There & Back Part 25

"You would if it were reasonable!"

"I will, then! To love all the creatures and not have a word to say to the G.o.d that made them for loving them before-hand--is that reasonable?"

"No, if a G.o.d did make them."

"They could not make themselves!"

"No; nothing could make itself."

"Then somebody must have made them!"

"Who?"

"Why, the one that could and did--who else?"

"We know nothing about such a somebody. All we know is, that there they are, and we have got to love them!"

"Ah!" she said, and looked up into the wide sky, where now the "wandering moon" was alone,

Like one that had been led astray Through the heaven's wide pathless way,

and gazed as if she searched for the Somebody. "I should like to see the one that made that!" she said at last. "Think of knowing the very person that made that poor pigeon, and has got it now!--and made Miss Brown--and the wind! I must find him! He can't have made me and not care when I ask him to speak to me! You say he is nowhere! I don't believe there is any nowhere, so he can't be there! Some people may be content with things; I shall get tired of them, I know, if I don't get behind them! A thing is nothing without what things it! A gift is nothing without what gives it! Oh, dear! I know what I mean, but I can't say it!"

"You don't know what you mean, but you do say it!" thought Richard.

He was nowise repelled by her enthusiasm, for there was in it nothing a.s.sailant, nothing too absurdly superst.i.tious. He did not care to answer her.

They went walking toward the house and were silent. The moon went on with her silentness: she never stops being silent. When they felt near the house, they fell to walking slower, but neither knew it. Barbara spoke again:

"Just fancy!" she said, "--if G.o.d were all the time at our backs, giving us one lovely thing after another, trying to make us look round and see who it was that was so good to us! Imagine him standing there, and wondering when his little one would look round, and see him, and burst out laughing--no, not laughing--yes, laughing--laughing with delight--or crying, I don't know which! If I had him to love as I should love one like that, I think I should break my heart with loving him--I should love him to the killing of me! What! all the colours and all the shapes, and all the lights, and all the shadows, and the moon, and the wind, and the water!--and all the creatures--and the people that one would love so if they would let you!--and all--"

"And all the pain, and the dying, and the disease, and the wrongs, and the cruelty!" interposed Richard.

She was silent. After a moment or two she said--

"I think I will go in now. I feel rather cold. I think there must be a fog, though I can't see it."

She gave a little shiver. He looked in her face. Was it the moon, or was it something in her thoughts that made the sweet countenance look so gray? Could his mere suggestion of the reverse, the wrong side of the web of creation, have done it? Surely not!

"I think I want some one to say _must_ to me!" she said, after another pause. "I feel as if--"

There she stopped. Richard said nothing. Some instinct told him he might blunder.

He stood still. Barbara went on a few steps, then turned and said--

"Are you not going in?"

"Not just yet," he answered. "Please to remember that if I can do anything for you,--"

"You are very kind. I am much obliged to you. If you know another rime,--But I think I shall have to give up poetry."

"It will be hard to find another so good," returned Richard.

"Good-night," she said.

"Good-night, miss!" answered Richard, and walked away, with a loss at his heart. The poem has already ceased to please her! He had made the lovely lady more thoughtful, and less happy than before!

"She has been taught to believe in a G.o.d," he said to himself. "She is afraid he will be angry with her, because, in her company, I dared question his existence! A generous G.o.d--isn't he! If he be anywhere, why don't he let us see him? How can he expect us to believe in him, if he never shows himself? But if he did, why should I worship him for being, or for making me? If I didn't want him, and I don't, I certainly shouldn't worship him because I saw him. I couldn't. If Nature is cruel, as she certainly is, and he made her, then he is cruel too! There cannot be such a G.o.d, or, if there be, it cannot be right to worship him!"

He did not reflect that if he had wanted him, he would not have waited to see him before he worshipped him.

But Barbara was saying to herself--

"What if he has shown himself to me some time--one of those nights, perhaps, when I was out till the sun rose--and I didn't know him!--How frightful if there should be n.o.body at all up there--n.o.body anywhere all round!"

She stared into the milky, star-sapphire-like blue, as if, out of the sweetly veiled terror-gulf, she would, by very gazing, draw the living face of G.o.d.

Verily the G.o.d that knows _how not_ to reveal himself, must also know how _best_ to reveal himself! If there be a calling child, there must be an answering father!

CHAPTER XXIII. _A HUMAN GADFLY_.

From so early an age had Richard been accustomed to despise a certain form he called G.o.d, which stood in the gallery of his imagination, carved at by the hands of successive generations of sculptors, some hard, some feeble, some clever, some stupid, all conventional and devoid of prophetic imagination, that his antagonism had long taken the shape of an angry hostility to the notion of any G.o.d whatever. Richard could see a thing to be false, that is, he could deny, but he was not yet capable either of discovering or receiving what was true, because he had not yet set himself to know the truth. To oppose, to refuse, to deny, is not _to know the truth_, is not _to be true_ any more than it is to be false. Whatever good may lie in the destroying of the false, the best hammer of the iconoclast will not serve withal to carve the celestial form of the Real; and when the iconoclast becomes the bigot of negation, and declares the non-existence of any form worthy of worship, because he has destroyed so many unworthy, he pa.s.ses into a fool. That he has never conceived a deity such as he could worship, is a poor ground to any but the man himself for saying such cannot exist; and to him it is but a ground lightly vaulted over the vacuity self-importance. Such a divine form may yet stand in the adytum of this or that man whom he and the world count an idiot.

Into the workshop of Richard's mind was now introduced, by this one disclosure of the mind of Barbara, a new idea of divinity, vague indeed as new, but one with which he found himself compelled to have some dealing. One of the best services true man can do a neighbour, is to persuade him--I speak in a parable--to house his children for a while, that he may know what they are: the children of another may be the saving of his children and his whole house. Alas for the man the children of whose brain are the curse of the household into which they are received! But from Barbara's house Richard had taken into his a vital protoplasmic idea that must work, and would never cease to work until the house itself was all divine--the idea, namely, of a being to call G.o.d, who was a delight to think of, a being concerning whom the great negation was that of everything Richard had hitherto a.s.sociated with the word G.o.d. The one door to admit this formal notion was hard to open; and when admitted, the figure was not easy to set up so that it could be looked at. The human niche where the idea of a G.o.d must stand, was in Richard's house occupied by the most hideous falsity. On the pedestal crouched the goblin of a j.a.panese teapot.

It was not pleasant to Richard to imagine any one with rights over him.

It may be that some persist in calling up the false idea of such a one hitherto presented to them, in order to avoid feeling obligation to believe in him. For the notion of a G.o.d is one from which naturally a thoughtful man must feel more or less recoil while as yet he knows nothing of the being himself, or of the nature of his creative rights, the rights of perfect, self-refusing, devoted fatherhood. It is one thing to seem to know with the brain, quite another to know with the heart. But even in the hope-lighted countenance of Barbara, even in the tones in which she suggested the presence of a soul that meant and was all that the beautiful world hinted and seemed, Richard could not fail to meet something of the true idea of a G.o.d.

Naturally also, his notion of the G.o.d in whom he felt that Barbara was at least ready to believe, a.s.sumed something of the look of Barbara who was being drawn toward him; so that now the graces of the world, all its lovely impacts upon his senses, began to be mixed up in his mind with Barbara and her G.o.d. Barbara was beginning to infect him with--shall I call it the superst.i.tion of a G.o.d? Whatever it may be called, it was very far from being religion yet. The fact was only this--that the idea of a G.o.d worth believing in, was coming a little nearer to him, was becoming to him a little more thinkable.

He began to feel his heart drawn at times, in some strange, tenderer fashion, hitherto unknown to him, to the blue of the sky, especially in the first sweetness of a summer morning. His soul would now and then seem to go out of him, in a pa.s.sion of embrace, to the simplest flower: the flower would be, for a moment, just its self to him. He would spread out his arms to the wind, now when it met him in its strength, now when it but kissed his face. He never consented with himself that it was one force in all the forms that drew him--that perhaps it was the very G.o.d, the All in all about him. Neither did he question much with himself as to how the development, rather than change, had begun. Whether G.o.d did this, or was this, or it was only the possessing Barbara that cast her light out of his eyes on the things he saw and felt, he scarcely asked; but fully he recognised the fact that Nature was more alive than she ever had been to him who had always loved her.

The thought of Barbara went on growing dear to him. He never pondered anything but the girl herself, cherished no dreams of her becoming more to him, of her ever being nearer than away there; just to know her was now, and henceforward ever would be the gladness of his life. If that life was but for a season; if the very core of life was decay; if life was because n.o.body could help its being; if it died because no one could keep it from dying; yet were there two facts fit almost to embalm the body of this living death: Barbara, and the world which was the body of Barbara! So life carried the day, if but the day, and the heart of Richard rejoiced in the midst of perishings. Only, the night was coming in which no man can rejoice.

Was he then presuming to be in love with Barbara? I do not care to meet the question. If I knew what the mysterious word, _love_, meant, I might be able to answer it, but what should I thus gain or give? I know he loved her. I know that a divine power of truth and beauty had laid hold upon him, and was working in him as the powers of G.o.d alone can work in man, for they are the same by which he lives and moves and has his being, and to life are more than meat and drink, than sun and air.

Instead of blaming as a matter of course the person who does not believe in a G.o.d, we should think first whether his notional G.o.d is a G.o.d that ought, or a G.o.d that ought not to be believed in. Perhaps he only is to be blamed who, by inattention to duty, has become less able to believe in a G.o.d than he was once: because he did not obey the true voice, whencesoever it came, G.o.d may have to let him taste what it would be to have no G.o.d. For aught I know, a man may have been born of so many generations of unbelief, that now, at this moment, he cannot believe; that now, at this moment, he has no notion of a G.o.d at all, and cannot care whether there be a G.o.d or not; but he can mind what he knows he ought to mind. That will, that alone can clear the moral atmosphere, and make it possible for the true idea of a G.o.d to be born into it.

For some time Richard saw little of Barbara.

The heads of the house did not interfere with him. Lady Ann would now and then sail through the room like an iceberg; sir Wilton would come in, give a glance at the shelves and a grin, and walk out again with a more or less gouty gait; so much was about all their contact. Arthur was a little ashamed of having spoken to him as he did, and had again become in a manner friendly. He had seen several decaying ma.s.ses, among the rest the Golding of their difference, become books in his hands, and again he had grown sufficiently interested in the workman to feel in him something more than the workman. He was on the way to perceive that, in certain insignificant things, such as imagination, reading, insight, and general faculty, not to mention conscience, generosity, and goodness of heart, Richard was out of sight before the ruck of gentlemen. He saw already that in some things, thought a good deal of at his college, Richard was more capable than himself. He found in him too what seemed to him a rare notion of art. In truth Richard's advance in this region was as yet but small, for he was guided only by his limited efforts in verse; none the less, however, was he far ahead of Arthur, who saw only what was shown him. In literature Arthur had already learned something from Richard, and knew it. He had, indeed, without knowing it, begun to look up to him.

Richard also had discovered good in Arthur--among other things a careful regard to his word, and to his father's tenantry. There was of course, in a scanty nature like his, a good deal of the lord bountiful mingled with his behaviour to his social inferiors on the property: he posed to himself as a condescending landlord.

The only one in the house who gave Richard trouble, was the child Victoria. The way she always took to show her liking, was to annoy its object. Never was name less fitting than hers: there was no victory in her. She could but fly about like veriest mosquito. Richard let her come and go unheeded, except when her proximity to his work made him anxious.

But the little vixen would not consent to be naught any smallest while.