“So,” said Stellamaris, continuing her argument, “as the fathers have no particular sins, they can't be visited much on the children. And if there are no wicked people to go to hell, hell must be empty, and therefore useless. So it's no good believing in it.”
“Not the slightest good in the world,” said John, fervently.
“And now that everybody loves God,” she went on, “I don't see what's the good of religion. I love you, Great High Belovedest, but there's no need for me to get a form of words to say 'I love you,' 'I love you,' all day long. One's heart says it.”
“What 's your idea of God, Stella dear?” he asked in a curiously husky voice.
She beckoned to him. He drew his chair nearer and bent toward her. She waved her fragile arms bare to the elbow.
“I think we breathe God,” she said.
John Risca went back to Fenton Square and breathed the ghosts of the night-before-last's sprats, and he journeyed to the Orphanage of Saint Martha at Willesden and breathed the prison taint of that abode of hopelessness, and he wrote hard at night in a tiny room breathing the hot, electric atmosphere of a newspaper-office; and ever horribly dominant in his mind was the woman whom once he had held in his arms, who now performed degrading tasks in shameful outward investiture, and inwardly lashed at him with malignant hatred through the distorted prism of her soul, and he breathed the clammy dungeon atmosphere of his own despair; and sitting at his writing-table one night, after having spent the day in court listening to the loathsome details of a sickening murder, a crime passionnel, with the shock of which the wide world was ringing,—his American syndicate insisted on a vivid story, and he had to earn the journalist's daily bread,—the ignorant, fanciful words of Stellamaris flashed through his mind—“I think we breathe God.” He threw back his head and laughed aloud, and then let it drop upon his arms, folded over his wet page of copy, and sobbed in a man's dry-eyed agony of spirit.
And as the prophet Elijah, when sore beset, found the Lord neither in the wind nor in the earthquake nor in the fire, so did John Risca find Him not in all these daily things through which he had passed. Life was fierce, inhuman, a devastating medley of blind forces, making human effort a vain thing, human aspiration a derision, faith in mankind a grotesque savage Ju-ju superstition. There was no God, no beneficent influence making order out of chaos; for it was all chaos. Jezebel and her lusts and cruelties ruled the world—this cloaca of a world. Man argues ever from particular to general, instinctively flying to the illogic on which the acceptance of human life is based. To Risca, at nine and twenty, his pain translated itself into terms of the world-pain; and so will it happen to all generations of all the sons and daughters of men.
After a while, as he sat there motionless, he grew aware of something delicately soft touching his ear and hair. For a moment he had the absurd fancy that Stellamaris stood beside him with caressing fingers. It became so insistent that he dallied with it, persuaded himself that she was there; he would have only to turn to see her in her childish grace. He heard a sound as of murmured speech. She seemed to whisper of quiet, far-off things. And then he seemed to hear the words: “The door is open. Go out into the wide spaces under heaven.” He roused himself with a start, and, looking about him, perceived that the door of his sitting-room was indeed ajar, the ill-fitting old lock having slipped, thus causing a draught, which poured over his head and shoulders. He rose and clapped on his hat and went down-stairs. A ten-minutes' trudge on the pavements would clear his head for the work that had to be accomplished. But on his doorstep he halted. Away above the housetops on the other side of the dingy square sailed the full moon, casting a wake of splendour along the edge of a rack of cloud. And below it swam a single star.
He caught himself repeating stupidly, “Stella Maris, Star of the Sea.” With an impatient shake of the shoulders he went his way through the narrow streets and emerged upon the broad and quiet thoroughfares about the Abbey and the Houses of Parliament. On Westminster Bridge the startling silver of the moonlit river brought him to a stand. The same glory was overspreading the mild sea below the windows of the Channel House. Perhaps Stella even then lay awake, as she often did of nights, and was watching it and was “breathing God.” A great longing arose within him to stand on the beach beneath her window in the wide spaces under heaven. So he walked on, thinking vaguely of Stellamaris and her ways and mysteries, and reached his home again in a chastened mood. Like Elijah, he had found God neither in the wind nor in the earthquake nor in the fire; but who can tell whether he had not been brought into touch with something of the divine by the still, small voice that came through the draught of the crazy door?