When men have visions the impression left upon their minds is that light
from the unseen world of light has in some way broken through into the
sphere of their cognizance. The race in its ages of reflection has upon
the whole come to the conclusion that that which actually takes place is
the gradual growth and the sudden breaking forth of light within the
mysterious depths of the man himself. A new explanation of a fact does
not do away with the fact.
Toyner was not dead, he was stunned; his head was badly injured. When
his consciousness returned, and through what process of inflammation and
fever his wounded head went in the struggle of nature toward recovery,
was never clearly known. His body, bound with the soft torn cloths to
the upright tree, sagged more and more until it found a rest upon the
inclined log. The fresh sweet air from pine woods, the cool vapours from
the water beneath him, were nurses of wise and delicate touch. The sun
arose and shone warmly, yet not hotly, through the air in which dry haze
was thickening. The dead trees stood in the calm water, keeping silence
as it were, a hundred stalwart guards with fingers at their lips, lest
any sound should disturb the life that, with beneficent patience, was
little by little restoring the wounded body from within. Even the little
vulgar puffing market-boat that twice a day passed the windings of the
old river channel--the only disturber of solitude--was kept at so great
a distance by this guard of silent trees that no perception of her
passing, and all the life and perplexity of which she must remind him,
entered into Toyner's half-closed avenues of sense.
For two days the sun rose on Bart through the mellow, smoke-dimmed
atmosphere. Each night it lay in a red cloud for an hour in the west,
tingeing and dyeing all the mirror below the trees with red. No one was
there in the desolate lake to see the twice-told glory of that rosy
flood and firmament, unless it was this wondrous light that first
penetrated the eyes of the prisoner with soothing brightness.
It was at some hour of light--sunset or sunrise, or it might have been
in the blending of the mornings and the evenings in that confusion of
mind which takes no heed of time--that Toyner first began to know
himself. Then it was not of himself that he took knowledge; his heart in
its waking felt after something else around and beneath and above him,
everywhere, something that meant light and comfort and rest and love,
something that was very strong, that was strength; he himself, Bart
Toyner, was part of this strength, and rested in it with a rest and
refreshing which is impossible to weakness, however much it may crave.
It came to him as he lay there, not knowing the where or when of his
knowledge--it came to him that he had made a great mistake, as a little
child makes a mistake in laughable ignorance. Indeed, he laughed within
himself as he thought what a strange, childish, grotesque notion he had
had,--he had thought, he had actually thought, that God was only a part
of things; that he, Bart Toyner, could turn away from God; that God's
power was only with him when he supposed himself to be obedient to Him!
Yes, he had thought this; but now he knew that God was all and in all.
There came to him, trooping with this new joy of knowledge, the sensuous
sight and sound and smell of many things that he had known, but had not
understood, before. All the spring-times through which he had walked
unconscious of their meaning, came to him. There was a sound in his ears
of delicate flowers springing to light through dewy moss, of buds
bursting, and he saw the glancing of myriad tiny leaves upon the grey
old trees. With precisely the same sense of sweetness came the vision of
days when autumn rain was falling, and the red and sear leaf, the nut,
the pine-cone and the flower-seed were dropping into the cold wet earth.
Was life in the spring, and death in the autumn? Was the power and love
of God not resting in the damp fallen things that lay rotting in the
ground?
There came before him a troop of the little children of Fentown, all the
rosy-cheeked faces and laughing eyes and lithe little dancing forms that
he had ever taken the trouble to notice; and Ann and Christa came and
stood with them--Christa with her dancing finery, with her beautiful,
thoughtless, unemotional face, her yellow hair, and soft white hands;
and Ann, a thousand times more beautiful to him, with her sun-brown
tints and hazel eyes, so full of energy and forethought, her dark neat
hair and working-dress and hardened hands--this was beauty! Over against
it he saw Markham, blear-eyed, unkempt and dirty; and his own father, a
gaunt, idiotic wreck of respectable manhood; and his mother, faded,
worn, and peevish; with them stood the hunch-backed baker of Fentown
and all the coarse and ugly sons of toil that frequented its wharfs.
There was not a child or a maiden among those he saw first who did not
owe their life to one of these. With the children and the maidens there
were pleasure and hope; with the older men and women there were effort
and failure, sin and despair. The life that was in all of them, was it
partly of God and partly of themselves? He laughed again at the
question. The life that was in them all was all of God, every impulse,
every act. The energy that thrilled them through, by which they acted,
if only as brutes act, by which they spoke, if only to lie, by which
they thought and felt, even when thought and feeling were false and bad,
the energy which upheld them was all of God. That devil, too, that he
saw standing close by and whispering to them--his form was dim and
fading; he was not sure whether he was a reality or a thought, but--if
he had life, was it his own? Somewhere, he could not remember where or
when, he had heard the voice of truth saying, "Thou couldst have no
power against me except it were given thee from above."
The strange complexity of dreams, which seems so foolish, brings them
nearer to reality than we suppose, for there is nothing real which has
not manifold meanings. Before this vision of his townspeople faded, Bart
saw Ann slowly walk over from the group in which she had risen to be a
queen, to that group whose members were worn with disappointment and
age; as she went he saw her perfectly as he had never seen her before,
the hard shallow thoughts that were woven in with her unremitting effort
to do always the thing that she had set herself to do; and he saw, too,
a nature that was beneath this outer range of activity, a small
trembling fountain of feeling suppressed and shut from the light. In
some strange way as she stood, having grown older by transition from one
group to the other, he saw that this inner fountain of strength was
increasing and overflowing all that other part which had before made up
almost the entire personality of the woman. This change did not take
place visibly in the other people among whom she stood. It was in Ann he
saw the change. He felt very glad he had seen this; he seemed to think
of nothing else for a long time.
He forgot then all the detail of that which he had seen and thought, and
it seemed to him that he spent a long time just rejoicing in the divine
life by which all things were, and by which they changed, growing by
transformation into a glory which was still indistinct to him, too far
off to be seen in any way except that its light came as the light comes
from stars which we say we see and have never really seen at all.
Through this joy and light the details of life began to show again. The
two forces which he had always supposed had moulded his life acted his
early scenes over again. His young mother, before the shadow of despair
had come over her, was seen waiting upon all his boyish footsteps with
cheerful love and patience, trying to guide and to help, but trying much
more to comfort and to please; and his father, with a strong body and
the strength of fixed opinion and formed habits, having no desire for
his son except to train and form him as he himself was trained and
formed, was seen darkening all the boy's happiness with unreasonable
severity, which hardened and sharpened with the opposition of years into
selfish cruelty. Toyner had often seen these scenes before; all that
was new to him now was that they stood in the vivid light of a new
interpretation. Ah! the father's cruelty, the irritable self-love, the
incapacity to recognise any form of life but his own, it was of
God,--not a high manifestation: the bat is lower than the bird, and yet
it is of God. Bart saw now the one great opportunity of life! He saw
that the whole of the universe goes to develop character, and the one
chief heavenly food set within reach of the growing character for its
nourishment is the opportunity to embrace malice with love, to gather it
in the arms of patience, convert its shame into glory by willing
endurance.
Had he, Bart Toyner, then really been given the power in that beginning
of life to put out his hand and take this fruit which would have given
him such great strength and stature, or had he only had strength just
for what he had done and nothing more?
The answer seemed to come to him from all that he had read of the growth
of things. He looked into the forests, into the life of the creatures
that now lived in them; he saw the fish in the rivers and the birds in
the air, everywhere now roots were feeling under the dark ground for
just the food that was needed, and the birds flew open-mouthed, and the
fishes darted here and there, and the squirrels hoarded their nuts.
Everywhere in the past the growth of ages had been bringing together
these creatures and their food by slowly developing in them new powers
to assimilate new foods. What then of those that pined and dwindled when
the organism was not quite strong enough and the old food was taken
away? Ah, well! they fell--fell as the sparrows fall, not one of them
without God. And what of man rising through ages from beast to
sainthood, rising from the mere dominion of physical law which works out
its own obedience into the moral region, where a perpetual choice is
ordained of God, and the consequences of each choice ordained? Was not
the lower choice often inevitable? Who could tell when or where except
God Himself? And the higher choice the only food by which character can
grow! So men must often fall. Fall to what end? To pass into that
boundless gulf of distant light into which everything is passing,
passing straight by the assimilation of its proper food, circuitously by
weakness and failure, but still coming, growing, reaching out into
infinite light, for all is of God, and God is Love.
All Toyner's thought and sense seemed to lose hold again of everything
but that first realisation of the surrounding glory and joy and
strength, and the feeling that he himself had to rest for a little
while before any new thing was given him to do.
His body lay back upon the grey lifeless branch, wrapped in the ragged,
soiled garment that Markham had put upon him; the silence of night came
again over the water and the grey dead trees, and nature went on
steadily and quietly with her work of healing.