Pow! Tommy's twelve-gauge cracked again. The two voices called laughingly back and forth across the slough, mingled with the excited barking of the brown dog as he retrieved the slaughtered ducks. After a time silence fell. Thompson's nose detected an odor. He turned hastily to his stove. But he had listened too long. The biscuits in his oven were smoking.
That did not matter greatly in itself. It was merely one of a long procession of culinary disasters. He could not, somehow, contrive to prepare food in the simple manner of Mike Breyette's instructions. If the biscuits had not scorched probably they would have been hopelessly soggy, dismal things compared to the brown discs Mike had turned out of the same oven. One was as bad as the other. Nothing seemed to work out right. Nothing ever tasted right. Only a healthy hunger enabled him to swallow the unsavory messes he concocted in the name of food.
He had been at Lone Moose two weeks now. His real work, his essential labor in that untilled field, was no farther advanced. He made about the same progress as a missionary that he made as a cook. In so far as Lone Moose was concerned he accomplished nothing because, like Archimedes, he lacked a foothold from which to apply his leverage. He had the intelligence to perceive that these people had no pressing wants which they looked to him to supply, that they were apparently impervious to any message he could deliver. His power to deliver a message was vitiated by this utter absence of receptivity. He was, and realized that he was, as superfluous in Lone Moose as sterling silver and cut glass in a house where there is neither food nor drink.
Also he was no longer so secure in the comfortable belief that all things work for an ultimate good. He was not so sure that a sparrow, or even an ordained servant of God, might not fall and the Almighty be none the wiser. The material considerations which he had always scorned pressed upon him in an unescapable manner. There was no getting away from them. Thrown at last upon his own resources he began to take stock of his needs, his instincts, his impulses, and to compare them with the needs and instincts and impulses of a more Godless humanity,—and he could not escape certain conclusions. Faith may move mountains, but chiefly through the medium of a shovel. When a man is hungry his need is for food. When he is lonely he craves companionship. When he grieves he desires sympathy. And the Providence Mr. Thompson had been taught to lean so hard upon did not chop his wood, cook his meals, furnish him with congenial society, comfort him when he was sad.
"Religion or nonreligion, belief in a personal, immanent God or a rank materialism that holds to a purely mechanical theory of the universe, it doesn't make much difference which you hold to if you do not set yourself up as the supreme authority and insist that the other fellow must believe as you do.
"Because, my dear sir, you cannot escape material factors. The human organism can't exist without food, clothing, and shelter. Society cannot attain to a culture which tends to soften the harshnesses of existence, without leisure in which to develop that culture. Machinery and science and art weren't handed to humanity done up in a package. Man only attained to these things through a long process of evolution, and he only attained them by the use of his muscle and the exercise of his intellect. Strength and skill—plus application. Nothing else gets either an individual or a race forward. Don't you see the force of that? Here is man with his fundamental, undeniable needs. Here is the earth with the fullness thereof. There's nothing mysterious or supernatural about it. Brain and brawn applied to the problems of living. That's all. And you can't dodge it. The first, pressing requirements of any man can only be filled in two ways. First by working and planning and getting for himself. Second by being able to compel the strength and skill of others to function for him so that his needs will be supplied; in other words, by some turn of circumstances, or some dominant quality in himself, to get something for nothing."
Sam Carr had delivered himself of this as a wind-up to a conversation with Thompson the evening before. Now, while his forgotten biscuits scorched and he listened to Tommy Ashe and Sophie Carr taking their toll of meat from the flocks of waterfowl, he was thinking over what Carr had said. He dissented. Oh, he dissented with a vigor that was almost bitterness, because the smiling quirk of Sam Carr's lips when he uttered the last sentence gave it something of a personal edge. However it was meant, Thompson could not help taking it that way. And Mr. Thompson's desire was to give—to give lavishly. Only here in this forsaken corner of the world he seemed to have nothing to give that was of any value.
He was, at the same time, discovering in himself personal needs to which he had never given a thought, sordid everyday necessities the satisfaction of which had always been at hand, unquestioned, taken for granted much as one takes the sun and the air for granted. His meals had been provided. His bed had been provided. The funds which had clothed and educated him and trained him for the ministry had been provided, and likewise his transportation to the scene of his endeavors. How, he had not known except in the vaguest way, he had not particularly inquired, any more than the child inquires the whence and the why of luscious berries he finds growing upon a bush in the garden.
Not until he was torn by the roots out of the old, ordered environment and flung headlong into an environment where cause and effect are linked close did he consider these things. Materially he was getting a first-hand lesson in economics—and domestic science of a sort! Spiritually he was a little bit aghast, amazed that the Almighty did not personally intervene to save a man from his own inefficiency. He began to grasp the hitherto unnoted fact that meals and a bed and fires and clothes and all the other stark necessities involved labor of the hands, skilful exercise of the thought-function.
If this was so, he, Wesley Thompson, twenty-five years of age and a minister of the gospel, was deeply in debt—unless he denied the justice of giving value for value received. He had received much; he had returned nothing except perfunctory thanks. And what had he to give? Even to him, transcendent as was his faith that the glory of man was but the reflected glory of God, that faith was not a commodity to be bartered.