“Things people told you?”
“No. Things I found out myself.
I
made it my business to find out.”
“What a damnable young prig you must have been! And
a
little contemptible, too.”
But Francis’ large dark eyes did not slink aside or wince. They were, at last, the eyes of a man. “I am not going to tell you what I found out. if they had been the average larcenies and manipulations of a politician, the usual skulduggeries, I’d have finally understood about them, too. There’s a hell of a lot of compromising we have to do in living and coming of age, isn’t there? I would have compromised, as I compromised before, with all the facile philosophies of a cynical world if my father’s—crimes—had just been the usual and accepted ones of a man and a politician. Or even if they had been what people call ‘peculiar,’ as a way of not mentioning the facts.”
Jonathan listened acutely. He was no longer smiling.
Francis’ expression was again grim. “No, I can’t tell you.
I
thought when I was seventeen that it was absolutely necessary for me to tell—well, say important men, men in government. I thought it was a matter of my—country. My country. The country he speaks so roundly and richly about on the Fourth of July, and Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays, and Decoration Day. The things he has sworn to protect. You see, he never thought I was very intelligent; even when I was sixteen and seventeen, he thought I was a child. So—I heard. I overheard. In his flat in Washington.”
He stared blankly at the upturned palms of his hands. “And there was the trouble. My conscience. My country. Above all, my country. Yet, he was my father. What does
a
person do in that case?”
My God, thought Jonathan, who had a shadowy revelation. Yes, what does a person do in that case? He said, “I don’t know. And so you were torn apart inside, and you bled inside, and you almost died.”
“You should have let me die,” said Francis, and closed his thin hands.
“You never told him?”
“No. To tell him—I’d have blown apart. I’d have had to do what I was afraid to do. It took me a long time to get over loving him. A very long time. Suppose you had found out something very terrible about your father, Dr. Ferrier, something really—monstrous. Something so criminal that in your country’s interest it should be revealed, and that if it weren’t revealed, he’d go on and on, doing the same thing and maybe much worse? Would you have—”
“Exposed him?” Jonathan shook his head. “I don’t know.
I
don’t think so.”
Francis sighed. “Well, there it is. I carried that to the seminary with me when I was seventeen. And—don’t laugh at me now—I prayed. Anyway, I put it out of my mind.”
“You couldn’t have been mistaken? You couldn’t have been making a mountain out of a molehill? After all, you were hardly more than a kid, and politicians do some very expedient things.”
Francis shook his head. “Give me some credit. I tried to tell myself that for over a year. I tried to think he was not doing what other politicians were not doing, only for much more money and that it was a sort of nefarious game with them, only. Like playing dice for high stakes. But men came to that flat in Washington—Senators—others.”
“And he let you stay around to absorb it?”
“No, he wasn’t that much of a fool. I kept on visiting him at times he didn’t expect me. I had to know. And I always arrived at night. Finally he must have suspected something, for when I did arrive, he was always ready for me. My aunt wired him that I was coming. I found that out, too.”
“Christ,” said Jonathan.
“And now I don’t know anything. I do know he made a lot of money out of the Spanish-American War. I do know he goes abroad a lot. That’s all I will tell you, Dr. Ferrier. Except that I’ve been doing a lot of reading the past three years, a great deal of reading on a very frightful subject. Have you ever heard of Zaharoff, Doctor?”
“Yes. He’s called mysterious and sinister. I’ve heard his name. Something to do with munitions, isn’t that it?”
But Francis did not answer. He leaned back on his pillows in utter exhaustion, and Jonathan watched him and respected both his honor and his suffering, and with that he was greatly disturbed. What a thing for a boy to have carried about with him for years! Worse still was that boy’s realization that in not betraying his father he was betraying something infinitely greater.
Jonathan said with unusual gentleness, “Look at it this way: If your father were not doing it, and others with him, there would still be a man in his position to do it. I know that isn’t much consolation, and when it comes to affairs like this, the individual is pretty impotent, but—”
Francis’ eyes were closed. He said in the quietest voice, “You don’t understand, Doctor. I don’t care about that any longer. I don’t care about anything. I haven’t cared about that for nearly a year. I haven’t cared about anything for that long or longer.”
Jonathan was more disturbed than ever. He stood up slowly and went to the bare window and stood and looked out at the long sweep of lawns, the fountains, the arbors and the flowers, and then raised his eyes and looked at the deepening mountains, calm and splendid and remote. Jonathan frowned. The room behind him was too quiet, as if the dead lay there. He said, without turning, “You say you haven’t cared about anything for a long time. You have been in a seminary, studying for the priesthood. Don’t you care any longer about—well—let’s say, God?”
“No,” said the emotionless voice behind him. “How can I? I no longer believe He exists. Or if He does, He is not concerned with this fleck of dust on which we live. What faith I have is gone. It took a long time dying. Over a year. It died very slowly, Dr. Ferrier. But it did die. I can’t be a priest. My faith is dead.”
And that’s why you tried to die, too, thought Jonathan, and he thought, “What a rotten, disgusting, revolting and sickening world this is, to be sure!”
He walked slowly back to the bed and stood beside it, looking down on the spent and suffering young man who lay there. He said, “If every man who lost his faith, if every man who was
an
honestly convinced agnostic or atheist, died of it, then there’d be few people left in this world. I’m not saying that wouldn’t be an excellent thing. I am merely stating a fact. ‘Men have died, and worms have eaten them,’ but not for God.”
“No,” said Francis, still lying there with shut eyes. “You forget the martyrs who did die for Him and the saints who believed to the death in Him. That seems the worst tragedy of all: To die for nothing.”
“We all do,” said Jonathan. “We live and die for nothing that we can discern, nothing that honestly makes sense to
a
rational man. Martyrs, saints, heroes, ordinary men, men like you and me, men like your father: we live and die for nothing. We invent gods when we can’t stand the thought of the nothingness, the barrenness, the unreason, and we worship them when we can’t bear living in a void any longer, when something piteously human cries out in us for consolation for what we see and suffer. Religion is the real Unreason, but, God help us, we can’t be absolutely sane for too long at
a
time or too often. There’s a worse agony than faith; there is
a
lack of faith. There’s a worse madness than believing; there
is
nonbelief.”
Francis’ eyes slowly opened and they looked at Jonathan straightly.
“You believe that, Doctor?”
Jonathan hesitated. His perturbation was like
a
storm
in
him. He did not know what to say, so he said, “I believe that. At times. You will remember the cry of a man to Our Lord: ‘I believe! Help thou mine unbelief!’ “
Francis smiled drearily. “I have lost even the will to believe, so I don’t need any help.”
So that is why he would not speak to Father McNulty. Jonathan drew his chair to the bedside. He said. ‘Have you talked with the old priests at the seminary about this, Francis?”
“No. I didn’t want to hurt them.”
“You should have talked with them. Do you believe for
a
moment that those dedicated and blameless men never have their long periods of dryness and despair, of unbelief? Do you think they never knew doubt and still don’t know it? St. Teresa of Avila had thirty years of dryness, and she was only one of the many saints who confessed that they were frequently torn by doubt and tortured by the despair of un-faith. Yet, they persisted in the heroic virtues. I’ve heard it said that their doubt and dryness were a testing to see if they would persevere in the desert of their agonized souls, in spite of everything.”
“Do you believe that, Dr. Ferrier?”
“I don’t know,” said Jonathan. “You see, when I was seventeen myself, I, too, lost my faith, and it never came back. Not once, not for a moment.”
“But how can you live, then?”
“I am not a coward. The world is filled with brave men who have no faith. We find ourselves in a senseless maelstrom, and the only thing that has verity is man himself. His very doggedness, his very patience, his very persistence, his very hope, in the face of apparent senselessness, gives him an awful dignity. He is the observer and the participant. He is the builder. He is the artist who makes order out of disorder, brings some frail light to chaos. I don’t usually have much respect for my fellowman, knowing him for his weaknesses and crimes and stupidities, and I rail against him for them. But there are moments when I feel an awe for him, that he survives and will not let himself die. He is tragic, and that makes him a heroic figure in the midst of his blind predicament.”
“And you think just living is enough to justify living?”
“What else can we do? Curse God and die? Is that the only thing a man can do? It is, if he remains a child, and if he insists on kicking and destroying everything when he discovers there is no Santa Claus, just out of sheer baby rage and vengefulness.”
“Dr. Ferrier,” said Francis, “I built my whole life, from childhood, on God. I knew, even when I was a kid, that my father didn’t really care about me. I knew my aunt didn’t. No one did. I couldn’t make friends easily. I was too shy, too timid. I liked to read too much. I had—fantasies. I loved to look at the world, and I loved it, and I loved its great Lover for making such a beautiful world and for creating me so I could enjoy it, too. God, to me, was father and mother, brother and sister, friend, companion, teacher—all the days of my fife, from the very first day I heard His Name.” He lifted a hand, then let it drop. “And now I have nothing, nothing at all.”
“You have your youth, and your world is still here, and you have a life before you to be endured if nothing else. As I endure it.”
Francis gazed a long time on the dark and weary and dissipated face that hung over him. Then he said, “You only endure it—Jon?”
“I only endure it. I’ve only endured it since I was seventeen. By the way, what happened to precipitate this crisis in you?”
“That’s the worst of it all, Doctor. If it had been some terrible disillusion, or some tragedy, or some upheaval, it would seem better and more sensible. But it wasn’t anything. My faith just ran out slowly, and then it was gone. I tried to keep it, but it went.”
Jonathan said, out of his deep pity, “Normal. Usual. Commonplace. That’s the way it is with most men. That’s the way faith leaves us. It seeps away. Small doubts, unresolved, unanswered. A few months of indifference. A tragic experience to which there seems no logical or compassionate answer. Observance of the unpunished crimes of men. The unexplained misery of the faithful. Disease. Cruel death. The joy and satisfaction of evil. The apparently mindless paradoxes. Confrontation of reality with doctrine. Small things, though, mostly. Attrition. New interests. Eventually something else takes the place of faith. Service. Ambition. Excitement in mere living. New revelations for possible pleasure and enjoyment. Curiosity. Science. Experimentation. Marriage and families. Pleasing results when our senses are indulged. The seven deadly sins, too, if you want to put it in a nutshell.”
Francis smiled a little. Neither he nor Jonathan was aware that Jonathan had taken his hand and was now holding it strongly. “The seven deadly sins,” he repeated.
“Yes. You’d be surprised how entertaining some of them can be, and enjoyable.”
Francis laughed silently. “I don’t really know how to sin,” he said.
“Then, you’ve got to learn.”
There was another silence in the room. Jonathan finally said, “I think what really happened to you was logic. The seminary priests go in for logic, and they do love Aristotle and Plato. But logic can be most irrational, dangerously irrational. Religion employs it at its deadly peril, for religion is built on the deepest instinct of a man’s soul, its deepest emotions, its most mysterious urges, which are totally inexplicable in our worldly terms. A man is born with these. He doesn’t acquire them. Only logic can be learned and acquired. I think that’s something you can think about! I heard a story once, about a schoolmaster who took his class Of seventeen-year-old youths out to see the dawn, a sort of scientific expedition.”
It was an unusually black night for all the waning moon and the stars. The young men and their teacher stood in a dark and stubbly field, where they could see the wideness of the sky without the interruption of buildings. They faced the east, yawning and chilled, and there was the faintest sparkle of frozen dew on the dead stems and grasses of the field. Then imperceptibly a blue-gray shadow lightened the east, the merest specter of a shadow. Then, instant by instant, there was a brightening, the palest gold brightening, though the earth was as still as if it were the first day of creation and nothing lived yet to see and no glimmer of radiance touched it. The boys began to feel a curious and disturbing awe, and they did not know why, but their instincts shook off the dull sloth of the learning they had absorbed over the years and murmured.