And after that, what?
He could not see clearly, when he tried to see. He was no longer filled with the sublime faith that a beneficent Providence kept watch and ward over him, and all men. He was in fact now almost of the opinion that both sparrows and preachers might fall and the Great Intelligence remain unperturbed. It seemed necessary that a man should do more than have faith. He must imperatively make some conscious, intelligent effort on his own behalf. He was especially of this opinion since the Board of Home Missions had overlooked the matter of forwarding his quarterly salary on time. The faith that moveth mountains was powerless to conjure flour and sugar and tea out of those dusky woods and silent waterways—at least not without a canoe and labor and a certain requisite medium of exchange.
No, he did not blame Sophie Carr for refusing to allow her judgment to be fogged with sentiment. He only marvelled that she could do it where he had failed. He could not blame her—not if his speech and activities since he came to Lone Moose were the measure of his possible achievement.
He was taking grim, unsparing stock of himself, of what he had, of what he had accomplished altogether, by this time. It was not much. It was not even promising. A theological education, which, compared to the sort of culture Sam Carr and his daughter had managed to acquire, seemed rather inadequate and one-sided. They knew more about the principles he was supposed to teach than he knew himself. And their knowledge extended to fields where he could not follow. When he compared himself with Tommy Ashe—well, Tommy was an Oxford man, and although Oxford had not indelibly stamped him, still it had left its mark.
These people had covered all his ground—and they had gone exploring further in fields of general knowledge while he sat gazing smugly at his own reflection in a theological mirror. Upon that score certainly the count was badly against him.
As for his worldly possessions, when Mr. Thompson sardonically considered them as a means of supporting a wife he was forced to admit that the provision would be intolerably meager. His prospects included a salary that barely sufficed for one. It was apparent, he concluded, that the Board of Home Missions, like the Army and Navy, calculated its rank and file to remain in single blessedness and subsist frugally to boot.
As to his late accomplishments in the field of labor, Mr. Thompson looked out of his cabin door to where he could see dimly through the trees the uncompleted bulk of his church—and he set down a mental cipher against that account. It was waste effort. He felt in his heart that he would never finish it. What was the use?
He tried to whip up the old sense of duty to his calling, to the Church, to the great good which he had been taught he should accomplish. And he could muster up nothing but an irritating sense of hollow wordiness in many of his former dictums and utterances, a vast futility of effort.
Whereupon he at once found himself face to face with a fresh problem, in which the question of squaring his material needs and queer half-formed desires with his actions loomed paramount. In other words Mr. Thompson began, in a fashion scarcely apprehended, upon the painful process of formulating a philosophy of life that would apply to life as it was forcing itself upon his consciousness—not as he had hitherto conceived life to be.
But he was unable to pin himself down to any definite plan. He could not evolve a clear idea of what to do, nor even of what he wanted to do. And in the interim he did little save sit about his cabin, deep in introspection, chop firewood as needed and cook his plain fare—that was gradually growing plainer, more restricted. Sometimes he varied this by long solitary tramps through the woods along the brushy bank of Lone Moose Creek.