Chapter V

Because I am here not stating for you a merely speculative doctrine concerning the place of evil in a good and rational spiritual world, I once more need, at this point, to appeal as directly as I can to life. Let me present to you, from recent literature, a noteworthy instance of the use of our present source of insight. The instance is confessedly one where no complete and determinate religious creed is defended as the result of the use of the insight in question. And an actually eternal truth about the spiritual world--a very old truth in the lore of the wise, but a deeply needed truth for our own day--is illustrated by the instance which the tale portrays.

I refer to a recent short story, published in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for November, 1910, and written by Cornelia A. P. Comer. It is entitled "The Preliminaries." It is, to my mind, an impressive union of a genuinely effective realism and a deep symbolism. The characters are very real human beings. Their problem is one of the most familiar problems of daily life--the problem as to the advisability of the proposed marriage of two young lovers. The {242} conditions of the problem are hard facts, of a general type that is unfortunately frequent enough under our confusing modern conditions. These facts are viewed in the tale as such people might well view them. And yet the issues involved are, like all the problems of young lovers, issues that are bound up with all the interests of religion and with the whole problem of the reality of a spiritual world. These issues are treated as they truly are, with a result that is fairly supernatural in its ancient but always new appeal to a source of insight that we can reach only through sorrow.

Since the question inevitably concerns the prospects of the proposed marriage, the first statement of the problem is fully in harmony with the spirit of recent pragmatism. The truth of the assertion: "We ought to marry," is surely a truth that, as the pragmatists would say, the young lovers who make the assertion should regard as quite inseparable from the probable results to which this marriage will lead in concrete life. Such a truth then is, one would say, wholly empirical. A marriage proposal, to use the favourite phrase of pragmatism, is a "working hypothesis." Such hypotheses must be submitted to the test of experience. No such test, it would seem, would be absolute. What does poor humanity know as to the real values of our destiny? Meanwhile the whole problem of good and evil is in question. Marriage, especially under certain conditions, will lead to one or another sorrow. Can one face {243} sorrow with any really deeper trust in life? Is life really a good at all, since there is so much sorrow in it? Must not any prudent person be afraid of life? Ought the lovers to defy fortune and to ignore obvious worldly prudence?

Such is the first statement of the problem. Its treatment in this admirable sketch shows an insight into the nature of good and evil which I had myself come to regard as very little present to the minds of the story-tellers of to-day, who are so often dominated by the recent love of power, by the tedious blindness of modern individualism, by false doctrines as to the merely temporal expediency of truth, and by the merely glittering show of unspiritual worldly efficiency. I rejoice to find that, in a literature which has been, of late, so devastated by a popularly trivial interpretation of pragmatism, and by an equally trivial disregard for the "rule of reason," there is still place for so straightforward and practical a recognition of eternal truth as the wise woman who has written this short story exemplifies.

The issue regarding this particular marriage proposal is stated at once in the opening words of the tale:

"Young Oliver Pickersgill was in love with Peter Lannithorne's daughter. Peter Lannithorne was serving a six-year term in the penitentiary for embezzlement."

The young hero is depicted as a high-minded youth of unquestionable and prosperous social {244} position in his community. His beloved is a loyal daughter who is convinced that her father's crime was due solely to a momentary and benevolent weakness, and to a mind confused by care for the needs and too importunate requirements of his own family. Not unjustly attributing the father's final downfall to the impatience, to the agonising discontent, and to the worldly ambition of her own mother, the daughter with spirit replies to the lover's proposal by saying plainly: "I will never marry any one who doesn't respect my father as I do." The lovers somewhat easily come to terms, at least apparently, as to this sole present ground for disagreement. The youth, not without inward difficulty, is ready to accept the daughter's version of her father's misadventure. In any case, love makes him indifferent to merely worldly scruples, and he has no fear of his own power to face his community as the loving husband of a convict's daughter; though there is, indeed, no doubt as to the father's actual guilt, and although Lannithorne is known to have admitted the justice of his sentence.

But to love, and to be magnanimously hopeful--this is not the same as to convince other people that such a marriage is prudent, or is likely, as the pragmatists would say, to have "expedient workings." Young Oliver has to persuade Ruth's mother on the one hand, his own father on the other, that such a marriage is reasonable. Both prove to be hard to convince. To the ordinary scruples of worldly {245} prudence which young lovers generally have to answer, they easily add seemingly unanswerable objections. The mother--the convict's wife--now a brilliantly clear-witted but hopelessly narrow-minded invalid--a broken woman of the world--pragmatically enlightened, in a way, by the bitter experience of sorrow, but not in the least brought thereby to any deeper insight, faces the lover as an intruder upon her daughter's peace and her own desolation. She has known, she says, what the bitterness of an unhappy marriage can be and is. If she herself has had her share of blame for her husband's downfall, that only the more shows her such truth as, in this dark world, she still can grasp. "I do not want my daughters to marry"--this is, to her, the conclusion of the whole matter. The bitterness of her own marriage has taught her this lesson, which she expounds to the lover with all the passion of wounded pride and the dear-bought lore of life as she has learned it. But of course, as she admits, she may be wrong. Let the lover consult her husband at the jail. He--the convict--is a well-meaning man, after all. He fell; but he is not at heart a criminal. Let him say whether he wants his daughter to take up the burden of this new tragedy. So the mother concludes her parable.

The lover, baffled, but still hopeful, next turns to his own father for consent and encouragement. But now he has to listen to the teachings of a loftier yet to him profoundly discouraging prudence. {246} Oliver's father is a truly high-minded man of the world, with a genuinely religious feeling in the background of his mind, and is intensely devoted to his son. But from this proposed match he recoils with a natural horror. The world is full of good girls. Why not choose one who brings no such sorrow with her? Peter Lannithorne was in his crime no worse, indeed, than many other men who are not in jail. He even meant on the whole well, and blundered, until at last from blunder he drifted into crime. He then took his penalty like a man, and owned that it was just. But, after all, he was found out. Such a taint lasts. It cannot be removed by repentance. The proposed marriage can only lead to misery. Peter Lannithorne himself, who, after all, "knows what's what," would be the first to admit this fact, if one asked his advice. If the son must persist in making light of a loving father's wisdom--well, let him then consult Peter Lannithorne himself. Ask the convict in his prison what a man needs and expects in the family of the woman whom he is to marry. This is the father's firm but kindly ultimatum.

Terrified by the gravity of repeated warnings, and dispirited by having to leave his dearest problem to the decision of the convict himself, Oliver determines to face the inevitable. He arranges for the interview at the jail, and is left by the warden alone with the prisoner in the prison library. Suddenly, as he faces his man, the youth finds himself {247} in the presence of one who has somehow been transformed as if by a supernatural power. As for the convict's person--

His features were irregular and unnoticeable; but the sum-total of
them gave the impression of force. It was a strong face, yet you
could see that it had once been a weak one. It was a tremendously
human face, a face like a battle-ground, scarred and seamed and
lined with the stress of invisible conflicts.... Not a triumphant
face at all, and yet there was peace in it. Somehow, the man had
achieved something, arrived somewhere, and the record of the journey
was piteous and terrible. Yet it drew the eyes in awe as much as in
wonder, and in pity not at all.

Oliver, reassured by the new presence, and glad to find himself at last facing a man who has nothing left to fear in life, states as well as possible his main problem. The father of his beloved listens, first with surprise at the news, then with seriousness. Oliver finds himself forced to cut deep when he repeats his own father's appeal to know the convict's opinion about what a man expects to meet in his future wife's family, and then pauses with a keen sense of the cruelty of his own position. But Lannithorne, who has long since become accustomed to feeling the ploughshare of passion grind down to his uttermost rock, is perfectly ready with his response. As the youth pauses and then begins a new appeal--

The man looked up and held up an arresting hand. "Let me clear the
way for you a little," he said. "It was a hard {248} thing for you
to come and seek me out in this place. I like your coming. Most
young men would have refused, or come in a different spirit. I want
you to understand that if in Ruth's eyes, and my wife's, and your
father's, my counsel has value, it is because they think I see
things as they are. And that means, first of all, that I know myself
for a man who committed a crime and is paying the penalty. I am
satisfied to be paying it. As I see justice, it is just. So, if I
seem to wince at your necessary allusions to it, that is part of the
price. I don't want you to feel that you are blundering or hurting
me more than is necessary. You have got to lay the thing before me
as it is."

Something in the words, in the dry, patient manner, in the endurance
of the man's face, touched Oliver to the quick and made him feel all
manner of new things: such as a sense of the moral poise of the
universe, acquiescence in its retributions, and a curious pride,
akin to Ruth's own, in a man who could meet him after this fashion,
in this place.

Hereupon, fully aroused, the youth tells with freedom why the problem seems so hard for the young people, and how their elders all insist upon such frightful discouragements, and how much he longs to know the truth about life, and whether all such doubts and scruples as those of his own father and of Ruth's mother are well founded. At last the prisoner begins his reply:

"They haven't the point of view," he said. "It is life that is the
great adventure. Not love, not marriage, not business. They are just
chapters in the book. The main thing is to take the road
fearlessly--to have courage to live one's life."

"Courage?"

{249}

Lannithorne nodded.

"That is the great word. Don't you see what ails your father's point
of view, and my wife's? One wants absolute security in one way for
Ruth; the other wants absolute security in another way for you. And
security--why, it's just the one thing a human being can't have, the
thing that's the damnation of him if he gets it! The reason it is so
hard for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven is that he has
that false sense of security. To demand it just disintegrates a man.
I don't know why. It does."

Oliver shook his head uncertainly.

"I don't quite follow you, sir. Oughtn't one to try to be safe?"

"One ought to try, yes. That is common prudence. But the point is
that, whatever you do or get, you aren't after all secure. There is
no such condition, and the harder you demand it, the more risk you
run. So it is up to a man to take all reasonable precautions about
his money, or his happiness, or his life, and trust the rest. What
every man in the world is looking for is the sense of having the
mastery over life. But I tell you, boy, there is only one thing that
really gives it!"

"And that is?"

Lannithorne hesitated perceptibly. For the thing he was about to
tell this undisciplined lad was his most precious possession; it was
the price of wisdom for which he had paid with the years of his
life. No man parts lightly with such knowledge.

"It comes," he said, with an effort, "with the knowledge of our
power to endure. That's it. _You are safe only when you can stand
everything that can happen to you._ Then, and then only! Endurance
is the measure of a man! ... Sometimes I think it is harder to
endure what we deserve, like me," said Lannithorne, "than what we
don't. I was afraid, you see, afraid for my wife and all of them.
Anyhow, take my word for it. Courage is security. There is no other
kind."

{250}

"Then--Ruth and I--"

"Ruth is the core of my heart!" said Lannithorne thickly. "I would
rather die than have her suffer more than she must. But she must
take her chances like the rest. It is the law of things. If you know
yourself fit for her, and feel reasonably sure you can take care of
her, you have a right to trust the future. Myself, I believe there
is some One to trust it to."

The speaker of this hard-won wisdom, after this appeal to the eternal, utters his last tremulous word as from a father's loving heart, and then the interview must end. The author concludes:

Finding his way out of the prison yard a few minutes later, Oliver
looked, unseeing, at the high walls that soared against the blue
spring sky. He could not realise them, there was such a sense of
light, air, space, in his spirit.

Apparently, he was just where he had been an hour before, with all
his battles still to fight, but really he knew they were already
won, for his weapon had been forged and put in his hand. He left his
boyhood behind him as he passed that stern threshold, for the last
hour had made a man of him, and a prisoner had given him the
master-key that opens every door.