Chapter XVI

Jim didn’t take to Huxley. He went instead to the little church across the fields, half a mile away. It was a still, dim day of misty sunshine. The heaviness of the autumn air had something peaceful and grave in it, as if by its own weight it could hold back the storms of life.

The leaves hung brittle and quiet on the trees. Death rested like a dream upon the empty harvest fields.

A wild, glad feeling rose in Jim’s heart which he could not understand nor tame. He had never been so conscious of his youth before; it thrilled up in him with all the ecstasy and force of unfettered instinct.

His mind was at war with his senses. He kept telling himself that he had sinned, that the result of his sin was suffering, and that another human being was lying threatened and enfeebled by his act; yet he knew that the air tasted like apples and that an unmistakable gladness lurked behind his fostered anxiety.

There were no ends in sight—he could do anything—feel anything—meet any one—the future was as hidden and as rare as the far misty hills. Youth is an awkward and baffling period—but it has moments of compensation when it transcends experience, and Jim had one of these moments now. He felt only his strength and saw none of the obstacles against which strength is broken.

The church was always open. Jim pushed back the wired door and felt the welcoming hush of the ancient sanctuary.

It had been badly restored, and love had filled it with tawdry and piteous things, but beauty lived in the solid old arches and rested on the worn and crooked stones. The church had stood for centuries and held the spirit of many prayers.

People had gone there in pain and with undreamed-of secrets; they had gone there filled with new joy and the innocence of thanksgiving; it seemed to Jim as if the spirit of humanity lingered there still—a little baffled and a little estranged by the placid obstinacy of invisible things.

The shadows of the dwindling day darkened over the altar. There were seven cheap lamps stretched across the church, one of which was always kept burning.

Mrs. Bligh had put white chrysanthemums and late lilies in the altar vases. She had a gift for arranging flowers; it seemed to Jim as if she had made a prayer out of each lifted blossom.

She was not there, but the church was full of her presence. Jim saw in his mind’s eye her small, erect figure with its lifted head and air of listening stillness.

He, too, listened, and in the silence he found prayer.

The sense of the Invisible pressed down upon him. A Presence on the cared-for altar, evoked and ministered to, responded to Jim’s needs. He felt as if he had never prayed before; he let his heart rush to his lips in burning words. All that he had never said to any one, and could never say, took him by storm and made its way to God.

His hurricane angers; the weight on him of his senses; the perpetual torment of the differences between himself and others; his large desires and petty failings; his pity and his love for mankind; poured out of his heart without let or hindrance.

Time ceased; and the slow shadows crept from the altar to the door.

Jim was in a holy place, where even a man’s sins are safe, if he knows that they are sins. He felt a stubborn strength in his heart rise up to meet them.

He did not hate Ainley any more; he hated still, but it was his own violence that he hated. He wanted to force his wild, spilled strength under a safe control.

Jim remembered how Arthur had once said to him,—

‘The place I am sending you to is a very stiff proposition. It’ll be a fight from start to finish, but there isn’t time now to prepare you first. You’ll have to fight your way through.’

Jim had glanced with justifiable pride at his iron fists, and reassured himself with the memory of his river conquests.

But Arthur had said quickly,—

‘The fight I mean will be not to use them!’

Jim hadn’t learned it yet. The humility of all strong natures shook him. He did not remember all his laborious weeks of self-control; he saw only the awfulness of his one failure.

A speck of dust in the niche of the stone column in front of him caught his eye. He thought his life had been like that—as purposeless and as fragmentary.

The unexpungeable years of his prison life weighed on him; and when he escaped from these he could not taste the joy of liberty because of Eliza.

However he tried to climb out of his past, he had Eliza fixed on his back as firmly as any Old Man of the Sea. He might keep out of prison himself; but part of him would go back to prison if Eliza went.

Crime was on his hands and in his sister’s heart. He was stamped and sealed against the law. He never could feel free as Wivvle and the other boys were free.

Shame lowered his heavy head. Not even Mrs. Bligh could bear to face his sins. They came upon him remorselessly, ugly, and heavy out of the misty past, and they were in him now, for nothing breaks the continuity of sin. They were in him, but something else was in him as well—something or some one who was on his side. He had been checked, a hand had interfered between him and murder; a voice, even now in the silence about him, was working upon his anxious heart. God, who hated sin, loved sinners; had made them; put up with them, and saved them.

Religion wasn’t only what you thought about God—it was what God thought about you.

You had a lot of it inside, but it came from outside as well—it was in the laughter of the sunshine as well as running in Jim’s blood. It was in the winds and the woods; little children had it, and the mothers of little children—all lovers knew it, and the hour of death was hushed by its presence.

You did not have to do everything yourself, but you had to do a great deal.

If you were going to be forgiven you had to forgive; if you were going to win you had to fight; you even had to fight fighting. You had to love loving. You were forced, if you wanted to be saved, to try to save.

It wasn’t enough for God to have your soul. He couldn’t even begin to have it unless it was out after somebody else’s. If you didn’t want to be like Eliza you must help Eliza. So many things came back to Eliza. If Jim never saw her again—and he didn’t see how he was going to—she was still a perpetual challenge to his faith.

Jim was so humble that he felt himself dust; but he was so alive that he knew God was in him.

Dust and God—it was what it all came down to. He could be what he liked most. He knew what instincts were and the drag of them on bewildered senses, and he had seen where instincts lead. He knew what beauty was, but he didn’t know where it might lead him; he knew only that he wanted to follow wherever it led; wanted it with a thirst sharper than the thirst of all his eager passions.

He bowed his young, fierce head still lower. He had no words, but in his dumb desire to escape sin and use himself for God, he might have voiced the infrequent cry of Job,—

‘Though he slay me, yet will I put my trust in God.’

It is the extremist challenge of the Christian, and it is never left unanswered.

The sun sank and a mist came up across the fields; it hung about the little church until the seven lamps and the one red light became beautiful and consolatory as the stars.

Jim still knelt, absorbed and unconscious, with a fixed heart. He had found a ladder between his soul and God.