lips, feeling that nothing he could say would touch her just then. The sick man’s face was hardly visible now in the twilight, and Gratian went over to his bed. She stood looking down at him a long time.
“Go and rest, Dad; the doctor’s coming again at eleven. I’ll call you if I want anything. I shall lie down a little, beside him.”
Pierson kissed her, and went out. To lie there beside him would be the greatest comfort she could get. He went to the bare narrow little room he had occupied ever since his wife died; and, taking off his boots, walked up and down, with a feeling of almost crushing loneliness. Both his daughters in such trouble, and he of no use to them! It was as if Life were pushing him utterly aside! He felt confused, helpless, bewildered. Surely if Gratian loved George, she had not left God’s side, whatever she might say. Then, conscious of the profound heresy of this thought, he stood still at the open window.
Earthly love – heavenly love; was there any analogy between them?
From the Square Gardens the indifferent whisper of the leaves answered; and a newsvendor at the far end, bawling his nightly tale of murder. 3
George Laird passed the crisis of his illness that night, and in the morning was pronounced out of danger. He had a splendid constitution, and – Scotsman on his father’s side – a fighting character. He came back to life very weak, but avid of recovery; and his first words were: “I’ve been hanging over the edge, Gracie!”
A very high cliff, and his body half over, balancing; one inch, the merest fraction of an inch more, and over he would have gone. Deuced rum sensation! But not so horrible as it would have been in real life. With the slip of that last inch he felt he would have passed at once into oblivion, without the long horror of a fall. So this was what it was for all the poor fellows he had seen slip in the past two years! Mercifully, at the end, one was not alive enough to be conscious of what one was leaving, not alive enough even to care. If he had been able to take in the presence of his young wife, able to realise that he was looking at her face, touching her for the last time – it would have been hell; if he had been up to realising sunlight, moonlight, the sound of the world’s life outside, the softness of the bed he lay on – it would have meant the most poignant anguish of defraudment. Life was a rare good thing, and to be squashed out of it with your powers at full, a wretched mistake in Nature’s arrangements, a wretched villainy on the part of Man – for his own death, like all those other millions of premature deaths, would have been due to the idiocy and brutality of men! He could smile now, with Gratian looking down at him, but the experience had heaped fuel on a fire which had always smouldered in his doctor’s soul against that half emancipated breed of apes, the human race. Well, now he would get a few days off from his death-carnival! And he lay, feasting his returning senses on his wife. She made a pretty nurse, and his practised eye judged her a good one – firm and quiet.
George Laird was thirty. At the opening of the war he was in an East-End practice, and had volunteered at once for service with the Army. For the first nine months he had been right up in the thick of it. A poisoned arm; rather than the authorities, had sent him home. During that leave he married Gratian. He had known the Piersons some time; and, made conscious of the instability of life, had resolved to marry her at the first chance he got. For his father-in-law he had respect and liking, ever mixed with what was not quite contempt and not quite pity. The blend of authority with humility, cleric with dreamer, monk with artist, mystic with man of action, in Pierson, excited in him an interested, but often irritated, wonder. He saw things so differently himself, and had little of the humorous curiosity which enjoys what is strange simply because it is strange. They could never talk together without soon reaching a point when he wanted to say: “If we’re not to trust our reason and our senses for what they’re worth, sir – will you kindly tell me what we are to trust? How can we exert them to the utmost in some matters, and in others suddenly turn our backs on them?” Once, in one of their discussions, which often bordered on acrimony, he had expounded himself at length.
“I grant,” he had said, “that there’s a great ultimate Mystery, that we shall never know anything for certain about the origin of life and the principle of the Universe; but why should we suddenly shut up our enquiring apparatus and deny all the evidence of our reason – say, about the story of Christ, or the question of a future life, or our moral code? If you want me to enter a temple of little mysteries, leaving my reason and senses behind – as a Mohammedan leaves his shoes – it won’t do to say to me simply: ‘There it is! Enter!’ You must show me the door; and you can’t! And I’ll tell you why, sir. Because in your brain there’s a little twist which is not in mine, or the lack of a little twist which is in mine. Nothing more than that divides us into the two main species of mankind, one of whom worships, and one of whom doesn’t. Oh, yes! I know; you won’t admit that, because it makes your religions natural instead of what you call supernatural. But I assure you there’s nothing more to it. Your eyes look up or they look down – they never look straight before them. Well, mine do just the opposite.”
That day Pierson had been feeling very tired, and though to meet this attack was vital, he had been unable to meet it. His brain had stammered. He had turned a little away, leaning his cheek on his hand, as if to cover that momentary break in his defences. Some days later he had said:
“I am able now to answer your questions, George. I think I can make you understand.”
Laird had answered: “All right, sir; go ahead.”
“You begin by assuming that the human reason is the final test of all things. What right have you to assume that? Suppose you were an ant. You would take your ant’s reason as the final test, wouldn’t you? Would that be the truth?” And a smile had fixed itself on his lips above his little grave beard.
George Laird also had smiled.
“That seems a good point, sir,” he said, “until you recognise that I don’t take, the human reason as final test in any absolute sense. I only say it’s the highest test we can apply; and that, behind that test all is quite dark and unknowable.”
“Revelation, then, means nothing to you?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“I don’t think we can usefully go on, George.”
“I don’t think we can, sir. In talking with you, I always feel like fighting a man with one hand tied behind his back.”
“And I, perhaps, feel that I am arguing with one who was blind from birth.”
For all that, they had often argued since; but never without those peculiar smiles coming on their faces. Still, they respected each other, and Pierson had not opposed his daughter’s marriage to this heretic, whom he knew to be an honest and trustworthy man. It had taken place before Laird’s arm was well, and the two had snatched a month’s honeymoon before he went back to France, and she to her hospital in Manchester. Since then, just one February fortnight by the sea had been all their time together…
In the afternoon he had asked for beef tea, and, having drunk a cup, said:
“I’ve got something to tell your father.”
But warned by the pallor of his smiling lips, Gratian answered:
“Tell me first, George.”
“Our last talk, Gracie; well – there’s nothing – on the other side. I looked over; it’s as black as your hat.”
Gratian shivered.
“I know. While you were lying here last night, I told father.”
He squeezed her hand, and said: “I also want to tell him.”
“Dad
