"Now you may say that even if the whole world had forgotten God, if I'd seen Him why couldn't I still remember Him? Why couldn't I consider the millions of years that go to the making of man and do my little bit and wait on His will? Because my temptation came on me. I was tempted in the wilderness of my own credulity and conceit. For I looked back over time past and I said like Solomon—I don't know whether he ever said it, but he's the most blasé Johnnie I remember—'All is vanity.' As it was in the beginning, so it ever shall be. We are not made in the image of God. We are made rather grotesquely out of dust, and to dust we shall return, all our hopes, all our aspirations, all the pretty plans we form for defeating death and time. And who made us and put us on this dark planet where it is next to impossible to see a step before us? God. Who is responsible for us? God. Can we find out His will? Never. Can we hope for any alleviation of misery on our dark planet? Never: for if we seek out many inventions to down disease and poverty, we shall unloose as many by-products of discovery and bring new plagues upon us. And so I had to turn away from God. Do you see? I didn't deny He exists. I didn't accuse Him of bad faith to us. How can He show either good faith or bad when He has made us no promises? He has merely set us on the dark planet and forced us to whirl with it on the wheel of time. And so, do you see, having turned away from God—and I had to, I had to in mere honesty—I simply lost Him. And having lost Him, there is nothing left to lose. Also, having once seen Him and then lost Him, I can't take up the puzzle again. I can't play the game. If I hadn't what we New Englanders call common sense, I suppose I should put an end to myself. What would be the good? He would simply catch me, like a rabbit out of a cage, and chuck me back again on the dark planet. Don't think I blame Him. He wouldn't do it out of cruelty. He'd have to put me back. That's the way His laws are made. So I'm going up to Wake Hill and live with Charlotte and Jerry, and see if I can't get tired enough every day to sleep at night. I couldn't keep on here. I couldn't. What we call civilization is too sickening to me. I should simply go off my nut. And when you come to that, it's an awful complication, besides the suffering of it. That I shrink from, too. I'm talking a good deal, but actually it's the thing I least want to do. I don't want a fuss."
Here he paused, wondered if he had more to say, thinking Dick must be unusually dull, even for a poet, if he couldn't understand such a plain state of things, and then took an irrational satisfaction in carefully folding these last pages and putting them in the envelope with what he had written first. He addressed the envelope to Dick, sealed and weighed it, got up and stretched himself and felt distinctly better. He had, in a way, confessed, and it was having the effect on him he had so sagely anticipated. He could sleep to-night. And he did sleep. It was one of the nights he used to have after long tramps about Wake Hill, when his tired legs thrilled deliciously before they sank into a swoon of nothingness.
In the morning, he leaped the chasm from four to six, a wakeful misery of late, when he was accustomed to go over and over the last harassing pages in his book of doubts. He did not wake until seven, and then it was with a clear-eyed resumption of consciousness. And here he was, exactly as he had found himself on other mornings when the bath of oblivion had not been so deep. Here was his world, the world he was trying to run away from, waiting for him in all its ordered hostilities. Immediately it struck him full in the center that, instead of having something less to brood upon by reason of his confession to Dick, he had saddled himself with more. He had the letter itself to repent of. He had given, not his unhappiness but his actual self away, and, no matter how clearly Dick understood, he had conjured up another anguish in admitting to his disordered inner world the lenses of another mind. This was only a matter of a second's disconcerting thought. It was also immediately clear to him that the letter must not go, and he spoke from his bedside to the kitchen and gave orders that nothing should be mailed until he came down. A contrite voice replied. The letters were mailed: that is, the thick one on the library table. Mary had gone in last night to lock the windows, and saw it, and knew he had forgotten to leave it in the hall. He often did forget. It was stamped and sealed. And the furnace man came then. Raven thought he might, in another minute, be groaning into her sympathetic ear; so he shut her up with an assurance that it was all right. But he felt the sweat start on his forehead at the picture of Dick sitting down to breakfast—Dick always ordered a big breakfast, having a hunter's appetite and a general impression that, the more he nourished himself, the more manly it would make his nose—and poring over the fable of his uncle's soul, or what seemed to be his soul, with eyes strained to their limit of credulity. However, it was of no use. Nothing was of any use when destiny had one of those ironic fits of hers and sat down to make a caricature of you, just for the fun of bursting her old sides over it. He dressed in a dogged haste, wondering if he'd better telephone Dick and ask him not to open any letter he might have from him that morning, and then dismissing it, because it had assuredly been received and Dick was now absorbing it with his chops and eggs.
Raven went down to his own eggs in a grim and sulky frame of mind. He would repudiate the letter, if need be, tell Dick it was only something he had written as a literary experiment and thought he'd try it on the dog. But the moment he heard the boy's key in the door and then his step through the hall, he knew he could not, for some unexplained reason inherent in his own frame of mind, "put it over." It was as if Dick represented the universe Raven was arraigning, was counsel for it, so to speak, and Raven had got, in sheer decency of honor, to stand to his guns. But it was all worse than he thought. Dick's entrance was so quick, his onslaught so unstudied, his glance so full of alarmed commiseration, that Raven saw at once he had been shocked out of all manly proprieties. Dick caught at a chair, on the way to the table, brought it with him and, placing it at a near angle to Raven's, dropped into it as if exhausted.
"I'd no idea," he began, "why, I'd no more idea——"
Raven's hand tightened on his fork. Then he laid the fork down, for, after all, he had finished breakfast, and might as well make the most of running his hands into his pockets and shutting them there.
"Morning, Dick," he said. "Have in some toast and eggs?"
Dick, in no mind even to weigh the significance of toast and eggs, was staring at him. He was cheated by a poverty of words when he most needed them, and could only repeat:
"I hadn't the least idea. I tell you it never occurred to me. I don't believe it did to Nan, either."
"What?" asked Raven. "What is it that didn't occur to you?"