Things were better in the stories he learned from Miss Fogg: that Adam had eaten the apple and been expelled from Eden; that Noah had built and taken his cruise in the ark; that Abraham had offered up Isaac, and Jacob served seven years; that Moses had led the Israelites into the wilderness, and Joshua made the sun stand still; that David should have loved Jonathan and killed Goliath; that Samson should have been shorn of his strength, and Esther gotten Haman hanged higher than the housetops;—all in order to teach little boys and girls to be good, to obey their fathers and mothers and go regularly to church and Sunday School, seemed to Gilbert entirely plausible, at least as it was expounded by the patient and smiling Miss Fogg. He read the stories in his new Bible, but he did not wonder much about them.
Every now and then there was a temperance lesson, when Miss Fogg would horrify the little boys with her pictures of the evils of strong drink. Gilbert had never seen any spirituous liquors, and he could hardly identify them in his mind, but through the vivid and scandalized exhortations of the minister and Miss Fogg, Gilbert conceived liquor as a dark, evil-smelling brew, a sort of religious urine, which foul and wicked men put into their stomachs, so that at once homes were wrecked, and mothers and children brought to abject want. The process by which this result arrived was vague in his mind, but the earliest genuine crime of which he had knowledge and felt with a shuddering realization of the existence of sin was this crime of entering a saloon, or of drinking down wine or beer. One of the golden texts was a special favorite with Gilbert and Olga, and she would declaim it with great éclat, in a broad, free-verse style:
“Wine is a maw-aw-ker,
Strong drink is ray-ay-ging,
And whoever is deceived there-by-y,
Is not—wise!”
But sin, on the whole, was a very vague idea to Gilbert. He early learned that God had sent His Son Jesus down to earth to save us from our sins, and that this was the central fact of life. Garna told him about it, and so did Miss Fogg, when they later had lessons in the New Testament. We must all love God very much, and especially Jesus, who had done so much for us. And in the solemn Sunday afternoons, when Gilbert was told to take his Bible and sit by the window in the back-parlor and read a chapter, he would sometimes wonder if he loved God enough, or if he loved Jesus. God was a majestic old gentleman with a white beard, reclining on white cumulus clouds, and Jesus he knew equally well as a young man in an archaic blue robe, holding a lamb in one arm, and followed by others. He had seen their pictures long ago, and whenever either of them was mentioned, these images popped into his mind, faintly colored by a sense of awe, as in the case of God, and of tenderness, as in the case of Jesus. But did he love them? The pastor was certainly a very poor caricature of God, and yet with his beard and square head and loud words, there must be a faint resemblance. Gilbert certainly did not like him.
Much more nearly like God was his father’s father, whom he had once been taken to see and whom he remembered now as a white-haired, white-bearded man, very solemn, and yet with something cold and repellent about him whenever Gilbert had touched him. Gilbert did not feel that he loved this God, and yet he knew that he ought to, that it was the most important thing in life that he could do. So he would sit there and try to screw his heart into an attitude of loving. He would grow very serious and tighten his muscles, and fix his thought on the majesty reclining on the white cloud, and, pretty soon, he would feel that indeed he now loved God, and he would be kept from sin. Jesus, who was tenderer, he might have found easier to love, but for the fact of those lambs. Gilbert had never seen young men carrying lambs, and the picture, whose authenticity he did not question, aroused no emotion within him. But after he had come to love God, he tightened his heart towards the benignant being in the blue robe.
He was always present, because before every meal they would all put down their heads, so that they breathed upon their plates, and they would ask Jesus to bless their food. Sometimes Gilbert would say it, sometimes Olga, and the food unblessed would have tasted bad in their mouths. Gilbert would have had a vague presentiment of something evil. Did Garna and Mother love God? Garna must, because every day she would put on her gold-rimmed spectacles and read a chapter in her Bible, and mother would kneel down with Gilbert and Olga at night while they said their prayers, and often murmur something fervently with them. The prayers, they understood, were addressed directly to God in heaven, and were necessary if you were to show your gratitude to the Heavenly Father and ensure for yourself a peaceful and secure night. You asked God also to bless all those people you were fond of, and you knew that if they should die before they woke, their souls also would be taken to Heaven with yours.
If it was only with painful effort that Gilbert in his early days of church and Sunday School loved God and Jesus, whom did he love? Did he love Mother? He did not know. He loved her very much at night when he felt her protecting presence in the house, but in the daytime she was a strange being who did not seem interested in Gilbert and Olga. She spent most of her time with little brother, or, if he were asleep, she would be lying stretched across the foot of the bed, with her face in her hands. Often there were tears in her eyes, and if Gilbert wanted her to do something for him, she would say piteously that she was not well. There were no more walks on the village green, but this did not make any difference to Gilbert, for the wonderful yard in which Garna’s house stood was a region that could never be explored or exhausted.
The one person that Gilbert knew he loved was Garna. You could not always see her, for she would be shut up in her room; but when you were let in, how inexhaustible she was, how comfortable you felt, playing about on the floor while Garna sat always by the window, sewing, always sewing, looking so wise and jolly and good out of her gold-rimmed spectacles. Garna was always the same, and always good to be with and look upon. Gilbert loved to sit in her lap, and touch her hair, brushed to such silky smoothness and parted in the middle. As she bent over, he would run both hands back over it from her forehead, and laugh as she laughed and pretended to arrange it again.
Gilbert liked to have Garna all to himself, and it was fortunate that Olga was not much interested in Garna. She did not seem to half appreciate her or her wonderful room. But once in a while she would take a perverse desire to come in with Gilbert when he went to see Garna. Olga would have to be prevented with all his weight and force. How could he stand so outrageous an invasion of his rights? And Olga would probably hit him, concentrating all her round little pugnacity into one stout blow, and Gilbert would hit back, and Olga would scream, and Mother would come running, and there would be many tears, and Eden would be spoiled, if not altogether denied him, for that afternoon. On the very threshold, Olga, who did not really care to be with Garna, had ruined his day with her! Hateful little Olga! And all the time, Garna would be inside, behind the closed door, serene, unheeding, letting her daughter, Gilbert’s mother, settle the whole affair, as far away as if she were in Pampelune. Gilbert felt the perversity of Fate, the inexorable aloofness of the gods, the fragility of happiness. Going eagerly to taste this sweet exhilaration of an afternoon with Garna, the cup, without any warning whatever, would be fatally dashed from his lips. But he could not have it shared with Olga!
Between Garna’s chair and the window was a high, chintz-colored box which opened into a voluminous cavern of sheets and white things. In the corner just behind Garna’s chair was the tall secretary-desk, with its big doors above that opened on shelves full of books, and its heavy writing-lid which folded down and rested horizontally on two supports that pulled out on each side. You could sit on the high chintz-box and write on the secretaire. Gilbert thought this was one of the most satisfactory spots in the whole world. At your right was the window looking down through the black-walnut trees to the street below; just behind you sat Garna, busily knitting or sewing; you had all the flat, shiny surface of the lid to make your puzzles on, or practise writing, or draw on; your legs hung down over the chintz-box, high above the ground; you were shut in to the most delicious privacy. At the back of the secretaire were innumerable compartments and pigeon-holes in which Garna kept her letters and papers; there were old diaries and account-books, which Gilbert puzzled over, and one compartment Garna gave Gilbert for his very own, so that he could keep his pencils and paper there, and anything he chose, safe for ever from the depredations of the marauding Olga, who seemed to Gilbert, whenever he thought of her at all from his safe retreat, as a very imp of lawlessness, of restless and devastating mischief. Sometimes, to make sure that no one interrupted him, he would silently turn the keys in the doors. But Garna did not like that very much, and it was awkward if Mother or Aunt Nan really came and wanted to come in, and Garna had to wonder how the doors could ever have become locked.