The Lad did not tell me how deeply he was interested in Janet. He simply
talked about her a large part of the time when he was with me. At first
it had been the book that filled his thought; now it was Janet and the
book.
Perhaps he did not know how far he was taking me into his confidence.
Perhaps he did not care.
Janet puzzled him. “I don’t understand,” he said one day when we were
taking one of our long walks. “She seems to be an absolute pessimist,
and yet she takes a strong interest in some things.”
“For instance?”
“Well, in gowns.” He spoke unwillingly.
“She would not have any right to be a pessimist about her gowns,” I
said. “They are too pretty.”
Here the Lad shot past me with his long stride. He had a way of
forgetting me for a minute, and of walking swiftly ahead. He always
turned and came back to apologize, and yet I objected decidedly to this
phase of his absent-mindedness. It was hardly deferential, I thought, to
a person of my years.
“You walk,” I said, when he paused to beg my pardon, “as if you had air
in your bones. You must be related to the birds.”
“I was thinking,” he said, “and I forgot. I was thinking how strange it
is to find women facing the newer criticism and making up their minds on
religious matters. In the South they do not do it. They are all
orthodox. It goes with being a woman.”
“I wonder why?”
“Partly because it is expected of them. Most of the men I know want
their wives to take the beaten paths, no matter how far they themselves
have strayed from them. Marriage of that kind doesn’t seem marriage to
me. I want my wife—if I ever have one—to share all of my life, the
intellectual part of it as well as the rest.
“That’s one thing I like about your friend,” he continued, apparently
unconscious of the connection of ideas. There was a great deal of the
scholar’s _naïveté_ about the Lad. “She is so broad-minded. She looks at
things as fairly and impersonally as a man does.”
I changed the subject abruptly, for I perceived that the Lad was going
to say more than he meant to about Janet.
“How did you reach your present position?” I asked, for lack of
something better. “You are an agnostic, I suppose?”
“In religious matters, yes,” he answered. “And the reason is, that after
I had been trained in methods of scientific thought, dogmatic thought
became impossible. All the theology I know anything about is founded on
arbitrary dogma.”
“To an outsider,” I said slowly, “science seems at times dogmatic. Are
not its sceptical conclusions out of proportion to its actual
achievement? You scientists deny beyond your power to prove. Kingsley
convicted you once for all in the argument about the water-babies, and
he did it by your own methods. You have ‘no right to say that God does
not exist until you have seen him not-existing.’”
But the Lad thought I was trifling.
“You are mistaken,” he maintained. “Genuine science neither asserts nor
denies where it cannot prove. It is silent about the ideas of God and of
immortality, because it cannot find any basis for scientific reasoning.
It is magnificent,—that reverence that keeps it from making great
unprovable statements about things in general. Oh, think of the patience
with which scientists study the least things, and the self-control that
keeps them from drawing conclusions before they have reached them, and
the splendid faith with which they go on working!”
The Lad’s eyes glowed with enthusiasm.
“Of course, my present position is not final,” he added. “I expect to go
on. I have tremendous faith in doubt.”
“You are creative even in your doubting,” I reflected.
“Of course,” said the Lad. “Otherwise there would not be the least use
in doubting.”
I told him that I had never known disbelief so eager and enthusiastic.
Agnosticism, as I had watched it, had weakened the whole moral fibre.
With Janet, for instance, loss of faith in God had meant loss of faith
in herself and in everything else.
“I can’t understand that,” said the Lad. “The feeling that the old
ground is slipping from under me makes me want to gird up my loins and
start to find new.
“But there is a terrible amount of suffering in the mental growth of the
race,” he continued, after a pause. “I can stand the loss of the hope
and comfort in the old ideas, but I can’t stand the pain that my changed
belief gives my poor old father. I could have kept still, but that
seemed hardly honest. So I tried to make him understand, and he was very
badly cut up.”
“And your mother?” I asked.
He had never talked about his mother. He was silent for a minute. We
were on one of the great bridges over the river, and we stopped to watch
the spires, the gray roofs, and the one gilded dome of the city across
the shining water.
“My mother,” he said at last, taking off his hat and standing
bare-headed in the cold November air, “my mother is where she
understands. She died when I was a little fellow.”
Where she understands! I smiled, but the smile brought tears to my eyes.
They all went back, these wise young people who had outgrown the faith
of their fathers and mothers,—they all went back to it in moments of
supreme emotion, and rested in it, like little children.
Naturally, I did not point out to the Lad his lack of logic. I knew that
he was going to speak again of Janet, and I waited. Presently the remark
came.
“Such splendid power, and all wasted! That girl could do anything that
she wished to do. There is a kind of impotent idealism in her that keeps
her from acting. She refuses to see the difference between the absolute
and the relative. She can not, or she will not, see that if she is to
have the ideal in this world she must work it out in the actual.”
“Wait,” I said. “She is young. Now she is only a question mark. But this
uncertainty is a phase of her development. Something positive will grow
out of the mood of denial.”
“If something could only rouse her,” said the Lad; he had forgotten that
I was there,—“could sting her into life. If something could only make
her _care_!”