I looked up at her quickly. I saw something in her eye that gave me heart again. I bade her good-by. I dared not say it to Eloise. I slipped away, but I watched the train of cars die away behind the trail of smoke in the distance as I rode back home, and it seemed as if my whole afterlife lay clouded in that path of smoke. It was hard to give up my home, the old home, every tree I knew, and with them Eloise and my life-dream....
One's dream and one's home—what else is there which grips so the very tendrils of one's soul. To give up one cuts deeply into the roots of the heart, but when the blow is doubled, there is only one thing that can make one stand upright and not fall, and that is the Spirit Within. People have different ideas of God as their souls reveal. It runs all the way from the pitiable, crude, faint conception which comes to the savage in cloud, a sun, or star or image of stone, to the higher mind which perceives Him in the Great Spirit of the Universe. None of these is my idea of God. I have never been able to dissociate God from my own self. I have never been able to conceive of Him as apart from me.... And not always the same, but always there.... In my meaner self so little of Him is there, so tiny a spot of the divine light ... so faint, so seemingly nothing. And this is the greatest of it—this is the test—the very divinest evidence. He is always there; and when a blow comes, humbling the material, the meaner of me, then He claims His own—my nobler self—taking it unto His care, flooding it with His presence. It is then, searching yourself and your own heart that you find Him—that you know that you are a part of God because He is there!
Riding home it all swept over me so. In my innermost soul I knew it: like a flash came the inspiration of it, the old Prophet of Deuteronomy: "As an eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings." Did God mean in this, the wrecking of my nest, that I should fly—even as a young eagle?
"And remember Satan, Jack, to keep him fit," I heard Eloise's voice say.
CHAPTER XVI
HEART'S-EASE
Never was there a quieter, better place to work than at Dr. Gottlieb's, whither I had gone after Aunt Lucretia and Eloise had left. In a short while I had become reconciled, in my hard work, to my lot; for to live with Dr. Gottlieb meant to work, to classify, to probe into things, and this meant to put aside all else, even for awhile one's heart's trouble for the hard mental strain of it. I remember those study nights well and with such pleasure. I can recall the little quiet man with his books, his abstraction, his quaint comments, the learned deductions that fell now and then from his lips as if he were unconscious that he was speaking. From studying the pollen of a flower he would look up abstractedly and drawl, "Ah, Jack; and Miss Lucretia—that most beautiful and charming of women! Did I ever tell you that each of us has our prototype in a plant? And how much to my mind—ah, Jack, and to my heart, how much she resembles the beautiful red wood lily!"
He would put down his book, and look longingly out over the hills. It was the only foolish thing he ever did, I thought, and so I forgave him, knowing that each of us has at least one foolish thought within us.
He always had a smile for me; often he would walk around all the evening thinking abstractedly, or puttering among his books and plants and geographical specimens, and then start into real work at midnight. And I would work with him; for, besides studying my forestry, I was carrying on some experiments, testing the various effects of fertilizers on the soil of The Home Stretch. Dr. Gottlieb would say: "It is not the time, it is the inspiration, Jack; catch it when it comes."
Exercising Satan daily as I did, I became as attached to the great game fellow as did he to me. He was a singular horse, of a type entirely his own. The harder the ride, the more difficult the feat, the stubborner, gamer he grew. Not every horse is an individual, in fact few are; they are horses merely. But Satan was one, almost human in his idiosyncrasies. If he had been a man he would have been one of the world's leaders. There was nothing he would not do for me after he learned to love me.