The Seeker

by Harry Leon Wilson

Here Father Riley sweetly reminded them—"No questions are asked in the Mother Church, gentlemen, that may not be answered with authority. In your churches, without an authority superior to mere reason, destructive questions will be asked more and more frequently."

Gravely they agreed that the church was losing its hold on the people. That but for its social and charitable activities, its state would be alarming.

"Your churches!" Father Riley corrected with suave persistence. "No church can endure without an infallible head."

Again and again during the meal Bernal had been tempted to speak. But each time he had been restrained by a sense of his aloofness. These men, too, were wheels within the machine, each revolving as he must. They would simply pity him, or be amused.

More and more acutely was he coming to feel the futility, the crass, absurd presumption of what he had come back to undertake. From the lucid quiet of his mountain haunts he had descended into a vale where antiquated cymbals clashed in wild discordance above the confusing clatter of an intricate machinery—machinery too complicated to be readjusted by a passing dreamer. In his years of solitude he had grown to believe that the teachers of the world were no longer dominated by that ancient superstition of a superhumanly malignant God. He had been prepared to find that the world-ideal had grown more lofty in his absence, been purified by many eliminations into a God who, as he had once said to Nance, could no more spare the soul of a Hottentot than the soul of a pope. Yet here was a high type of the priest of the Mother Church, gentle, Godly, learned, who gravely and as one having authority told how God would blight forever the soul of a child unbaptised, thus imputing to Deity a regard for mechanical rites that would constitute even a poor human father an incredible monster.

Yet the marvel of it seemed to him to lie in this: that the priest himself lived actually a life of loving devotion and sacrifice in marked opposition to this doctrine of formal cruelty; that his church, more successfully than any other in Christendom, had met the needs of humanity, coming closer to men in their sin and sickness, ministering to them with a deeper knowledge, a more affectionate intimacy, than any other. That all these men of God should hold formally to dogmas belying the humaneness of their actual practise—here was the puzzling anomaly that might well give pause to any casual message-bringer. Struggle as he might, it was like a tangling mesh cast over him—this growing sense of his own futility.

Along with this conviction of his powerlessness there came to him a new sense of reliance upon Nancy. Unconsciously at first he turned to her for sunlight, big views and quiet power, for the very stimulus he had been wont to draw from the wide, high reaches of his far-off valley. Later, came a conscious turning, an open-eyed bringing of all his needs, to lay them in her waiting lap. Then it was he saw that on that first night at Edom her confidence and enthusiasm had been things he leaned upon quite naturally, though unwittingly. The knowledge brought him a vague unrest. Furtive, elusive impulses, borne to him on the wings of certain old memories—memories once resolutely put away in the face of his one, big world-desire—now came to trouble him.

It seemed that one must forever go in circles. With fine courage he had made straight off to toil up the high difficult paths of the ideal. Never had he consciously turned, nor even swerved. Yet here he was at length upon his old tracks, come again to the wondering girl.

Did it mean, then, that his soul was baffled—or did it mean that his soul would not suffer him to baffle it, try as he might? Was that girl of the old days to greet him with her wondering eyes at the end of every high path? These and many other questions he asked himself.

At the close of this day he sought her, eager for the light of her understanding eyes—for a certain waiting sympathy she never withheld. As she looked up now with a kind of composed gladness, it seemed to him that they two alone, out of all the world, were sanely quiet. Silently he sank into a chair near her and they sat long thus, feeling no need of words. At last she spoke.