Lot & Company

by Will Levington Comfort

“We learn by austerities apart,” Fleury said, “and then we return to men with the story. We are called up the mountain to witness the transfiguration, and then are sent with the picture down among men. Oh, no, we are not permitted to remain, nor build a temple up there. First we receive; then we must give. We must lose the sense of self in order to receive; and having received, we do not want the sense of self. This is the right and left hand of prayer—pure selfless receptivity, then tireless giving to others. It is the key to the whole scheme of life—mountain and valley, ebb and flow, night and day, winter and summer, the movement of the lungs and the heart and the soul. We cannot receive while our senses are hot with desire; therefore we must become delicate and sensitive. Having received, we must make the gift alive through action. Dreaming is splendid; the dreamer receives. The dreamer starts all things; but the dreamer becomes a hopeless ineffectual if he does not make his dreams come true in matter. That is it. We are here to make matter follow the dream. That’s why the spirit puts on flesh—that’s why we are workmen. Action is the right hand of thought.”

The preacher was ahead of him in these thoughts. So often he said just what Bellair needed, the exact, clearing, helpful thing. For instance, Bellair had followed his own fascinating conviction that the world is full of secret values; that the world is ready to pull together, only it requires a certain stimulus from without—some certain message that would reach and unify all. Fleury tightened the matter by his expression of it:

“The socialists are doing great good. The church is still doing good; the societies that have turned to the East have heard the great message; even in commerce there is a new life; everywhere in the world, the sense of having found some new spirit which works to destroy the sense of self. If one great figure should come now—come saying, ‘You are all good. You are all after the same thing. One way is as good as another—only come.’... What we need is for some one to touch the chord for us—to give us the key, as to an orchestra of different instruments. We are all making different notes; and yet are ready for the harmony—some of us intensely eager for the harmony. The great need is for a Unifier.... It seems that we, here in the small boat, can see America so much clearer, than when we were there——”

Bellair had felt this a thousand times.

“The greatest story in the world is the story of the coming of a Messiah—the one who may chord for us. I think He will come. He will come out of the East, his face like the morning sun turned to the West. Don’t you see—we are all like atoms of steel in a chaos? You know what happens when a voltage of electricity is turned upon a bar of steel? Order comes to the chaos; the atoms sing, all turned the same way. That Voice must come—that tremendous voltage of spiritual electricity—that will set us all in harmony—all with our tails down stream.”

And Fleury finished it all by pointing out what had happened to them in the small boat. They had lost separateness; they were each for the others.

“That’s what must happen in America, in the world,—the pull of each for the whole—the harmony. You have seen an audience in the midst of great message or great music—they weep together. They cry out together. They are all one. That’s the story. That is what must happen. It will happen when the Unifier comes. It is the base of all gospel—that we are all one in spirit. Don’t you see it—every message from the beginning of time has told it? All one—all one—our separateness is our suffering, our evil. To return to the House of Our Father—that is the end of estrangement.”

... And Fleury was the one who had ceased to talk. But he had acted, too.... They saw that he was held by some power of his giving to them. He was like light. He had given the whole material force of his body to hold off that destruction which had come with the dying of Stackhouse. He had not eaten, even as they had eaten. They feared for him, because he was the centre and mainspring of their pilgrimage. Especially this haunt became more grippable in the heart of the ninth night.... There was a small tin of water left, less than three pints, very far from clean; and somewhat less than a pound of crackers. Bellair awoke to find Fleury gone from his place between him and the woman. He was in the stern, in the old seat of Stackhouse, praying. ... Fleury met the tenth day with an exaltation that awed Bellair and the woman; and there came from it a fear to Bellair’s heart that had nothing to do with self, nor with the Mother, nor the Gleam.

They were all weak, and two men utterly weak. Through their will and denial, and the extraordinary force and health of her own nature, the child had not yet been dangerously denied. It had become a sort of natural religion with the three—a readiness to die for the Gleam.

“This is our last day,” said Fleury, before the western horizon was marked clear.... The Faraway Woman told them another story of what the wise old shepherd dog told the puppies—that it was better to begin on crackers and water—and end on cookies and cream....