"Why didn't I get thrashed?" I ventured.
"Because you were so awful wicked. When you're awful bad you don't get thrashed; its only when you're a little bad," she explained.
I had to stay in bed for the remainder of the day, which I think was more a punishment than a precaution, so I had opportunity to think on Marjorie's philosophy. It was evident that she was right; I had the proof in my own experience; I had been very wicked, and had escaped punishment. My ideas of wickedness were well defined. Wickedness consisted of telling lies, using bad words, disobeying one's parents, getting drunk, and cutting wood on Sunday. All our religion was negative; it consisted entirely of Thou Shalt Nots. It was utterly selfish. To my father, my mother, my little sister and myself the purpose of religion was to keep us from going to Hell, and, incidentally, to cause us to go to Heaven, although the hope element never weighed as much in our minds as did the fear element.
I have said that our religion was entirely a matter of Thou Shalt Nots, but I should make one exception. There was one Thou Shalt. Thou Shalt go to church every Sunday. Accordingly each Sunday morning I was crowded into a pair of boots and stockings and a suit with an uncomfortable white collar, and the four of us walked in great solemnity to the church of our faith. There were other churches in town, but I had already learned that it was almost as bad to go to them as not to go at all; in fact, our minister was suspected of believing that it was even worse. In any case we took no chances, and when, as happened on one or two occasions, our minister was unable to preach and no substitute had been found, we stayed religiously at home.
In the church we sat in a stiff, high-backed seat, where I was required to be very still through a tedious discourse of which I comprehended nothing whatever. In summer I usually contrived to enliven the time by a surreptitious killing of beetles, with which the church was infested. The building was small, but the preacher shouted at the top of his voice, as though in competition with the rival preacher two blocks down the street, which I verily believe he was. When the sermon was over the plate was passed and I deposited a copper—the only coin I ever handled until I was ten or twelve years old. Then we filed solemnly home again.
My consciousness of evil-doing, however, rested lightly upon me. I had escaped the strap which hung behind the kitchen door, and which was a much more immediate menace than any possible torments of the after-world. I spent the remaining hours of the day in imagining situations in which I would save Jean from all kinds of disasters.
Next morning found me none the worse for my experience; indeed my dip over the dam already seemed a more or less vague recollection. After breakfast I made a journey to the big pine which grew at the very end of our little farm—a surviving monarch of the forest that in some way had escaped the locust-cloud of axe-men which had swarmed through the country twenty years before. All the good pine had been cut out then, but the hardwoods, being heavier and more difficult to market, had been left, and with them my father had wrestled many a sundown hour, and into the night until he could no longer see. But this lone pine had remained standing, a proud and melancholy reminder of the greatness of the forest and of the insane destructiveness of the maggots of men who had over-run it, sweeping away in a season that which the centuries had borne but which the centuries will not return.
I took my way in the warm morning sun past the cow-stables—the "byre" it was in those days—through the vegetable garden, and down a path between rows of sprouting corn which led to the uncleared land at the back of the farm. Here was a wooden fence to keep the cattle off the corn field. I slipped easily between the bars and followed the path, now a cow-path winding sinuously about the trunks of sturdy maples, until it brought me under the shadow of the great, green arms. Far aloft the old tree towered in majestic symmetry, and the morning breeze passed through its branches with a sound as of a mighty wind. I threw myself on the grass at its feet, and there, lying on my back, with my eyes partly shaded by my hand, I watched the fleecy clouds far, far above as they trailed their gossamer laces across the blue portals of heaven, and dreamed of a day when I should do something great and be a hero in the eyes of Jean.
Perhaps it was as I lay under the great pine on that sunny summer morning and watched the filmy clouds float gently overhead that I caught my first glimpse, shyly, wonderingly, through the golden gates of romance. It was a vision of Jean; a vision which has remained with me through the years, growing, thrilling in my moments of happiness, fading in my hours of darkness, but at no time quite obscure. Perhaps it was my first glimpse of that vision which brought me on that morning to my feet where the great pine's swaying lacework of sun and shadow patterned the green grass and set my heart lilting with the joy of being alive.
I was about to shape my lips for a whistle when I became conscious of a presence. It was Jean, her golden locks held together by a midget sunbonnet, save for some vagrant curls which nestled against the peach-pink bloom of her cheeks; her chubby bare feet seeking cover in the grass.