just what the mother does when she takes the child's hand and puts it against the hot thing, and the burn hurts her as much as it hurts the child; but He is not weak like we are to do it only once in a way. I tell you, Ann, every time you do a wrong thing G.o.d is with you; that is what I saw when I was hard up and G.o.d showed me how things really were. Now, look here, there isn't any end to it that we can see here; it's an awful lot of help we get to do the wrong thing if that's the thing we choose to do. It gets easier and easier, and at first there's a lot of pleasure to it, but by-and-by it gets more and more dreadful, and then comes death, and that's the end here. But G.o.d does not change because we die, and wherever we go He is with us and gives us energy to do just what we choose to do. It's h.e.l.l before we die when we live that way, and it's h.e.l.l after, for ages and ages and worlds and worlds perhaps, just until the h.e.l.l-fire of sin has burned the wrong way of choosing out of us. But remember, G.o.d never leaves us whatever we do; there's nothing we feel that He doesn't feel with us; we must all come in the end to being like Himself, and there's always open the short simple way of choosing His help to do right, instead of the long, long way through h.e.l.l. But I tell you, Ann, whether you're good or whether you're wicked, G.o.d is in you and you are in Him.

If He left you, you would neither be good nor wicked, you would stop being; but He loves you in a bigger, closer way than you can think of loving anybody; and if you choose to go round the longest way you can, through the h.e.l.l-fire of sin on earth and all the other worlds, He will suffer it all with you, and bring you in the end to be like Himself."

The calm voice was sustained in physical strength by the strength of the new faith.

Ann's reply followed on the track of thoughts that had occurred to her.

"Well now, there's that awful low girl, Nelly Bowes. She's drunk all the time, and she's got an awful disease. She's as bad as bad can be, and so is the man she lives with; and that little child of hers was born a hard-minded, sickly little beast." Her words had a touch of triumphant opposition as she brought them out slowly. "It's a mean, horrid shame for the child to be born like that. It wasn't its fault. Do you mean to say G.o.d is with them?"

"It's a long sight easier to believe that than that He just let them go to the devil! I tell you it's an awful wicked thing to teach people that G.o.d can save them and doesn't. G.o.d is saving those two and the child just by the h.e.l.l they've brought on themselves and it; and He's in h.e.l.l with them, and He'll bring them out to something grander than we can think about. They could come to it without giving Him all that agony and themselves too; but if they won't, He'll go through it with them rather than turn them into puppets that He could pull by wires. And as to the child, I can't see it quite clear; but I see this much that I know is true: it's G.o.d's character to have things so that a good man has a child with a nice clean soul, and it's just by the same way of things that the other happens too. It's the working out of the bad man's salvation to see his child worse than himself, and it's the working out of the child's salvation to have his bad soul in a bad body. Look you, can't you think that in the ages after death the saving of the soul of that child may be the one thing to make that man and woman divine?

They'll never, never get rid of their child, and the child will come quicker to the light through the blackness he is born to than if, having the bad soul that he has, G.o.d was to set him in heaven. But, look you, Ann, there isn't a day or an hour that G.o.d is not asking them to choose the better and the quicker way, and there isn't a day or an hour that He isn't asking you and me and every one else in the world to do as He does so as to help them to choose it, and live out the sufferings of their life with them till they do."