He went on reading:
"There is no need of going into old Billy's sickness. It made a great
change in my life. As soon as it got about that I had taken him to live
with me, folks began to say I was queer, the same as they did before,
and the children would hoot and run. He was known to be so bad (they had
always called him bad; they never once thought God made him) they
thought I liked to keep company with him because I must be bad, too. And
I could not go about any more doing for people because I was doing for
him and there was no time. But people kept sending for me, and when they
saw old Billy Jones sitting there with his bandaged legs, they would
feel hard toward me. They said I would rather do for him than for them,
and he ought, by rights, to be on the town. That meant his going to the
Farm. Sometimes I thought they felt so about it there might be action
taken to get him there--to the Poor Farm. He never thought of this, I am
sure. He had a peaceful time, as much so as a man could have that has
killed his body and begins to be afraid he has killed his soul. That was
the hardest time I had with him: about his soul. He was afraid to die. I
told him God made him and would see to him in the end, and that He well
knew he did not mean to kill Cyrus Graves. He said that was true, but if
he had been tried here in a court of law the jury would have pronounced
him guilty and it was very likely God would. And there was hell. These
things I could not answer because I did not know, and if I had any
convictions they were as dark as his, though of another sort. But I did
try to put heart into him, and I hoped the end would come before he
suffered any more.
"I want the boy to know that all this time his mother was a very great
comfort to me. Of course she could not let the boy come up to the hut,
because old Billy Jones was too dreadful a sight for a child to see. But
she cooked a great many delicate things and brought them up or sent
them, and, one day I shall never forget, when I had a blind headache and
had to lie down in the dark, she sat with Billy a long time, to keep him
from being lonesome, and afterward I found she had bandaged his legs.
"As time went on and he grew worse and worse, there was but one thing he
wanted. It was to be forgiven. I tried again to persuade him to tell
publicly the straight story of the killing and so die with a clean mind.
This he would not do. He had asked me to get him a headstone, with his
name on it all complete, and he was much set against being remembered as
a murderer. All his life he had lived outside the law, so to speak, and
he wanted to die respectable. I told him it might happen to him that,
after his death, somebody would be accused of the death of Cyrus Graves
and in that case I should break my promise to him and tell. To this he
consented, though unwillingly, and I am now telling, not only for the
sake of the boy, but for the sake of all to whom the boy may have to
pass on the strange things that came to Billy Jones. His sickness went
on in a very painful way, and when it got to be near the end he was
still more distressed in mind. He could not die, he said, unless he was
forgiven. And yet he had to die. For a while he seemed almost to hate me
because I could not show him the way.
"'If I was a Roman Catholic,' he said, 'and you was a priest, you could
forgive me yourself. You would forgive me, I'll warrant ye.'
"I did not deny it, though I felt very hopeless of anything I might do.
In those last days I could have denied him nothing. He seemed to me like
all the trouble in the world beating out there in the hut. God had made
him, and made him so that he did not rightly see good from evil, and he
had ruined his body, and now he was taking the consequences. And the
night before he died, he cried out a terrible voice:
"'You don't say a word about Jesus Christ.'
"I stood by his bed in anguish of mind perhaps as great as his. Yet not
as great, for he had no strength of body to bear the anguish with.
"'You never have said anything,' he went on.
"I felt as if he was accusing me of not giving him water when he was
fevered, or bread if he was hungry. Then he said he remembered something
he used to hear when he was little and he had hardly ever heard of it
since. But he had heard other things. And I guessed he was remembering
he had lived with the people who used the name of Jesus Christ only to
swear by. He had heard, he told me, that Jesus Christ was the son of
God, and God sent Him here to save sinners, and, if sinners called on
Him to save them, they would be saved. And then he looked at me for a
minute with that same look, as if he hated me, and he said:
"'You don't believe it. You wouldn't let me suffer like this, if you
did.'
"And all my spirit broke up in me, and my legs were weak under me, and
the tears ran down on my face, and I said to him:
"'I do believe it.'
"'Will you swear it?' he asked me. He was very wild then. 'Will you
swear by Jesus Christ it is so?'
"'Yes,' I said, 'I will swear.'
"And I fell on my knees by the bed and said: 'Let us pray.' And I
prayed, in what words I don't know, but my hand was on his, and when I
said Amen, he said Amen, too, and when I looked at him all the trouble
was smoothed out of his face and he said, 'Jesus Christ!' as he never
could have said it in his life before. It was as if you were speaking to
your mother or your friend (yet not just a friend, but a heavenly
friend) and shortly he died. And I had told him a lie. But I was not
sorry. I was glad. What was my keeping my poor soul clean to old Billy
Jones's dying in peace? It was the last thing I could give him, and he
was welcome to it.
"It was in the early morning he died, and I did what I knew about making
him right for his coffin, and then went down to get one of the neighbors
that knew more, and all that day I was busy. The next day he would be
taken away and lie in the Methodist church at the Ridge, and the third
day he would be buried. And nobody had ever taken any interest in him
except to call him a poor good-for-nothing creature--nobody except your
mother (she is a good woman) but it looked as if he would have a
well-attended funeral. I was glad of that, for I knew he would be
pleased. He was laid out in the bedroom of the hut and the window was
open and the cold air blowing on him, and I lay down on the couch in the
large room. I didn't take my clothes off, for at such times it is
respectful to have watchers about the dead. It may not be necessary, but
it is the custom, and I wanted old Billy to have everything that was
fitting and right. I did not mean to go to sleep, but lie there a spell
and then get up and put on more wood and go into his cold room and let
him feel as if he was being taken care of to the last. And I lay there
thinking how I had heard there was diphtheria over beyond the mountain
and I would take a day or two to rest me and then I'd go over there and
help. I laughed a little to myself, and I see now it wasn't a very
pleasant kind of laugh, for I thought the people would begin to like me
again because I was free to do for them.
"And I did go to sleep, being, as I said, very tired, and how long I
slept I don't know. But suddenly I waked up, just as wide awake as I am
this minute, and I knew as well as I ever knew anything, that Billy
Jones was in the room. I didn't see him. I didn't hear him. I didn't
hear anything, outside or in. It was a very still night, and there
wasn't even the creaking of the branches against each other. But Billy
Jones was in the room. I wasn't afraid, but I felt queer. I had a kind
of prickly feeling all over me. The hair on my head moved somehow,
according to the feeling it gave me. Perhaps that was being afraid, only
I don't take it so. The reason I think differently is that I didn't want
it to stop. If Billy Jones was there, I didn't want him to go away. If
he had anything to say, I wanted to hear it. And I was as sure as ever I
was of anything in my life that there was something to say. If this was
the beginning of something that was going to happen, it was only the
beginning. There was more to come. And I wanted to know what. I lay
there as still almost as Billy's body in the next room. I was afraid of
missing something. If there was something for me to hear I'd got to keep
still to hear it. But I said that before. I have to keep saying it, it
took such hold of me. The fire hadn't wholly died down. I could tell by
that I hadn't been asleep long. But I didn't dare to get up and put on
another stick. I was afraid if I moved I might jar something and it
would break. And I couldn't have it break till the end--the end of my
knowing what it was.
"And now the boy must remember that what follows, if I live to write it,
is faithful and true. That is what the Bible says about things like
that: they are faithful and true. And mine are just as true. It seemed
to me as if the ceiling of the room raised up and the walls opened out
and the room was as if it was not. Whether I looked through it or
whether it was gone, I do not know. But I looked into a great space. And
it was dark and at one side of it there was a great light. And the light
was not angry, as a sunset looks when it flames and flares. It was
steady, and I knew it was to light the world. And there came into my
head some words: 'And the darkness comprehended it not.' When I waked
up, I found the words in the Bible, but that night it seemed to me they
were said for the first time. The boy must remember Billy Jones was in
all this. He was the chief part of it. As to the words, it was as if
Billy Jones said them. I was in the darkness, and I was to be made to
comprehend. And when I looked lower through the darkness--and I cannot
tell how, but I seemed to be in it and yet at the same time I was above
it, so that I looked down and saw what was going on--I saw multitudes of
men and women, trying to get through it. Sometimes they walked slowly,
as if it was hard to walk, and sometimes they jostled each other and
sometimes stopped to push one another about, and sometimes when some
were down the others stamped on them. But they were all going somewhere,
and it was toward the light. And as I say, I was in the darkness though
I could see through it, and I wondered if I was going, too.
"And then I understood. I couldn't tell the boy how I understood, not if
he was here to ask me; but it was as if a voice spoke and told me in two
or three words, and few as they were, I took them in and I knew. Perhaps
there was a voice. Perhaps it was the voice of Billy Jones. There is no
reason why not. The minute after he got out of his body, he might have
known everything: I don't mean everything, I mean the one thing that
would explain it all. And he had a kindness for me, and if he learned
anything that smoothed out his trouble and turned it into joy, he would
want me to know, too. And this is it, though now I have got to the place
for telling it, I don't know how. It is like a dream. You have to tell
it the minute you wake, or it is gone. I saw that creation had been a
long time going on. I saw that although we have minds to think with, we
haven't really, in comparison with the things to be thought out. I saw
that we are so near the dust that we can no more account for the ways of
Almighty God than the owl hooting out there in the woods can read the
words I am writing here. I saw that nothing is to be told us. We are to
find out everything for ourselves, just as we have found electricity and
the laws of physics. And poisons--we have found out those, some of them,
even if we had to die to do it. And God lets us die trying to find out.
He doesn't care anything about our dying. And if He doesn't care
anything about our dying, He doesn't care anything about the rabbit
broken by the owl, or the toad struck by the snake.
"Now, why doesn't He care? For the first time, I knew there was a reason
that was not a cruel reason. I knew His reasons were all good. And I saw
that though He could not break the rules of His plan by telling us
things, He could give us a kind of a something inside us that should
make us work it out ourselves. We had hungers. We had one hunger for
eternal life. We had to believe in it, to help us bear this present
life. We believed it so hard that men rose up and said it was so, and we
said God had put the words into their mouths. And out of our sufferings,
pity was born, and now and then a man would be raised up so full of pity
that other men believed in him and followed everything he said and even
called him a god. And this was well, because if they had not thought he
was a god, they might not have followed him. And I seemed to be told
that a great many men were born who were sent from God, but I have not
read many books and how can I prove whether it is true?
"But Jesus Christ came, and His story is the story of the will of God.
For men believed His father was God. That is to keep in our minds always
the fatherhood of God. And his mother was believed to be a virgin. I do
not know how to say this, but I was given to believe that that was no
more true than I had thought, but still that it was the truest of all.
It is one of the things we are to believe. We are to learn from it--how
can I say?--that there is a heavenly birth out of purity and light. It
is a symbol. That is the word: a symbol. And His death for mankind is
the everlasting symbol of man's duty: to die for one another. And He
went into the grave, and ascended into heaven, and so shall we all die
and live again. But every observance of every church is a
symbol--nothing more. And the man that was a god is a symbol and nothing
more. But nothing could be more. For to find a symbol that has lasted,
in one form or another, since the beginning of the world is to learn
that it is something the world itself is built on. It is the picture
book we are given before we can read print. And it means that something
is working out--and is not yet--and the eye of man hath not seen or the
ear of man heard. And about fear--that is the most wonderful of all and
the hardest to tell. It is our friend. At first everything fed upon
everything else; and so it does now, for how shall I say the animal has
fear and the growing plant has not? And our fear tells us what to turn
away from, and it fits us for the fight of the mortal life. But in the
end will our fear be only the fear of evil? Fear is our counselor. It is
our friend.
"Now perhaps I have done wrong in trying to write this out. Perhaps I
have not helped the boy or anybody he tells. Perhaps I have offended
them. I know the sound of what I must have heard and the sight of what I
saw was clearer to me before I tried to tell about them. At first I kept
them back somewhere in my mind and didn't try to see them or hear them
too close. And when I did that, the great light was always there and I
was running toward it. But now I have tried to tell, I see it is no more
than words. They darken counsel. And I have put it back into my mind,
not so much to be thought about as to have at hand. And all my trouble
has gone. It has been a long trouble. I am over sixty now. But I am not
afraid of anything and I am not in doubt. When I see men suffering, I
know they are suffering for a reason. When I find the bird with a broken
wing or the rabbit bit by the trap I know God knows about them, and if I
cannot know, it proves it is not necessary I should. For there is the
great light. (But it is not likely the boy will see this account of it
at all, because I shall try to write it over--to write it better--and if
I make it clearer this will be destroyed.)
"Another thing: about the worship of God. He does not want us to worship
Him as we understand it, to crawl before Him as if He were an idol we
had set up to get us victories over our enemies and to fill us with
food. He wants us--what shall I say?--to open our hearts and our minds
and our ears and eyes to what He wants us to know. He is not an idol. He
is God. And all the way to Him, the horrible way through burnt
offerings, the blood of lambs and goats--blood, blood, all the way--is
the way that climbs up to the real sacrifice, the last of all: the man's
own heart.
"One thing more: the greatest thing that ever happened to me was old
Billy Jones. Was it because I was sorry for him? Was it because I could
do something for him? I don't know. But I tell the boy that the man or
the woman that makes him shed his blood in pity for them, that is the
man or woman that will open his eyes to what we call Eternal Life. What
is Eternal Life? Is it living forever? I do not know. But the
words--those two words--stand for the great light ahead of us, the light
I truly saw. And what the light is, still I do not know. But this I
know: God is. He lives. And He is sorry. The boy may tell me this is no
more than the words about His caring for the sparrow that falleth. But I
tell him it is more to me, for this I have found out for myself. And I
have found it out through great tribulation. But the tribulation is not
now. It has stopped. It stopped with the sound of old Billy Jones's
voice I heard--somehow I heard it--when his body lay in there dead. And
I am not afraid. I am not afraid of fear--even for the little
animals--and that is more than for myself. And that is my legacy to the
boy. He must not be afraid."
There it ended, and Raven sat for a long time looking at the fine
painstaking script and seeing, for the moment, at least, the vision of
Old Crow. He felt a great welling of love toward him, a longing to get
hold of him somehow and tell him the journal had done its work. He
understood. And it meant to him, in its halting simplicity, more than
all the books he had ever read on the destiny of man. Meager as it was,
it seemed to him something altogether new, because it had come out of
the mind of an ignorant man, if a man can be called ignorant who has
used his mind to its full capacity of thought and unconsciously fitted
it, so far as he might, to the majestic simplicities of the Bible. Old
Crow had never read anything about legend or the origins of belief.
There were no such books then at Wake Hill. He read no language but his
own. Whatever he had evolved, out of the roots of longing, had been done
in the loneliness of the remote shepherd who charts the stars. And in
the man himself Raven had found a curious companionship. Their lives
seemed to have run a parallel course. Old Crow, like himself, was a
victim of world sickness. And his wound had been cleansed; he had been
healed.
Raven did give a little smile to the thought that, at least, the man had
been saved one thing: he had no authoritative Amelia on his track to
betray him to organized benevolence. And for himself something, he could
not adequately tell what, was as clear to him as a road of light to
unapprehended certainties. It was a symbol. It was the little language
men had to talk in because they could not use the language of the stars:
their picture language. But it was the rude token of ineffable reality.
As the savage's drawing of a man stands for the man, so the symbols
wrought out by the hungry world stand for what is somewhere, yet not
visibly here. For the man exists or the savage could not have drawn him.
Not all the mystics, he thought, smiling over his foolish inner
conviction that could not be reached through the mind but only through
the heart, not all the divines, could have set up within him the altar
of faith he seemed suddenly to see before him: it had to be Old Crow.
And he slept, and in the morning it did not need the mottled book at his
bedside to remind him. Still it was Old Crow.
He put it all away in his mind to think over later, just as Old Crow had
turned aside from his vision for the more convincing clearness of an
oblique angle upon it, and dressed hastily. He got out of the house
without meeting even Charlotte, and was about crossing the road on the
way to the hut when he saw Tenney coming, axe and dinner pail in hand.
Raven swerved on his path, and affected to be looking down the road. He
could not proceed the way he was going. Tenney's mind must not be drawn
toward that living focus by even the most fragmentary hint. Yet if Tira
was still there, she and the child must be fed. After his glance down
the road he turned back to the house, nodding at Tenney as he neared.
But Tenney motioned to him.
"Here," he called stridently. "You wait."
Raven halted and as Tenney was approaching, at a quick stride, noted how
queerly he was hung. It was like a skeleton walking, the dry joints
acting spasmodically. When the man came up with him, he saw how ravaged
his face was, and yet lighted by what a curious eagerness. Ready, he
hoped, at all points for any possible attack involving Tira, Raven still
waited, and the question Tenney shot at him could not have been more
surprising:
"Did you find salvation?"
Raven stood looking at him for an instant, and suddenly he remembered
Old Crow, who had accomplished the salvation of a sick heart and
bequeathed the treasure to him.
"Yes," he said, more tolerantly than he had ever spoken to Tenney. "I
think I did."
Was it his imagination that Tenney looked disappointed?
"Last night?" the man insisted. "Did you find it last night? Through
me?"
"No," said Raven. "I didn't find it through you."
Tenney was ingenuously taken aback.
"There is one way," he said, "into the sheepfold--only one."
He turned about, muttering, and Raven, looking after him, thought he was
an ugly customer. For a woman to be shut up alone with him, her young,
too, to defend! It was like being jailed with an irrational beast. But
Tenney paid no further attention to him. He walked away, swinging his
dinner pail, down across the meadow to the lower woods, and Raven, after
the fringe of birches had closed upon him, hurried off to the hut. He
did not expect to find her. The pail in Tenney's hand was sufficient
evidence, even if the man's going to his work were not. Tenney would
never have abandoned his search or his waiting for her, and if he had,
he would not have delayed to pack a dinner pail. The hut was empty of
human life, but the bricks were warm. She could not have left until the
early morning. Mechanically he piled kindling near the hearth. But
curiously, though the hut was warm not only with the fire but the
suggestion of her breathing presence, it was not she who seemed to be
with him but Old Crow.
He went back to the house and found Amelia in traveling dress, her face
tuned to the note of concentration when something was to be done. She
was ready. She had the appearance of the traveler needing only to slip
on an outer garment to go, not merely from New Hampshire down to Boston,
but to uncharted fastnesses. It meant, he found, this droll look of
being prepared for anything, not the inconsiderable journey before her
but a new enterprise for him. And he would have to be persuaded to it.
Well, she knew that. She met him in the hall.
"John," she said, with the firmness of her tone in active benevolences,
"I have asked Jerry to take me to the train. I want you to go with me."
"Me?" said Raven, unaffectedly surprised. "What for?"
"For several things. If Dick is in any sort of trouble----"
"He's not," said Raven. "Take my word for that."
"And," she concluded, "I want you to see somebody."
"Somebody?" Raven repeated. He put his hand on her shoulder, smiling
down at her. Milly was a good sort. It was too bad she had to be, like
so many women benevolence mad, so disordered in her meddling. "I suppose
you mean an alienist."
She nodded, her lips compressed. She would stick at nothing.
"Now Milly," said Raven, "do I seem to you in the least dotty?"
Tears came into her eyes.
"I wish you wouldn't use such words," she said tremulously. It meant
much for Milly to tremble. "It's like calling that dreadful influenza
the flu."
Raven was reminded of the old man down the road who forbade secular talk
in the household during a thunder shower. It "madded" the Almighty. You
might be struck.
"I won't," he said, the more merciful of her because she was on the
point of going. "And I won't go back with you."
"Will you come later?" she persisted, still tremulous.
"No," said Raven, "probably not. If I do, I'll let you know. And you
mustn't come up here without notifying me well in advance."
"That shows----" she began impulsively. "John, that isn't a normal thing
to say: to expect your own sister to notify you."
"All right," said Raven cheerfully. "Then I'm not normal. The funny part
of it is, I don't care whether I'm normal or not. I've got too many
other things to think of. Here's Charlotte with your brekky. Come on."
In the two hours before she went, he was, she told Dick afterward,
absolutely scintillating. She never knew John could be so brilliant. He
talked about things she never knew he had the slightest interest in:
theosophy and feminism and Americanization. She couldn't help wondering
whether he was trying to convince her of his mental soundness. But he
certainly was amazing. Dick received this in silence. He understood.
It was true. Raven did fill the time from a racing impetuosity, only
slackened when Jerry appeared with the pung. Then he hurried her into
her coat, kissed her warmly--and she had to comment inwardly that she
had never found John so affectionate--and, standing bareheaded to watch
her away, saluted her when she turned at the bend in the road. Then,
when the scene was empty of her, he plunged in, past Charlotte, standing
with hands rolled in her apron, snatched his cap, and hurried up the
road to Nan.