THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVIL
Dinner was served in the Du Telles’ private room. Channing dined with
them—the man who had informed Jane of Leslie’s whereabouts—a young,
clean shaven man, member of the Shanghai Jockey Club and practically
head of the great silk firm of Channing, Matheson & Co.
At dessert Jane asked Leslie’s permission to tell of Campanula’s
finding. Leslie at first demurred. No one knew anything about it except
the far-away folk in Nikko and the secretive Japanese police. It seemed
scarcely fair to Campanula to give the tale away, but at last he
consented, for George du Telle had eaten and drunk himself into a state
of torpor. He was staring at a pineapple before him with a flushed face,
from which protruded a great cigar, and as for Channing he was off to
Shanghai next day. So Jane told the story, and Channing listened.
“Well, what do you think?” said Jane when she had finished her tale.
“I never think about these matters,” said Channing, “I simply accept
them. My dear lady, were you to live a long time in the East you would
come to believe in things that Western people would rank as nursery
tales. The Tokyo fire-walkers can walk barefoot over a bed of live
charcoal as thick as a mattress. I have seen them. How do they do it? I
don’t know.
“It is very curious how the Western people, Christians, and so forth,
treat the unknown. They look upon it as the unknowable. The Easterns
don’t. I had a missionary man in at my office the other day over at
Shanghai subscription hunting. I gave him what he wanted, and then,
without scarcely saying ‘Thank you,’ he asked me did I believe in God. I
asked him did he believe in the devil. He said ‘Yes.’ I asked him did he
believe in devils, and he said ‘No.’ I asked him did he believe in the
Bible. He said ‘Yes.’ Then I recalled to his mind the story of the
Gadarene swine, and his reply was that times are changed since then.
Then I suppose, I said, all the devils are dead? He walked away in a
huff—with my check in his pocket, though.
“Now the juggler man”—turning to Leslie—“may have been chivied to
death by devils just as the Gadarene swine were chased into the sea—who
knows?
“Of course it may have been that his madness, if he were mad, took an
acute turn, who knows? But I have lived a good time in the East, and I
am very well assured of this, that there are men here hand in glove with
evil. I have seen things done in China, and for money too, that could
not possibly have been done by trickery, and could not, I think, have
been done by permission of the powers of Good. I’m not what you call a
Christian, and what’s more, I think the Christian religion has done a
great deal of harm—not to speak of other what you call ‘religions’—Am
I wearying you, Mrs. du Telle?”
“Not in the least; please go on.”
“In this way. It has robbed us of our terror of evil. It paints a vague
devil that no man really believes in. Now take that much-read book, ‘The
Sorrows of Satan,’ where the Devil sits down and plays the piano and
sings a song.”
“I thought it was a guitar he played,” said Jane.
“Well, a guitar; it’s all the same. People read that with a grave face.
He’s quite a good sort and so forth.” Channing paused for a moment and
gazed reflectively at the wine in his glass, took a sip and went on:
“Don’t you think the thousands of people who read that stuff, and admire
it, must have lost all sense of the horrible thing that evil is? The
sense that evil is a reality, a thing to fill us with the wildest horror
if one could only appreciate it, a very real thing, and a very
determined thing, and a thing all black; yet we get people playing in
fancy with, and even laughing about, this horror. And writers painting
the cuttle-fish center of it as a semi-sentimental idiot capable of
assuming evening clothes and talking twaddle, or criticizing plays as he
does in Satan Montgomery’s poem. We don’t play with a thing we loathe
even in fancy. But we—I mean Christians—play with the idea of the
devil as if it were a poodle dog. The truth is that Christians don’t
fear the Power of Evil, they fear the Power of Good. They praise him,
propitiate and worship him in a most fulsome manner, and say they love
him. I tell you this for a fact that no man can love good who does not
abhor evil, and you can’t abhor a thing that you play with.”
“Do you abhor evil, Mr. Channing?” asked Jane.
“Honestly, I do. Any one with eyes and the capacity for thought who
lives in China _must_.”
“Then you must love good?”
“One does not ‘love’ the sun, one worships it, so to speak—but this is
all very strange my talking like this; my business in life is mainly
silk and racehorses.”
“’Scuse me,” said George du Telle, who was swaying slightly in his
chair, the gone-out cigar still stuck in the side of his mouth, his face
bulged and red, and his eye a fixity. “’Scuse me.”
“One moment, George—Well, I think, Mr. Channing, there are worse
Christians in the world than you are.”
“Perhaps there are worse men, but I don’t claim to be a Christian. Only
a man who recognizes fearfully the existence of evil as well as good.”
“’Scuse me,” said George du Telle, speaking loudly now as if he were
calling a servant or railway porter. “I’m not going to have this sort of
thing at my table. _I’m_ a Christian, brought up a Christian, die one.
’M not going to—”
“George!” said his wife in a mild voice, but a voice very steady and
full of command.
The Christian, who had raised himself in his chair, subsided.
Jane rose from the table.
“Shall we go into the drawing-room and have some music?” she said. “You
sing, Dick—or used to.”
As they passed to the drawing-room she said to Channing: “Did I tell you
the mark my cousin Dick made—you know what I mean—was the Christian
emblem?”
“My dear lady,” said Channing, “I especially dread hurting another
person’s religious feelings, and I, what am I? Just a man who thinks his
own thoughts, but—”
“Well?”
“Well, if there were anything in it at all, may it not be that the cause
of the disturbance was the fact that he touched him?”
“How is that?”
“You have never touched the wire in connection with a running dynamo?”
“No.”
“No,” said Channing, “for if you had you would not be here. The metaphor
is a bad one. I only mean to say that the touch of a stick or a hand may
disturb the play of great forces with most surprising results.”