Then came the frosts. And one morning the hilltops were turned into leaden grey clouds from which the snow came sweeping down. Merle stood at the window, her face grey in the clammy light. She looked down the valley to where the mountains closed it in; it seemed still narrower than before; one’s breath came heavily, and one’s mind seemed stifled under cold damp wrappings.
Ugh! Better go out into the kitchen and set to work again—work—work and forget.
Then one day there came a letter telling her that her mother was dead.
Chapter III
DEAR KLAUS BROCK,—
Legendary being! Cast down from Khedivial heights one day and up again on high with Kitchener the next. But, in Heaven’s name, what has taken you to the Soudan? What made you go and risk your life at Omdurman? The same old desperation, I suppose, that you’re always complaining about. And why, of all things, plant yourself away in an outpost on the edge of the wilderness, to lie awake at nights nursing suicidal thoughts over Schopenhauer? You have lived without principles, you say. And wasted your youth. And are homeless now all round, with no morals, no country, no religion. But will you make all this better by making things much worse?
You’ve no reason to envy me my country life, by the way, and there’s no sense in your going about longing for the little church of your childhood, with its Moses and hymns and God. Well, longing does no harm, perhaps, but don’t ever try to find it. The fact is, old fellow, that such things are not to be found any more.
I take it that religion had the same power on you in your childhood as it had with me. We were wild young scamps, both of us, but we liked going to church, not for the sake of the sermons, but to bow our heads when the hymn arose and join in singing it. When the waves of the organ-music rolled through the church, it seemed—to me at least—as if something were set swelling in my own soul, bearing me away to lands and kingdoms where all at last was as it should be. And when we went out into the world we went with some echo of the hymn in our hearts, and we might curse Jehovah, but in a corner of our minds the hymn lived on as a craving, a hunger for some world-harmony. All through the busy day we might bear our part in the roaring song of the steel, but in the evenings, on our lonely couch, another power would come forth in our minds, the hunger for the infinite, the longing to be cradled and borne up on the waves of eternity, whose way is past all finding out.
Never believe, though, that you’ll find the church of your childhood now in any of our country places. We have electric light now everywhere, telephones, separators, labour unions and political meetings, but the church stands empty. I have been there. The organ wails as if it had the toothache, the precentor sneezes out a hymn, the congregation does not lift the roof off with its voice, for the very good reason that there is no congregation there. And the priest, poor devil, stands up in his pulpit with his black moustache and pince-nez; he is an officer in the army reserve, and he reads out his highly rational remarks from a manuscript. But his face says all the time—“You two paupers down there that make up my congregation, you don’t believe a word I am saying; but never mind, I don’t believe it either.” It’s a tragic business when people have outgrown their own conception of the divine. And we—we are certainly better than Jehovah. The dogma of the atonement, based on original sin and the bloodthirstiness of God, is revolting to us; we shrug our shoulders, and turn away with a smile, or in disgust. We are not angels yet, but we are too good to worship such a God as that.