--VIII--
But for Martin this was not life. For him it was a retreat, an asylum
in which he had sought repose for a time, which he hoped to make short.
He read and thought. In books and in his own thoughts he searched for
what one so often seeks in youth in order to forget in age that one
has ever bothered about it: a faith to live by, a star to steer by, a
concord in things, a meaning, and a goal.
* * * * *
Martin had been a Christian up to his sixteenth year. It is natural
for a child to believe what his elders say is true. He had believed
everything and had not doubted, and on Sundays he had gone to church
with his parents. If the preacher was a good talker and a charlatan,
he felt edified and moved and wished he could become such a preacher;
but if it was an honest unassuming minister who preached as well as he
could without making any fuss or gesticulations, he generally went to
sleep.
But when he was sixteen he was confirmed. Up to then religion had been
a detail of school work set side by side with other details; now it
became all of a sudden the one essential, that which daily demanded
his time and consideration. The question could not be appeased by
the thought: «This is just a matter of the emotions,» since it was
customary to weep when one «went forward.» It freely developed the
claim to be the highest of all, the dominant force in life, the one
thing that mattered. And Martin could not escape the discovery that
if religion was the truth, then it was right in this claim, the claim
to be above everything else, and he must devote all his powers and
his whole soul to it; he must become religious. But if it was not the
truth, then he must seek the truth wherever he could find it; he must
become a free-thinker. The course between, the Christianity of use and
custom such as is professed and believed in by the multitude, was to
him mere thoughtlessness and conventionality. This was an evasion which
seemed natural to him in most of his comrades, but it never occurred to
him to think that this was open to him. He stood at the parting of the
ways and had to choose.
But one night when he lay awake pondering over this, unable to sleep,
while the moon shone straight into his room and the thoughts crowded
into his head, suddenly it stood clear to him that he did not believe.
It seemed to him that he had long realized the Christian religion was
something that no one could really believe if he wished to be honest
with himself. It became evident to him that the problem as to the
truth of Christianity was something which he had already gone past and
that it was actually a quite different problem which now disturbed
him: how was it possible that the others could believe in this when
he could not? By «the others» he meant not only his comrades--for
they did not seem to concern themselves any further in such matters,
and he knew besides that one could get them to believe in a little of
everything--but his parents, his teachers, all the grown-ups, who must
know more of life and the world than he did. How was it possible that
he, Martin Birck, who wasn’t sixteen yet and lay in a little iron bed
in the home of his parents, could think differently about the highest
and most important things than did old and experienced people, and how
could he be right and they wrong? This seemed to him almost as wildly
absurd as the faith he had just rejected. Here he was completely at a
loss; he couldn’t come to any solution. He got up out of bed and went
to the window. Snow was glittering white on the roofs, it was dark
in the houses, and the street lay empty. The moon stood high in the
heavens, but it was a gray-white winter moon, small and frost-bitten
and infinitely far away, and in the moon-haze the stars twinkled
sleepily and dully. Martin stood tracing with his finger on the pane.
«Give me a sign, God!» he whispered. Then he stood long at the window,
getting chilly and staring at the moon; he saw it glide in and become
hidden behind a black factory chimney and he saw it creep out again on
the other side. But he received no sign.
In the depths of his heart he did not wish for a sign either, for he
felt that a conviction was something that one could not and should not
have as a gift by means of a miracle. To seek for truth and be honest
with oneself in the search, that was the one clue he could find.
Martin supposed that confirmation and the first communion were duties
prescribed by law which he could not evade. His father had no different
conception, or if he had he did not say so, for he reverenced the
proverb: Speech is silver, silence is golden. Martin therefore went to
communion with the other neophytes. It was a spring day with sun and
tender green in the old trees of the churchyard, and when Martin heard
the bells roar and sing and the organ begin the processional hymn, his
eyes filled with tears and he grieved in his heart that he was not as
the others and could not believe and feel as they did. And when he saw
the church full of serious folk and heard the voice of the preacher
enjoining the young people from the pulpit to hold fast to the faith of
their fathers, he felt unrest and confusion through his inmost soul,
and again the question came to trouble him: «How is it possible that
all these can believe, and not I? It’s mad to think that I alone can
be right against all these and against all the dead who sleep in their
graves out there, who lived and died in the faith I reject. It’s mad,
it’s mad! I must conquer my reason and teach myself to believe.» But
when he came to the actual ceremonies and saw the ministers in their
surplices going back and forth before the altar, while they dispensed
the bread and wine and carried napkins over their arms like waiters,
he felt faint and disgusted and could not understand that he had let
himself be fooled into such mummery. And although he knew or believed
that these ministers who shuffled about there in the gloom were in
everyday life about as honest as most people, they seemed to him at
that moment shameless hypocrites.
Belief in a God and in a life after this was what Martin had left at
this time of his childhood faith. But his god was no longer a fatherly
god who listened to prayers and nodded approval if they were needful
and intelligent, or shook his head if they were childish and stupid.
His god had become cold as ice and remote as the moon he had stood
staring at on the winter’s night, and Martin ceased saying his evening
prayer, for he did not believe there was anyone who heard it. Then
finally came the day when Martin realized that what he had been calling
god these last days was something with which no human being could come
into any relation either of love or obedience or opposition, something
which could only have the name of god by a wanton play of words and a
misuse of the incompleteness of language.
And when he examined his belief in immortality, he soon found that he
had got far away from the blue heaven of his childhood. He had observed
that all who on any ground other than that of revelation preserved
their belief in a life after this also assumed a life before this,
and he found such an assumption both natural and logical. Only that
is eternal which has always existed. What has come into being will
sometime cease to be: such was the law for everything existent. But
Martin had no memory of any earlier existence, nor had he either read
or heard tell of any one who had with any gleam of probability given it
out that he remembered any such state. There were, to be sure, people
who asserted that they recalled their preëxistence, but they regularly
maintained that they had been some historic personage of whom they
had read in books during their present life: _e.g._, Julius Caesar or
Gregory VII. Only rarely could any one remember having been a slave or
a waiter or a shop-clerk. This circumstance appeared peculiar. In any
event it was clear that the great majority of people, and Martin among
them, had not the slightest recollection of any previous existence.
He concluded from this that neither in a future life would he be
able to remember anything of the present, that indeed he would not
be able to verify his own identity; and he found that if one called
such an existence immortality, it was again--as in the question of
God--a weakness of thought, a play with the imperfection of language,
and nothing else. And it struck him as even more bizarre to give
such a name to the passage of the dead body into living nature, into
plants and animals and air and water. He had no mind for such kinds of
word-play.
Things went on in this way so that Martin set out in life without any
other belief than that he would grow up, get old and die like a tree in
the ground, as his forefathers had done, and that the green earth which
he saw with his eyes was his only home in the world and the only space
in which it was given him to live and act. And among the many dreams
he composed about his life was that in which he was to become like
a great and beautiful tree by the wayside with rich foliage, giving
coolness and shelter to many. He wished to create happiness and beauty
around him and to clear away illusions; he meant to speak and write so
that all would have to perceive at once that he was right. To be sure
he was not quite certain that truth in itself could produce happiness,
but history had taught him that illusion created unhappiness and crime.
Like pestilences the various religions had passed over the world, and
he was astounded when he thought of all the desolation with which
Christianity had marked its way through times and peoples. But he
believed in full confidence that its days were reckoned, that he lived
at the dawn of a new time, and he wanted to play his part in thought
and poetry toward breaking the road for what was to come.
At the time when Martin believed and thought thus it still occurred
to him that life, no matter how short and unstable it was, had
nevertheless a sort of meaning. He felt himself to be in a state of
development and growth; every day new truths arose before his mind
and new beauty before his senses during his long lonely wanderings
to the edge of the city or in the woods when spring had begun. And
spring.... At that time spring was still a real spring--not a disease,
an intoxication, a fever in the blood, in which all old half-forgotten
yearning and regret rises to the surface and says: «Look, here I am!
Do you recognize me? I have slept long but I am not dead.» Nothing
of that sort, but an awakening, a morning, a murmur in the air,
and a resounding song. And at that time the thousand unsatisfied
desires which he bore within him were like so many shimmering hopes
and half-uttered promises, for no long years of emptiness and
disappointment had yet managed to sharpen them into cutting knives
which wounded and tore at the soul. And if he did not believe that
all these obligations, or even most of them, would be redeemed by
life, they were still like bribing possibilities, like a lever for
dreams without goal or bounds; and even at the moment when the book
he held in his hand or the experience he had had in the course of the
day whispered warnings in his ear and advised him not to believe in
happiness, these dreams were woven into a longing without bitterness
and a melancholy as luminous as a spring twilight.
Nevertheless these warnings came ever more closely together, and ever
more often it happened that in the midst of the dreams youthful blood
conjured up he caught himself listening to the other voice, the voice
that welled up from the depths of the oldest times and was echoed in
the newest books of the day, the strange voice that none of the hundred
new gospels which periodically as equinoctial storms had blown through
the minds of men could silence for more than a brief moment, the voice
which said: «All is vanity, and there is nothing new under the sun.»
Why was he alive, and what was the meaning of it all? He did not cease
to ask himself these questions, for he still continuously demanded of
the life which he saw with his eyes that there should be something
behind it, something which could be called life’s meaning. For most
of the happiness which he saw men possess and that which he saw them
strive for seemed to him like the fairy gold in the story, to be
withered leaves, or it appeared to him like nice playthings, something
not to be taken seriously. If he turned his gaze to his own life as
he lived it from day to day, he could not escape the thought that in
itself it was miserable and empty and that its only worth lay in the
uncertain hope that it would not remain as it was. But what he hoped
for was not something that one could approach step by step with work
and patience and a hundred small sacrifices--competence and respect
and that sort of thing--what he hoped for was something indefinite and
indescribable: a sunrise, a break-up of the ice, an awakening from a
painful and purposeless dream.
For it was like a painful and purposeless dream that his life appeared
when he looked at it with waking eyes and found it filled with shabby
joy, with vulgar sorrow and ignoble anxiety. Now and then he wrote
some poems and stories to earn a little money and to prove how far
his words could follow his thoughts, but with every new year all he
had written in the old seemed to him childish and worthless, and he
felt that nothing would amount to anything which could not fill him
completely with the joy of creation. Beyond this he fulfilled almost
automatically the sum of actions, or more properly gestures, which
usually characterize a young man in a government office or to which
other circumstances may lead. He went to his work as late in the day as
possible and left as early as propriety allowed. He made acquaintance
with his fellow employees and shared in their amusements. He drank
punch, ate suppers, and visited cheap girls of the streets; he loved
music and often sat at the opera among the blackamoors and musical
enthusiasts of the upper gallery, and he sang quartettes and took his
reward in double file when an old school superintendent hung the gilded
tin funnel on a rose-colored ribbon around his neck with paternal hands.