"Not really, of course. But you, as an artist, must understand how one dallies with an idea, plays with a mood, works oneself up imaginatively into a dramatic situation. I let it grow upon me till, like a man alone in the dark, afraid of the ghosts he doesn't believe in, I grew horribly nervous."
"I daresay you hadn't wholly recovered from your fall, and your nerves were unstrung by the blood and the nails, and that steak had disagreed with you, and you had had a bad night, and you were morbidly uneasy about annoying the old woman, and all those chunks of mist got into your spirits. You are a child of the sun!"
"Of course I knew all that, down in the cellars of my being, but upstairs, all the same, I had this sense of guilt and expiation, this anxious doubt that perhaps all that great, gloomy, mediæval business of saints and nuns, and bones, and relics, and miracles, and icons, and calvaries, and cells, and celibacy, and horsehair shirts, and blood, and dirt, and tears, was true after all! What if the world of beauty I had been content to live in was a Satanic show, and the real thing was that dead, topsy-turvy world down there in the cold, gray lake under the reeking mists? I sneaked back into the house to see if the streak hadn't dried yet; but no! it loomed in tell-tale ghastliness, a sort of writing on the wall announcing the wrath and visitation of heaven. I went outside again and smoked miserably on the little bench. Gradually I began to feel warmer, the mists seemed clearing. I rose and stretched myself with an ache of luxurious languor. Encouraged, I stole within again to peep at the streak. It was dry—a virgin wall, innocently white, met my delighted gaze. I opened the window; the draggling vapors were still rising, rising, the bleakness was merging in a mild warmth. I refilled my pipe, and plunged down the yet gray hill. I strode past the old saw-mill, skirted the swampy border of the lake, came out on the firm green, when bing! zim! br-r-r! a heavenly bolt of sunshine smashed through the raw mists, scattering them like a bomb to the horizon's rim; then with sovereign calm the sun came out full, flooding hill and dale with luminous joy; the lake shimmered and flashed into radiant life, and gave back a great white cloud-island on a stretch of glorious blue, and all that golden warmth stole into my veins like wine. A little goat came skipping along with tinkling bell, a horse at grass threw up its heels in ecstasy, an ox lowed, a dog barked. Tears of exquisite emotion came into my eyes; the beautiful soft warm light that lay over all the happy valley seemed to get into them and melt something. How unlike those tears of yesterday, wrung out of me as by some serpent coiled round my ribs! Now my ribs seemed expanding—to hold my heart—and all the divine joy of existence thrilled me to a religious rapture. And with the lifting of the mists all that ghastly mediæval nightmare was lifted from my soul; in that sacred moment all the lurid tragedy of the crucified Christ vanished, and only Christ was left, the simple fellowship with man and beast and nature, the love of life, the love of love, the love of God. And in that yearning ecstasy my picture came to me—The Joyous Comrade. Christ—not the tortured God, but the joyous comrade, the friend of all simple souls; the joyous comrade, with the children clinging to him, and peasants and fishers listening to his chat; not the theologian spinning barren subtleties, but the man of genius protesting against all forms and dogmas that would replace the direct vision and the living ecstasy; not the man of sorrows loving the blankness of underground cells and scourged backs and sexless skeletons, but the lover of warm life, and warm sunlight, and all that is fresh and simple and pure and beautiful."
"Every man makes his God in his own image," I thought, too touched to jar him by saying it aloud.
"And so—ever since—off and on—I have worked at this human picture of him—The Joyous Comrade—to restore the true Christ to the world."
"My business is with work, not with results. 'Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do with all thy might.' What can any single hand, even the mightiest, do in this great weltering world? Yet, without the hope and the dream, who would work at all? And so, not without hope, yet with no expectation of a miracle, I give the Jews a Christ they can now accept, the Christians a Christ they have forgotten. I rebuild for my beloved America a type of simple manhood, unfretted by the feverish lust for wealth or power, a simple lover of the quiet moment, a sweet human soul never dispossessed of itself, always at one with the essence of existence. Who knows but I may suggest the great question: What shall it profit a nation to gain the whole world and lose its own soul?"
His voice died away solemnly, and I heard only the click of the billiard-balls and the rumble and roar of New York.