THE STRUGGLE IN THE DARK
It was a long, lonesome, fearful night that the school-master passed,
lying with nerves on edge and eyes wide open in that comfortless bed in
the "furdest corner" of the loft of Pete Jones's house, shivering with
cold, while the light snow that was falling sifted in upon the ragged
patch-work quilt that covered him. Nerves broken by sleeplessness
imagine many things, and for the first hour Ralph felt sure that Pete
would cut his throat before morning.
And you, friend Callow, who have blunted your palate by swallowing the
Cayenne pepper of the penny-dreadfuls, you wish me to make this night
exciting by a hand-to-hand contest between Ralph and a robber. You would
like it better if there were a trap-door. There's nothing so convenient
as a trap-door, unless it be a subterranean passage. And you'd like
something of that sort just here. It's so pleasant to have one's hair
stand on end, you know, when one is safe from danger to one's self. But
if you want each individual hair to bristle with such a "Struggle in
the Dark," you can buy trap-doors and subterranean passages dirt cheap
at the next news-stand. But it was, indeed, a real and terrible
"Struggle in the Dark" that Ralph fought out at Pete Jones's.
When he had vanquished his fears of personal violence by reminding
himself that it would be folly for Jones to commit murder in his own
house, the question of Bud and Hannah took the uppermost place in his
thoughts. And as the image of Hannah spelling against the master came up
to him, as the memory of the walk, the talk, the box-elder tree, and all
the rest took possession of him, it seemed to Ralph that his very life
depended upon his securing her love. He would shut his teeth like the
jaws of a bulldog, and all Bud's muscles should not prevail over his
resolution and his stratagems.
It was easy to persuade himself that this was right. Hannah ought not to
throw herself away on Bud Means. Men of some culture always play their
conceit off against their consciences. To a man of literary habits it
usually seems to be a great boon that he confers on a woman when he
gives her his love. Reasoning thus, Ralph had fixed his resolution, and
if the night had been shorter, or sleep possible, the color of his life
might have been changed.
But some time along in the tedious hours came the memory of his
childhood, the words of his mother, the old Bible stories, the
aspiration after nobility of spirit, the solemn resolutions to be true
to his conscience. These angels of the memory came flocking back before
the animal, the bull-doggedness, had "set," as workers in plaster say.
He remembered the story of David and Nathan, and it seemed to him that
he, with all his abilities and ambitions and prospects, was about to rob
Bud of the one ewe-lamb, the only thing he had to rejoice in in his
life. In getting Hannah, he would make himself unworthy of Hannah. And
then there came to him a vision of the supreme value of a true
character; how it was better than success, better than to be loved,
better than heaven. And how near he had been to missing it! And how
certain he was, when these thoughts should fade, to miss it! He was as
one fighting for a great prize who feels his strength failing and is
sure of defeat.
This was the real, awful "Struggle in the Dark." A human soul fighting
with heaven in sight, but certain of slipping inevitably into hell! It
was the same old battle. The Image of God fought with the Image of the
Devil. It was the same fight that Paul described so dramatically when he
represented the Spirit as contending with the Flesh. Paul also called
this dreadful something the Old Adam, and I suppose Darwin would call it
the remains of the Wild Beast. But call it what you will, it is the
battle that every well-endowed soul must fight at some point. And to
Ralph it seemed that the final victory of the Evil, the Old Adam, the
Flesh, the Wild Beast, the Devil, was certain. For, was not the pure,
unconscious face of Hannah on the Devil's side? And so the battle had
just as well be given up at once, for it must be lost in the end.
But to Ralph, lying there in the still darkness, with his conscience as
wide awake as if it were the Day of Doom, there seemed something so
terrible in this overflow of the better nature which he knew to be
inevitable as soon as the voice of conscience became blunted, that he
looked about for help. He did not at first think of God; but there came
into his thoughts the memory of a travel-worn Galilean peasant, hungry,
sleepy, weary, tempted, tried, like other men, but having a strange,
divine Victory in him by which everything evil was vanquished at his
coming. He remembered how He had reached out a Hand to every helpless
one, how He was the Helper of every weak one. And out of the depths of
his soul he cried to the Helper, and found comfort. Not victory, but,
what is better, strength. And so, without a thought of the niceties of
theological distinctions, without dreaming that it was the beginning of
a religious experience, he found what he needed, help. And the Helper
gave His beloved sleep.