CHAPTER XXIX
It is written in the Book that holds the wisdom of our race that one who is reborn into the Kingdom of God, enters as a little child. It is there in black and white, yet few people get the idea into their consciousnesses. They expect regeneration to produce an upright man. God knows better than that. And we should know better too when it is written down for us. And so you good people who expect to see John Barclay turn rightabout face on the habits of a lifetime are to be disappointed. For a little child stumbles and falls and goes the wrong way many times before it learns the way of life. There came days after that summer night of 1904, when John Barclay fell—days when he would sneak into the stenographers' room in his office in the City and tear up some letter he had dictated, when he would send a telegram annulling an order, when he would find himself cheating and gouging his competitors or his business associates,—even days when he had not the moral courage to retrace his steps although he knew he was wrong. Shame put her brand on his heart, and his face showed to those who watched it closely—and there were scores of fellow-gamblers at the game with him, whose profits came from watching his face—his face showed forth uncertainty and daze. So men said, "The old man's off his feed," or others said, "Barclay's losing his nerve"; and still others said, "Can it be possible that the old hypocrite is getting a sort of belated conscience?"
But slowly, inch by inch, the child within him grew; he gripped his soul with the iron hand of will that had made a man of him, and when the child fell and ached with shame, Barclay's will sustained the weakling. We are so hidden by our masks that this struggle in the man's soul, though guessed at by some of those about him, was unknown to the hundreds who saw him every day. But for him the universe had changed. And as a child, amazed, he looked upon the new wonder of God's order about him and went tripping and stumbling and toppling over awkwardly through it all as one learning some new equilibrium. There were times when his heart grew sick, and he would have given it all up. There were hours when he did surrender; when he did a mean thing and gloried in it, or a cowardly thing and apologized for it. But his will rose and turned him back to his resolve. He found the big things easy, and the little things hard to do. So he kept at the big things until they had pushed him so far toward his goal that the little things were details which he repaired slowly and with anguish of humiliation in secret, and unknown even to those who were nearest to him.
And all this struggle was behind the hard face, under the broad, high forehead, back of the mean jaw, beneath the cover of the sharp brazen eyes. Even in Sycamore Ridge they did not suspect the truth until Barclay had grown so strong in his new faith that he could look at his yesterdays without shuddering.
The year of our Lord nineteen hundred and six was a slow year politically in Sycamore Ridge, so in the parliament at McHurdie's shop discussion took somewhat wider range than was usual. It may interest metaphysicians in the world at large to know that the McHurdie parliament that August definitely decided that this is not a material world; that sensation is a delusion, that the whole phantasmagoria of the outer and material world is a reaction of some sort upon the individual consciousness. Up to this point the matter is settled, and metaphysicians may as well make a record of the decision; for Watts McHurdie, Jacob Dolan, Philemon Ward, Martin Culpepper, and sometimes Oscar Fernald, know just exactly as much about it as the ablest logician in the world. It is, however, regrettable that after deciding that the external world is but a divine reaction upon the individual consciousness, the parliament was unable to reach any sort of a decision as to whose consciousness received the picture. Mr. Dolan maintained vigorously that his consciousness was the one actually affected, and that the colonel and the general and Watts were mere hallucinations of his. The general held that Jake and the others were accessory phantasms of his own dream, and Watts and the colonel, being of more poetical temperament, held that the whole outfit was a chimera in some larger consciousness, whose entity it is not given us to know. As for Oscar, he claimed the parliament was crazy, and started to prove it, when it was thought best to shift and modify the discussion; and, therefore, early in September, when the upper currents of the national atmosphere were vocal with discordant allegations, denials, accusations, and maledictions, in Watts McHurdie's shop the question before the house was, "How many people are there in the world?" For ten days, in the desultory debate that had droned through the summer, the general, true to his former contention, insisted that there was only one person in the world. Mr. Dolan, with the Celtic elasticity of reason, was willing to admit two.
"You and me and no more—all the rest is background for us," he proclaimed. "If the you of the moment is the colonel—well and good; then the colonel and I for it; but if it is the general and I—to the trees with your colonel and Watts, and the three billion others—you're merely stage setting, and become third persons."
"But," asked McHurdie, "if I exist this minute with you, and then you focus your attention on Mart there, the next minute, and he exists, what becomes of me when you turn your head from me?"
Dolan did not answer. He dipped into the Times and read awhile; and the colonel and the general got out the checkerboard and plunged into a silent game. At length Dolan, after the fashion of debaters in the parliament, came out of his newspaper and said:—
"That, Mr. McHurdie, is a problem ranging off the subject, into the theories of the essence of time and space, and I refuse to answer it."
Me Hurdie kept on working, and the hands of the clock slipped around nearly an hour. Then the bell tinkled and Neal Ward came in on his afternoon round for news to print in the next day's issue of the Banner.