“It may be so, but if you seek, you find.”
“What?”
“Whatever you are seeking.”
“What am I seeking?”
“Not to know that is the blackest treachery to life. We are growing old,” she added inconsequently, stretching her hands to the fire. She wore black silk mittens.
“Perhaps that’s it,” he allowed, with a laugh. “Childhood’s best.”
“Surely not,” she protested.
“Ah, but I was gay enough then. I’m not a religious man, you know—and perhaps that’s the reason—but however—I can remember things of great joy and pleasure then.”
And it seemed from his recollections that not the least pleasant and persistent was his memory of the chapel, a Baptist hall long since closed and decayed, to which his mother had sent him on Sunday afternoons. It was a plain, tough, little tabernacle, with benches of deal, plain deal, very hard, covered with a clear varnish that smelled pleasant. The platform and its railing, the teacher’s desk, the pulpit were all of deal, the plainest deal, very hard and all covered with the clear varnish that smelled very pleasant. And somehow the creed and the teacher and the attendants were like that too, all plain and hard, covered with a varnish that was pleasant. But there was a way in which the afternoon sun beamed through the cheap windows that lit up for young Pettigrove an everlasting light. There were hymns with tunes that he hoped would be sung in Paradise. The texts, the stories, the admonitions of the teachers, were vivid and evidently beautiful in his memory. Best of all was the privilege of borrowing a book at the end of school time—Pilgrim’s Progress or Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
For a While his recollections restored him to cheerfulness, but his dullness soon overcame him again.