REASON IS AGAIN ENTHRONED

Slowly the days brought new life to the convalescent, despite his occasional attacks of theological astigmatism.  And these attacks grew less frequent and less marked as the poor bones once more involved themselves in firm flesh ­to the glad relief of a harried and scandalised old gentleman whose black forebodings had daily moved him to visions of the mad-house for his best-loved descendant.

Yet there were still dreadful times when the young man on the couch blasphemed placidly by the hour, with an insane air of assuming that those about him held the same opinions; as if the Christian religion were a pricked bubble the adherents of which had long since vanished.

If left by himself he could often be heard chuckling and muttering between chuckles:  “I will get me honour upon Pharaoh and all his host.  I have hardened his heart and the heart of his host that I might show these my signs before him.”

Entering the room, the old gentleman might be met with: 

“I certainly agree with you, sir, in every respect ­Christianity was an invertebrate materialism of separation ­crude, mechanical separation ­less spiritual, less ethical, than almost any of the Oriental faiths.  Affirming the brotherhood of man, yet separating us into a heaven and a hell.  Christians cowering before a being of divided power, half-god and half-devil.  Indeed, I remember no religion so non-moral ­none that is so baldly a mere mechanical device for meeting the primitive mind’s need to set its own tribe apart from all others ­or in the later growth to separate the sheep from the goats, by reason of the opinion formed of certain evidence.  Even schoolboys nowadays know that no moral value inheres in any opinion formed upon evidence.  Yet, I dare say it was doubtless for a long period an excellent religion for marauding nations.”

Or, again, after a long period of apparently rational talk, the unfortunate young man would break out with, “And how childish its wonder-tales were, of iron made to swim, of a rod turned to a serpent, of a coin found in a fish’s mouth, of devils asking to go into swine, of a fig-tree cursed to death because it did not bear fruit out of season ­how childish that tale of a virgin mother, who conceived ‘without sin,’ as it is somewhere naively put ­an ideal of absolutely flawless falsity.  Even the great old painters were helpless before it.  They were driven to make mindless Madonnas, stupid bits of fleshy animality.  It’s not easy to idealise mere physical motherhood.  You see, that was the wrong, perverted idea of motherhood ­’conceiving without sin.’  It’s an unclean dogma in its implications.  I knew somewhere once a man named Milo Barrus ­a sort of cheap village atheist, I remember, but one thing I recall hearing him say seems now to have a certain crude truth in it.  He said:  ’There’s my old mother, seventy-eight this spring, bent, gray, and wasted with the work of raising us seven children; she’s slaved so hard for fifty years that she’s worn her wedding-ring to a fine thread, and her hands look as if they had a thousand knuckles and joints in them.  But she smiles like a girl of sixteen, she was never cross or bitter to one of us hounds, and I believe she never even wanted to complain in all her days.  And there’s a look of noble capacity in her face, of soul dignity, that you never saw in any Madonna’s.  I tell you no “virgin mother” could be as beautiful as my mother, who bore seven children for love of my father and for love of the thought of us.’  Isn’t it queer, sir, that I remember that ­for it seemed only grotesque at the time I heard it.”

It was after this extraordinary speech, uttered with every sign of physical soundness, that young Dr. Merritt confided to the old man when they had left the study: 

“He’s coming on fine, Mr. Delcher.  He’ll eat himself into shape now in no time; but ­I don’t know ­seems to me you stand a lot better show of making a preacher out of his brother.  Of course, I may be mistaken ­we doctors often are.”  Then the young physician became loftily humble:  “But it doesn’t strike me he’ll ever get his ideas exactly into Presbyterian shape again!”

“But, man, he’ll surely be rid of these devil’s hallucinations?”

“Well, well ­perhaps, but I’m almost afraid they’re what we doctors call ‘fixed delusions.’”

“But I set my heart so long ago on his preaching the Word.  Oh, I’ve looked forward to it so long ­and so hard!”

“Well, all you can do now is to feed him and not excite him.  We often have these cases.”

The very last of Bernal’s utterances that could have been reprobated in a well man was his telling Clytie in the old gentleman’s presence that, whereas in his boyhood he had pictured the hand of God as a big black hand reaching down to “remove” people ­“the way you weed an onion bed” ­he now conceived it to be like her own ­“the most beautiful fat, red hand in the world, always patting you or tucking you in, or reaching you something good or pointing to a jar of cookies.”  It was so dangerously close to irreverence that it made Clytemnestra look stiff and solemn as she arranged matters on the luncheon tray; yet it was so inoffensive, considering the past, that it made Grandfather Delcher quite hopeful.

Thereafter, instead of babbling blasphemies, the convalescent became silent for the most part, yet cheerful and beautifully rational when he did speak, so that fear came gradually to leave the old man’s heart for longer and longer intervals.  Indeed, one day when Bernal had long lain silent, he swept lingering doubts from the old man’s mind by saying, with a curious little air of embarrassment, yet with a return of that old-time playful assumption of equality between them ­“I’m afraid, old man, I may have been a little queer in my talk ­back there.”

The old man’s heart leaped with hope at this, though the acknowledgment struck him as being inadequate to the circumstance it referred to.

“You were flighty, boy, now and then,” he replied, in quite the same glossing strain of inadequacy.

“I can’t tell you how queerly things came back to me ­some bits of consciousness and memory came early and some came late ­and they’re still struggling along in that disorderly procession.  Even yet I’ve not been able to take stock.  Old man, I must have been an awful bore.”

“Oh, no ­not that, boy!” Then, in glad relief, he fell upon his knees beside the couch, praying, in discreetly veiled language, that the pure heart of a babbler might not be held guilty for the utterances of an irresponsible head.

Yet, after many days of sane quiet and ever-renewing strength ­days of long walks in the summer woods or long readings in the hammock when the shadows lay east of the big house, there came to be observed in the young man a certain moody reticence.  And when the time for his return to college was near, he came again to his disquieted grandfather one day, saying: 

“I think there are some matters I should speak to you about, sir.”  Had he used the term “old man,” instead of “sir,” there might still have been no cause for alarm.  As it was, the grandfather regarded him in a sudden, heart-hurried fear.

“Are the matters, boy, those ­those about which you may have spoken during your sickness?”

“I believe so, sir.”

The old man winced again under the “sir,” when his heart longed for the other term of playful familiarity.  But he quickly assumed a lightness of manner to hide the eagerness of his heart’s appeal: 

“Don’t talk now, boy ­be advised by me.  It’s not well for you ­you are not strong.  Please let me guide you now.  Go back to your studies, put all these matters from your mind ­study your studies and play your play.  Play harder than you study ­you need it more.  Play out of doors ­you must have a horse to ride.  You have thought too much before your time for thinking.  Put away the troublesome things, and live in the flesh as a healthy boy should.  Trust me.  When you come to ­to those matters again, they will not trouble you.”

In his eagerness, first one hand had gone to the boy’s shoulder, then the other, and his tones grew warm with pleading, while the keen old eyes played as a searchlight over the troubled young face.

“I must tell you at least one thing, sir.”

The old man forced a smile around his trembling mouth, and again assumed his little jaunty lightness.

“Come, come, boy ­not ‘sir.’  Call me ‘old man’ and you shall say anything.”

But the boy was constrained, plainly in discomfort.  “I ­I can’t call you that ­just now ­sir.”

“Well, if you must, tell me one thing ­but only one! only one, mind you, boy!” In fear, but smiling, he waited.

“Well, sir, it’s a shock I suffered just before I was sick.  It came to me one night when I sat down to dinner ­fearfully hungry.  I had a thick English chop on the plate before me; and a green salad, oily in its bowl, and crisp, browned potatoes, and a mug of creamy ale.  I’d gone to the place for a treat.  I’d been whetting my appetite with nibbles of bread and sips of ale until the other things came; and then, even when I put my knife to the chop ­like a blade pushed very slowly into my heart came the thought:  ’My father is burning in hell ­screaming in agony for a drop of this water which I shall not touch because I have ale.  He has been in this agony for years; he will be there forever.’  That was enough, sir.  I had to leave the little feast.  I was hungry no longer, though a moment before it had seemed that I couldn’t wait for it.  I walked out into the cold, raw night ­walked till near daylight, with the sweat running off me.  And the thing I knew all the time was this:  that if I were in hell and my father in heaven, he would blaspheme God to His face for a monster and come to hell to burn with me forever ­come with a joke and a song, telling me never to mind, that we’d have a fine time there in hell in spite of everything!  That was what I knew of my poor, cheap, fiddle-playing mountebank of a father.  Just a moment more ­this is what you must remember of me, in whatever I have to say hereafter, that after that night I never ceased to suffer all the hell my father could be suffering, and I suffered it until my mind went out in that sickness.  But, listen now:  whatever has happened ­I’m not yet sure what it is ­I no longer suffer.  Two things only I know:  that our creed still has my godless, scoffing, unbaptised father in hell, and that my love for him ­my absolute oneness with him ­has not lessened.

“I’ll stop there, if you wish, leaving you to divine what other change has taken place.”

“There, there,” soothed the old man, seizing the shoulders once more with his strong grip ­“no more now, boy.  It was a hard thing, I know.  The consciousness of God’s majesty comes often in that way, and often it overwhelms the unprepared.  It was hard, but it will leave you more a man; your soul and your faith will both survive.  Do what I have told you ­as if you were once more the puzzled little Bernal, who never could keep his hair neatly brushed like Allan, and would always moon in corners.  Go finish your course.  Another year, when your mind has new fortitude from your recreated body, we will talk these matters as much as you like.  Yet I will tell you one thing to remember ­just one, as you have told me one:  You are in a world of law, of unvarying cause and effect; and the integrity of this law cannot be destroyed, nor even impaired, by any conceivable rebellion of yours.  Yet this material world of law is but the shadow of the reality, and that reality is God ­the moral law if you please, as relentless, as inexorable, as immutable in its succession of cause and effect as the physical laws more apparent to us; and as little to be overthrown as physical law by any rebellion of disordered sentiment.  The word of this God and this Law is contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, wherein is the only rule to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy Him.

“Now,” continued the old man, more lightly, “each of us has something to remember ­and let each of us pray for the other.  Go, be a good boy ­but careless and happy ­for a year.”

The old man had his way, and the two boys went presently back to their studies.

The girl, Nancy, remembered them well for the things each had said to her.

Allan, who, though he constantly praised her, had always the effect of leaving her small to herself.  “Really, Nance,” he said, “without any joking, I believe you have a capacity for living life in its larger aspects.”

And on the last day, Bernal had said, “Nance, you remember when we were both sorry you couldn’t be born again ­a boy?  Well, from what the old gentleman says, one learns in time to bow to the ways of an inscrutable Providence.  I dare say he’s right.  I can see reasons now, my girl, why it was well that you were not allowed to meddle with Heaven’s allotment of your sex.  I’m glad you had to remain a girl.”

One compliment pleased her.  The other made her tremble, though she laughed at it.