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?"
"For what we've accomplished since Jacob."
"Printing, steam, and electricity, for instance? They spread the Bible and the yellow journal with equal velocity."
"I don't mean science. Take our institutions."
"Well, we've accomplished hospitals and the stock market — a pretty even set-off between God and the devil."
He laughed. "You don't take a high view of us!"
"Nor a low one. I don't play ostrich with any of the staring permanences of human nature. We're just as noble to-day as David was sometimes, and just as bestial to-day as David was sometimes, and we've every possibility inside us all the time, whether we paint our naked skins, or wear steel armor or starched shirts."
"Well, I believe good is the guiding power in the world."
"Oh, John Mayrant! Good and evil draw us on like a span of horses, sometimes like a tandem, taking turns in the lead. Order has melted into disorder, and disorder into new order — how many times?"
"But better each time."
"How can you know, who never lived in any age but your own?"
"I know we have a higher ideal."
"Have we? The Greek was taught to love his neighbor as himself. He gave his great teacher a cup of poison. We gave ours the cross."
Again he looked away from me into the sweet old churchyard. "I can't answer you, but I don't believe it."
This brought me to gayety. "That's unanswerable, anyhow!"
He still stared at the graves. "Those people in there didn't think all these uncomfortable things."
"Ah! no! They belonged in the first volume of the history of our national soul, before the bloom was off us."
"That's an odd notion! And pray what volume are we in now?"
"Only the second."
"Since when?"
"Since that momentous picnic, the Spanish War!"
"I don't see how that took the bloom off us."
"It didn't. It merely waked Europe up to the facts."
"Our battleships, you mean?"
"Our steel rails, our gold coffers, our roaring affluence."
"And our very accurate shooting!" he insisted; for he was a Southerner, and man's gallantry appealed to him more than man's industry.
I laughed. "Yes, indeed! We may say that the Spanish War closed our first volume with a bang. And now in the second we bid good-by to the virgin wilderness, for it's explored; to the Indian, for he's conquered; to the pioneer, for he's dead; we've finished our wild, romantic adolescence and we find ourselves a recognized world power of eighty million people, and of general commercial endlessness, and playtime over."
I think, John Mayrant now asserted, "that it is going too far to say the bloom is off us."
"Oh, you'll find snow in the woods away into April and May. The freedom-loving American, the embattled farmer, is not yet extinct in the far recesses. But the great cities grow like a creeping paralysis over freedom, and the man from the country is walking into them all the time because the poor, restless fellow believes wealth awaits him on their pavements. And when he doesn't go to them, they come to him. The Wall Street bucket-shop goes fishing in the woods with wires a thousand miles long; and so we exchange the solid trailblazing enterprise of Volume One for Volume Two's electric unrest. In Volume One our wagon was hitched to the star of liberty. Capital and labor have cut the traces. The labor union forbids the workingman to labor as his own virile energy and skill prompt him. If he disobeys, he is expelled and called a 'scab.' Don't let us call ourselves the land of the free while such things go on. We're all thinking a deal too much about our pockets nowadays. Eternal vigilance cannot watch liberty and the ticker at the same time.
"Well," said John Mayrant, "we're not thinking about our pockets in Kings Port, because" (and here there came into his voice and face that sudden humor which made him so delightful)—"because we haven't got any pockets to think of!"