Come, My Beloved

  “Why a school of theology, Father?” he asked.

  MacArd undertook earnestly the task of explaining himself to his son.

  “It came to me after India. I saw the enormous contrast between the English and the Indian, or between ourselves and those wretched natives, for that matter. There must be some reason why the western world has risen in wealth and power. Call it the favor of God, if you like to use religious terms, which may be as true as any other. But the fact is that the people over there are oppressed by the weight of an evil and superstitious religion, whereas our religion has made us free men. We have overthrown our tyrants, we have been inspired by our faith. Surely men are not so different that what inspires and strengthens some cannot also and likewise strengthen and inspire others. If this is true, and I believe it to be so, then it is my Christian duty to share with the whole world what I myself have, and I am sure your mother would have agreed with me, if she had been with us in India. This is the logical conclusion. The only way to put a big idea into big action is to train plenty of men to carry it out. I propose to do it at the MacArd School of Theology.”

  “I see,” David said. He had listened attentively, his quick mind, accustomed to his father’s concise speech, seizing and enriching every word. He had expected to be repelled but he was not. In spite of the unconscious arrogance of his father’s voice and bearing, the words themselves had not conveyed arrogance. His father did not, then, despise those dark and hopeless people clinging to their barren land. On the contrary, he implied that had they inspiration like his own there was no reason why they should not have all that he had.

  “I’d like to think about what you have told me,” he said “It is interesting. I can see that it might be important.”

  “It is very important,” his father said with emphasis. “I intend to make MacArd Memorial the greatest center in the world for a practical progressive Christianity that will improve the world.”

  He got up. There was no need for answer. It was time for him to be downtown.

  “Good-by, son,” he said in his heartiest manner. “Think it over and come with me if you can. It would mean a lot to me.”

  David said nothing but he gave his mother’s smile and MacArd saw the smile and felt the old pang at his heart. So much Leila had left him when she died, and yet it would never be enough, because she had taken herself away. He must so live and so conduct himself that the hope of meeting her again in some eternity might be realized, if such hope was a possibility, as he now believed it was. Indeed, he must believe it was. He tried to return his son’s smile, raised his hand in silent gesture and went away.

  David poured himself a second cup of coffee. His mother had made it a family habit that they be left alone at this meal, and Enderby did not intrude after he had brought in bacon, eggs, rolls and toast and coffee. Unless someone pressed the bell he would not return until he was sure that no one remained at the table, and David sat drinking his coffee and gazing reflectively into the formal garden upon which the French windows opened. Flowers were blooming in neat beds and at the far end a figure of Italian marble, a slender girl pouring water into a pool from a jar on her shoulder, made a focus for his eyes. His mother had been fond of the figure, a symbol, she had once said to him while they sat together at this table, of life-giving water, flowing from a deathless source. Once when they had been driving through the mountains north of the city they had come upon a vast overflowing lake, one of the reservoirs which supplied the city water, and she had pointed it out to him saying, “The water in our fountain comes from here, and it is the gathered waters of all these hills and valleys, pouring together.”

  He remembered the way she had looked that summer’s day in her duster and veil, her face vivid, her eyes dark and alive, and he felt again the symbolism of her words. Was there indeed an eternal source for man’s life, a primal cause, a true reason for the little span of years? He had passed through his first phase of grief, the vivid moment of return had passed and his melancholy now was expressed in vague and thoughtful questions to which he could find no answer. He was lonely and he had begun to long for the companionship of others who were like himself as he now was, and not as he used to be in college. It was impossible to return to the childishness of sports and games and routined lessons. He must penetrate far more deeply into learning, but where and how should he begin? He turned over in his mind the plan his father had put before him. For a moment it seemed preposterous and he doubted his father understood fully what he himself had conceived. A school for religion could grow far beyond the confines of expressed theology. If a body of young and inquiring minds gathered into such a center, who knew what together they might discover? He allowed his imagination to play about the school, developing a place very different from that which his father planned, a place fulfilling a deeper concept, providing an energy not yet in motion, establishing a channel between man and God, such as had never yet been found, discovering if indeed God did exist. When he faced his primary question he could almost hear his mother cry out to him across the space between. She, who had never read theology or cared to hear the reasoning of logicians, accepted the being of God as the simplest explanation of created form and beauty. From whence had come the earth and its flowering if not from Someone?

  “It is so much easier to believe than to doubt,” she had said to him.

  He finished his coffee and went to the telephone and called Dr. Barton.

  “This is David MacArd, Dr. Barton.”

  “Oh yes, David, what can I do for you?”

  “My father has just told me of his great idea. He suggests that I might be useful to you.”

  “Yes, indeed.” The ministerial voice was professionally cheerful. “I have just been looking at some sites. That’s the first thing, isn’t it? The place is important, the repose, the proper isolation and yet not too remote from railroad stations. The practical combined with the spiritual, eh, David? Come along to my study, my dear boy. You’ll find me in a fog of confusion. I shall be glad of your listening ear.”

  “Very well, I’ll be there soon.”

  He hung up and then climbed the wide stairs slowly. The house was as still as a tomb and on a sunny morning like this he was glad to be out of it.

  The air in Dr. Barton’s office was warm and slightly fragrant, as though a fire had been lit, sprinkled with incense and allowed to go out again. The dying smell of old leather-bound books and the mildly acid taint of printer’s ink mingled with the scent of an immense bowl of roses on a table under the window.

  “My wife’s contribution to the day’s work,” Dr. Barton said when he saw David’s eyes straying again and again to the roses.

  “They make me think of my mother,” he said.

  “Ah, we miss her,” Dr. Barton replied, with emotion that just escaped being unctuous. “But it doesn’t do to think of the past, dear boy.”

  “She doesn’t belong to the past,” David said.

  “Ah no, of course not,” Dr. Barton agreed quickly. “Shall we proceed, David? I don’t want to hurry you, if you feel you would like to talk a while of your dear mother—”

  “No, it was only the roses.” He drew his chair to the desk and took up the sheets of paper that Dr. Barton had put down.

  “You will see,” the minister said, “that I have nothing conclusive. A fine tract of land lies over here northwest of the city. It can be had for ten thousand dollars. There are good building sites on it. What would you say to running up there today and seeing it for yourself? Then you could corroborate what I am planning to tell your father on Friday at noon, when he has kindly invited me to come and have luncheon with him again, a report of progress, so to speak. It is a great responsibility.”

  “I would like to go and may I take this map?”

  “By all means,” Dr. Barton said. He was secretly a little glad to be rid of so grave a young man to whom nevertheless he must be cordial, since he was the son of a benefactor. Why, he wondered, had MacArd decided to offer
his own son as an aide? Did he distrust, possibly, the minister’s practical judgment? He took out his watch. “There is a train in just three quarters of an hour which will get you there nicely before noon. It is only an hour’s run. At the station you can ask for the livery stable, it is not too far, and half an hour’s drive with horse and buggy will get you to the spot. There’s an old farmhouse near by. Just ask for Miller’s Creek. There’s a train back at five o’clock.”

  David took the map and studied it a moment. The dismissal was a trifle too swift.

  “What do you make out of my father’s plan, Dr. Barton?” he asked after a moment. He folded the map and put it into his pocket.

  The minister looked surprised. “A very noble idea,” he replied. “A center of the best training for young leaders of the church.”

  “My father emphasized to me the practical missionary aspect,” David said.

  “Ah yes,” Dr. Barton replied in his swift smooth agreement. “Quite rightly. The church militant is a missionary one. ‘Go ye into all the world,’ and so forth. A civilizing uplifting influence, proclaiming the gospel, teaching men the right, revealing the true faith. This is an age of expansion, and if our country can carry aloft the banner of God, we cannot fail.”

  David leaned back in the comfortable chair, his hands in his pockets, his eyes intense and thoughtful upon Dr. Barton’s smooth-shaven, well-fed face. It would be unwise, if not useless, to argue at this point when there was not even a piece of land for the school. Later he would talk with his father. He was astute enough to divine by instinct that Dr. Barton looked upon him as a potential enemy, wanting no son between himself and the father.

  He rose. “I had better move on if I am to catch that train.”

  Dr. Barton was still anxious. “Will you report direct to me, dear boy? I feel responsible to your father.”

  “Certainly,” David said. “I realize that I am supposed to be helping you, sir.”

  They shook hands and he left the close sweet air of the study and went into the outer freshness. It was one of the city’s rare days, the winds blew in from the sea and cleansed the streets of smoke and mist. He headed for the station, reaching it early enough to buy a couple of sandwiches for his luncheon later on in the hills. In the train the car was almost empty at this hour of the day, and he sat by a window and gazed at fleeting tenements and dirty streets, comparing them in his mind with the crowded sidewalks in Bombay and the dusty squalor of Indian villages. Why should his father dream of sending missionaries to India and China or to any part of the foreign world when here not five miles from his own door were heathen as valid as any to be found? He knew very well the answer to this. His father would declare again, as he had often declared before, that idleness, the fruit of laziness, was the sole cause for poverty in a rich country, and he would give himself as proof. Had he not been poor, the son of a country parson, and had he not raised himself without help until today he was one of the richest men in the world? What he had done others could do in any free and Christian country.

  “But could I?” David inquired of himself. He did not believe that he could, if he had been born in a filthy room level with the track. He looked into one sordid cell after another as the train rolled by and he saw dirty children, frowsy women, unshaven men, broken furniture. Had he been born there he could not have pulled himself out of ft. Crushed, by such fate, who would have delivered him? No one, for no one came to deliver such people.

  He turned his troubled mind away from a problem he could not solve, and was grateful that the tenements gave way to scattered streets and then to the pleasant countryside. Here was something better to be seen, indeed, than the countryside of India. Instead of dry and barren fields, dust beneath the heat of a burning sun, here were green crops, trees and grass and comfortable farmhouses, barns to store harvests and place for children’s play. Why should not a practical religion destroy the tenements? But he knew that his father would say that tenements could not be destroyed. If they were, others would spring up to take their place. In their separate ways Darya and his father were alike. Darya would say that tenements did not matter. They were man’s fate, but man’s abodes were transient, and there was no reason why a tenement could not be as suitable as a mansion, a habitation for a saint.

  Nor would Darya consider the obvious retort. “But you, Darya, live in a mansion and it is easy for you to talk of a tenement as suitable. You will never live in a tenement.”

  And Darya would say in his laughing fashion, “Ah, but I was born in a mansion, and I live only where I was born. Had I been born in a tenement, then I would live there. It is meaningless, this difference between mansion and tenement, so long as I am one with God.”

  His father, David knew very well, did not dream of destroying poverty, which was the result of what he would call shiftlessness. Poverty was a very proper punishment for such behavior. His father believed that through the right religion civilization could develop which would provide opportunity for all, and then men like himself would rise as he had risen, and those who did not make use of opportunity were the surplus, the scum, useless except as they provided labor. That, in a few words, David thought grimly, was his father’s gospel. God was on the side of the strong.

  And perhaps his father was right, and who could say he was not? Perhaps the battle was to the strong and the race to the swift.

  III

  AT MIDAFTERNOON DAVID LEFT the hilltop and walked down toward the river, the Hudson, at this distance from the city a wide and placid stream. He was hot, for he had chosen to walk instead of hiring a rig, and the coolness of the morning had changed to a still white heat under the blazing sun, and the thought of a swim in the river had become a necessity. He had found the site suggested by Dr. Barton, it was a beautiful place, he agreed, a low hilltop surrounded by higher mountains, facing the distant vista of the river. Yet it was strangely remote and silent, far from human life. He had eaten his sandwiches on the grassy flat, his back against a grey rock, his feet outstretched, and he had tried to imagine buildings, people, young men and their teachers, living here. It was too much like a monastery, he decided, too different from the crowded streets of Bombay and the tenements of New York, and he began to be troubled by the whole idea of the school which was to be a memorial to his mother.

  How did men learn of God? How be born again? It would be easy to absorb the message of earth and sky, and creation might seem divine at this height, but would the lessons learned in such idyllic schooldays serve when the days were over? He searched thoughtfully his own experience of religion, nothing very valid, he feared, the usual business of Sunday School and church, and then when he was at prep school and college the required chapel. He could not say that he had ever had an experience of God, although he had joined the church of his parents when he was sixteen or so because it was the right thing to do, or perhaps only the proper thing, and for normal human beings that might be the same thing. He knew that he was not a natural rebel, there had been nothing in his life against which to rebel, and he had found life good until his mother died. He lay back on the grass after he had eaten and lying with his arms under his head and his eyes closed, he thought about his mother. It was impossible to believe that she was not alive in whatever form she might be. She had been too vivid a creature, too positive, too gay to be dead. It was easier to believe that she lived, and that from somewhere at this very moment she looked upon him and knew what he was thinking. She had always an instinct so aware of him that she had often been able to divine his thinking. People were talking a lot about mental telepathy these days, but it might be something more. Nobody knew, and perhaps faith was the easiest way when the alternative was ignorance. It was as wise to assert as to deny when there was no way of knowing anything. Even science was limited. Thus far, it could only deal with chemicals and physical forces. One had to choose.

  The sun beat upon him and the wind died down and he slept for an hour and awoke thirsty and hot. Yet he was conscientious and he roam
ed about the hilltop before he decided that the place was good enough, beautiful if one wanted that, and that he might as well agree with Dr. Barton. The wide silvery band of the river shining through a valley between the low mountains tempted him. It could not be more than a mile or two away straight downhill, and the railroad ran near enough so that he had only to follow it southward to come to a station. He found a small path and by following it or leaving it to crash through trees, he reached a level height on a mild cliff which he had not noticed from above.

  The level was that of a spacious lawn where the grass had not been clipped and in the midst of the lawn he saw a large and even splendid house. It was occupied, there were chairs on the porch behind the massive pillars which reached from the roof in the style of the Greek Renaissance in the South. Yet, despite the splendor, the house looked untended. Terraces led down to sunken gardens on either side and there the rose bushes grew too high. A solitary peacock walked slowly on the edge of the upper terrace, its tail folded and dragging.

  He drew near and saw that the wide front door was open, although no one was about. A magnificent site this, he thought, only a few hundred feet above the river, which made a sweeping westward curve as though to add more magnificence. Then the peacock saw him and began to screech and bridle. It stretched its small foolish head and lifted its tail and almost immediately he heard a girl’s voice from the garden.

  “Oh, Pilate, do be quiet!”

  She stood up and David saw her a dark pretty girl, too slender for her height. She saw him and walked toward him, a trowel in her earthy hand, and there was mud on her forehead where she had brushed aside her hair.