"I was close to the top. There wasn't a man anywhere near my age above me. Then the smash. It was a woman. You can't tell what's right and wrong in these things. Don't blame that cousin of yours or the girl. If anybody ought to know it's a doctor. I didn't. It's the hardest problem there is in ethics. The theological seminaries don't help. It's stupid just to tell men to keep away from it—sooner or later they don't. And nobody can tell them what's right. You wouldn't understand my case if I told you about it. It finished me. I began to drink. Watch out for the drink. That's sure to be uncomfortable. I was a drunkard—on the bottom. At last I heard about her again. She was coming down fast—towards the bottom. Well, I knew what the bottom was like—and I did not want her to know."
He smoked his cigar furiously for a moment before he went on. He had crawled out and sobered up. This school work and the village practice gave him enough to keep her in a private hospital. She had consumption.
"And sometime—before very long," he ended, "she will die and—well—I can go back to Forgetting-Land."
Of course I did not understand half what it meant. How I racked my heart for some word of comfort! I wanted to ask him to stay in the school and help other boys as he was helping me. But I could not find phrases. At last his cigar burned out and he snapped the stub into the mill-race. There was a sharp hiss, which sounded like a protest, before it sank under the water. He jumped up.
"You ought to be in bed. A youngster needs sleep. Don't worry your head about God. It's more important for you to make the baseball team. Run along."
I had only gone a few steps when he called me back.
"You know—if you should tell anyone, I might lose my position. I don't care for myself—but be careful on her account. Goodnight."
He turned away before I could protest. His calling me back is the one cloud on my memory of him. His secret was safe.
For the rest of the school year I gave my undivided attention to baseball. The doctor was uniformly gruff to me. We did not have another talk.
Two weeks before the school closed he disappeared. I knew that she had died, he would not have deserted his post while her need lasted. On Commencement Day, John, the apple-man, handed me a letter from him. I tore it up carefully after reading it, as he asked—threw the fragments out of the window of the train which was carrying me homeward. There was much to help me to clear thinking in that letter, but the most important part was advice about how to act towards the Father. "Don't tell him your doubts now. It would only distress him. Wait till you're grown up before you quarrel with him."