"The motive, Paret--the motive that sends us all wandering into is
divine, is inherited from God himself. And the same motive, after our
eyes shall have been opened, after we shall have seen and known the
tragedy and misery of life, after we shall have made the mistakes and
committed the sins and experienced the emptiness--the same motive will
lead us back again. That, too, is an adventure, the greatest adventure of
all. Because, when we go back we shall not find the same God--or rather
we shall recognize him in ourselves. Autonomy is godliness, knowledge is
godliness. We went away cringing, superstitious, we saw everywhere omens
and evidences of his wrath in the earth and sea and sky, we burned
candles and sacrificed animals in the vain hope of averting scourges and
other calamities. But when we come back it will be with a knowledge of
his ways, gained at a price,--the price he, too, must have paid--and we
shall be able to stand up and look him in the face, and all our childish
superstitions and optimisms shall have been burned away."
Some faith indeed had given him strength to renounce those things in life
I had held dear, driven him on to fight until his exhausted body failed
him, and even now that he was physically helpless sustained him. I did
not ask myself, then, the nature of this faith. In its presence it could
no more be questioned than the light. It was light; I felt bathed in it.
Now it was soft, suffused: but I remembered how the night before in the
hall, just before he had fallen, it had flashed forth in a smile and
illumined my soul with an ecstasy that yet was anguish....
"We shall get back," I said at length. My remark was not a question--it
had escaped from me almost unawares.
"The joy is in the journey," he answered. "The secret is in the search."
"But for me?" I exclaimed.
"We've all been lost, Paret. It would seem as though we have to be."
"And yet you are--saved," I said, hesitating over the word.
"It is true that I am content, even happy," he asserted, "in spite of my
wish to live. If there is any secret, it lies, I think, in the struggle
for an open mind, in the keeping alive of a desire to know more and more.
That desire, strangely enough, hasn't lost its strength. We don't know
whether there is a future life, but if there is, I think it must be a
continuation of this." He paused. "I told you I was glad you came
in--I've been thinking of you, and I saw you in the hall last night. You
ask what there is for you--I'll tell you,--the new generation."
"The new generation."
"That's the task of every man and woman who wakes up. I've come to see
how little can be done for the great majority of those who have reached
our age. It's hard--but it's true. Superstition, sentiment, the habit of
wrong thinking or of not thinking at all have struck in too deep, the
habit of unreasoning acceptance of authority is too paralyzing. Some may
be stung back into life, spurred on to find out what the world really is,
but not many. The hope lies in those who are coming after us--we must do
for them what wasn't done for us. We really didn't have much of a chance,
Paret. What did our instructors at Harvard know about the age that was
dawning? what did anybody know? You can educate yourself--or rather
reeducate yourself. All this"--and he waved his hand towards his
bookshelves--"all this has sprung up since you and I were at Cambridge;
if we don't try to become familiar with it, if we fail to grasp the point
of view from which it's written, there's little hope for us. Go away from
all this and get straightened out, make yourself acquainted with the
modern trend in literature and criticism, with modern history, find out
what's being done in the field of education, read the modern sciences,
especially biology, and psychology and sociology, and try to get a
glimpse of the fundamental human needs underlying such phenomena as the
labour and woman's movements. God knows I've just begun to get my
glimpse, and I've floundered around ever since I left college.... I don't
mean to say we can ever see the whole, but we can get a clew, an idea,
and pass it on to our children. You have children, haven't you?"
"Yes," I said....
He said nothing--he seemed to be looking out of the window.
"Then the scientific point of view in your opinion hasn't done away with
religion?" I asked presently.
"The scientific point of view is the religious point of view," he said
earnestly, "because it's the only self-respecting point of view. I can't
believe that God intended to make a creature who would not ultimately
weigh his beliefs with his reason instead of accepting them blindly.
That's immoral, if you like--especially in these days."
"And are there, then, no 'over-beliefs'?" I said, remembering the
expression in something I had read.
"That seems to me a relic of the method of ancient science, which was
upside down,--a mere confusion with faith. Faith and belief are two
different things; faith is the emotion, the steam, if you like, that
drives us on in our search for truth. Theories, at a stretch, might be
identified with 'over-beliefs' but when it comes to confusing our
theories with facts, instead of recognizing them as theories, when it
comes to living by 'over-beliefs' that have no basis in reason and
observed facts,--that is fatal. It's just the trouble with so much of our
electorate to-day--unreasoning acceptance without thought."
"Then," I said, "you admit of no other faculty than reason?"
"I confess that I don't. A great many insights that we seem to get from
what we call intuition I think are due to the reason, which is
unconsciously at work. If there were another faculty that equalled or
transcended reason, it seems to me it would be a very dangerous thing for
the world's progress. We'd come to rely on it rather than on ourselves
the trouble with the world is that it has been relying on it. Reason is
the mind--it leaps to the stars without realizing always how it gets
there. It is through reason we get the self-reliance that redeems us."
"But you!" I exclaimed. "You rely on something else besides reason?"
"Yes, it is true," he explained gently, "but that Thing
Other-than-Ourselves we feel stirring in us is power, and that power, or
the Source of it, seems to have given us our reason for guidance--if it
were not so we shouldn't have a semblance of freedom. For there is
neither virtue nor development in finding the path if we are guided. We
do rely on that power for movement--and in the moments when it is
withdrawn we are helpless. Both the power and the reason are God's."
"But the Church," I was moved by some untraced thought to ask, "you
believe there is a future for the Church?"
"A church of all those who disseminate truth, foster open-mindedness,
serve humanity and radiate faith," he replied--but as though he were
speaking to himself, not to me....
A few moments later there was a knock at the door, and the woman of the
house entered to say that Dr. Hepburn had arrived. I rose and shook
Krebs's hand: sheer inability to express my emotion drove me to
commonplaces.
"I'll come in soon again, if I may," I told him.
"Do, Paret," he said, "it's done me good to talk to you--more good than
you imagine."
I was unable to answer him, but I glanced back from the doorway to see
him smiling after me. On my way down the stairs I bumped into the doctor
as he ascended. The dingy brown parlour was filled with men, standing in
groups and talking in subdued voices. I hurried into the street, and on
the sidewalk stopped face to face with Perry Blackwood.
"Hugh!" he exclaimed. "What are you doing here?"
"I came to inquire for Krebs," I answered. "I've seen him."
"You--you've been talking to him?" Perry demanded.
I nodded. He stared at me for a moment with an astonishment to which I
was wholly indifferent. He did not seem to know just how to act.
"Well, it was decent of you, Hugh, I must say. How does he seem?"
"Not at all like--like what you'd expect, in his manner."
"No," agreed Perry agitatedly, "no, he wouldn't. My God, we've lost a big
man in him."
"I think we have," I said.
He stared at me again, gave me his hand awkwardly, and went into the
house. It was not until I had walked the length of the block that I began
to realize what a shock my presence there must have been to him, with his
head full of the contrast between this visit and my former attitude.
Could it be that it was only the night before I had made a speech against
him and his associates? It is interesting that my mind rejected all sense
of anomaly and inconsistency. Krebs possessed me; I must have been in
reality extremely agitated, but this sense of being possessed seemed a
quiet one. An amazing thing had happened--and yet I was not amazed. The
Krebs I had seen was the man I had known for many years, the man I had
ridiculed, despised and oppressed, but it seemed to me then that he had
been my friend and intimate all my life: more than that, I had an odd
feeling he had always been a part of me, and that now had begun to take
place a merging of personality. Nor could I feel that he was a dying man.
He would live on....
I could not as yet sort and appraise, reduce to order the possessions he
had wished to turn over to me.
It was noon, and people were walking past me in the watery, diluted
sunlight, men in black coats and top hats and women in bizarre,
complicated costumes bright with colour. I had reached the more
respectable portion of the city, where the churches were emptying. These
very people, whom not long ago I would have acknowledged as my own kind,
now seemed mildly animated automatons, wax figures. The day was like
hundreds of Sundays I had known, the city familiar, yet passing strange.
I walked like a ghost through it....