Mr. Thompson folded up the sheets with deliberate precision, replaced
them in the envelope and tucked the envelope in his pocket. He rose to
go. He had a feeling of wanting to escape from that room which those
penned pages and swiftly acute memories had filled with a presence it
hurt him terribly to recall. His eye fell upon the rows of Carr's books,
orderly upon their shelves. The postscript, fresh in his
sense-impressions because it came last, and the sight of the books,
roused him to a swelling fury of anger.
The heresies of Huxley and Darwin! The blasphemies of Tom Paine! The
economic diatribes which began with Adam Smith and continued in
multiplying volumes down to the latest emanation from professorial
intellects in every civilized corner of the earth. The bulky, bitter
tomes of Marx and Engels! The Lorias and Leacocks, the tribe of
Gumplowicz, and Haeckel, the Lubbocks and Burtons, all that vast array
of minds which calmly dissect man and his manifold activities, that draw
deeply upon every branch of human knowledge to make clear the age-old
evolution and revolution in both the physical and intellectual
realm--and which generally leave gods and religions out of account
except to analyze them as manifestations of social phenomena. Those
damnable documents which he had never read, but which he had been taught
to shun as the product of perverted intellects, blasts of scientific
artillery, unkindly trained upon sacred concepts!
He put on his parka hood, gave an abrupt "good evening" to Cloudy Moon,
and went out into the night which had deepened its shadows while he sat
within.
The North lay hushed and hard under a wan moon. The teeth of the frost
nipped at him. A wolf lifted a dismal howl as he crossed the meadow. And
his anger died. That flare of resentment was, he recognized, but a burst
of wrath against Sophie, a passionate protest at her desertion. She had
loved him and she had left him, deliberately, calculatingly, left him
and love, for the world, the flesh and the devil--tempted by a fortune
untimely directed to her hands.
He did not mind about the books. Doubtless they were well enough in
their way, a source of practical knowledge. But he did not care a curse
about books or knowledge or faith as he walked through the snow across
that gleaming white patch in the dusky forest. His heart cried aloud in
forlorn protest against the surging emotions that beset him. His eyes
stung. And he fought against that inarticulate misery, against the
melancholy that settled upon him like a dank mist.
A man must stand upon his own feet! That stabbed at him, cut across his
mood like a slap in the face. Wasn't that what he was learning to do? He
lifted his head with a sudden spirit of defiance, a bitter resolution. A
man must stand on his own feet. Well, he would. If he could no longer
pray and be comforted, he could grit his teeth and struggle and endure.
He had begun to perceive that a man must do that physically--set his
teeth and endure. In the less concrete matter of the spirit it was much
the same.