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 assured 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. God 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 God,
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
passed into her mind.
"God 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 God showed me because I was so hard up. It's God'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 God ain't in me, any way. There
isn't much of God 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 God 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 God'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 God'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 God'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 God
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
God'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 God is with you; that is what I saw when I was hard up
and God 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 God 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 hell
before we die when we live that way, and it's hell after, for ages and
ages and worlds and worlds perhaps, just until the hell-fire of sin has
burned the wrong way of choosing out of us. But remember, God 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 hell. But I tell you, Ann, whether
you're good or whether you're wicked, God 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 hell-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 God 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 God can save them and doesn't. God is saving those two and the
child just by the hell they've brought on themselves and it; and He's in
hell 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 God'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, God was to set him in heaven. But, look you,
Ann, there isn't a day or an hour that God 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."
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 God with father when he tried to kill you and tied you to the
tree?"
"Yes."
"How do you know?"
"You can't think of God being less than something else. If God was not
in your father, then space is outside God's mind. You can't think that
God wanted to save your father from doing it and didn't, unless you
think that the devil was stronger than God. You can't think that you are
more loving than God; 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 hell 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 hell.'
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 God had been
doing it always, and that He did nothing but what He saw God doing, and
that when men saw Him they would know that God was like that always.
Haven't I just been telling you that God 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 God'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."