Part 20

He laughed. “Oh, don’t compare a gentleman to a newspaper.”

“Then keep your vocabulary clean of bargain-counter words. A while ago the journalists had a furious run upon the adjective ‘un-American.’ Anybody or anything that displeased them was ‘un-American.’ They ran it into the ground, and in its place they have lately set up ‘pessimist,’ which certainly has a threatening appearance. They don’t know its meaning, and in their mouths it merely signifies that what a man says snakes them feel personally uncomfortable. The word has become a dusty rag of slang. The arrested burglar very likely calls the policeman a pessimist; and, speaking reverently and with no intention to shock you, the scribes and Pharisees would undoubtedly have called Christ a pessimist when He called them hypocrites, had they been acquainted with the word.”

Once more my remarks drew from the boy an unexpected rejoinder. We had turned into Worship Street, and, as we passed the churchyard, he stopped and laid his hand upon the railing of the pate.

“You don’t shock me,” he said; and then: “But you would shock my aunts.” He paused, gazing into the churchyard, before he continued more slowly: “And so should I--if they knew it--shock them.”

“If they knew what?” I asked.

His hand indicated a sculptured crucifix near by.

“Do you believe everything still?” he answered. “Can you?”

As he looked at me, I suppose that he read negation in my eyes.

“No more can I,” he murmured. Again he looked in among the tombstones and flowers, where the old custodian saw us and took off his hat. “Howdy, Daddy Ben!” John Mayrant returned pleasantly, and then resuming to me: “No more can I believe everything.” Then he gave a brief, comical laugh. “And I hope my aunts won’t find that out! They would think me gone to perdition indeed. But I always go to church here” (he pointed to the quiet building, which, for all its modest size and simplicity, had a stately and inexpressible charm), “because I like to kneel where my mother said her prayers, you know.” He flushed a little over this confidence into which he had fallen, but he continued: “I like the words of the service, too, and I don’t ask myself over-curiously what I do believe; but there’s a permanent something within us--a Greater Self--don’t you think?”

“A permanent something,” I assented, “which has created all the religions all over the earth from the beginning, and of which Christianity itself is merely one of the present temples.”

He made an exclamation at my word “present.”

“Do you think anything in this world is final?” I asked him.

“But--” he began, somewhat at a loss.

“Haven’t you found out yet that human nature is the one indestructible reality that we know?”

“But--” he began again.

“Don’t we have the ‘latest thing’ all the time, and never the ultimate thing, never, never? The latest thing in women’s hats is that huge-brimmed affair with the veil as voluminous as a double-bed mosquito netting. That hat will look improbable next spring. The latest thing in science is radium. Radium has exploded the conservation of energy theory--turned it into a last year’s hat. Answer me, if Christianity is the same as when it wore among its savage ornaments a devil with horns and a flaming Hell! Forever and forever the human race reaches out its hand and shapes some system, some creed, some government, and declares: ‘This is at length the final thing, the cure-all,’ and lo and behold, something flowing and eternal in the race itself presently splits the creed and the government to pieces! Truth is a very marvelous thing. We feel it; it can fill our eyes with tears, our hearts with joy, it can make us die for it; but once our human lips attempt to formulate and thus imprison it, it becomes a lie. You cannot shut truth up in any words.”

“But it shall prevail!” the boy exclaimed with a sort of passion.

“Everything prevails,” I answered him.

“I don’t like that,” he said.

“Neither do I,” I returned. “But Jacob got Esau’s inheritance by a mean trick.”

“Jacob was punished for it.”

“Did that help Esau much?”

“You are a pessimist!”

“Just because I see Jacob and Esau to-day, alive and kicking in Wall Street, Washington, Newport, everywhere?”

“You’re no optimist, anyhow!”

“I hope I’m blind in neither eye.”

“You don’t give us credit--”

“For what?”