第165章

That theology cleared for faith an open road,made of faith a reasonable thing,yet did not rob it of a sense of high adventure;cleansed it of the taints of thrift and selfish concern.In this reaffirmation of vitalism there might be a future,yes,an individual future,yet it was far from the smug conception of salvation.Here was a faith conferred by the freedom of truth;a faith that lost and regained itself in life;it was dynamic in its operation;for,as Lessing said,the searching after truth,and not its possession,gives happiness to man.In the words of an American scientist,taken from his book on Heredity,"The evolutionary idea has forced man to consider the probable future of his own race on earth and to take measures to control that future,a matter he had previously left largely to fate."Here indeed was another sign of the times,to find in a strictly scientific work a sentence truly religious!As I continued to read these works,I found them suffused with religion,religion of a kind and quality I had not imagined.The birthright of the spirit of man was freedom,freedom to experiment,to determine,to create--to create himself,to create society in the image of God!Spiritual creation the function of cooperative man through the coming ages,the task that was to make him divine.Here indeed was the germ of a new sanction,of a new motive,of a new religion that strangely harmonized with the concepts of the old--once the dynamic power of these was revealed.

I had been thinking of my family--of my family in terms of Matthew--and yet with a growing yearning that embraced them all.I had not informed Maude of my illness,and I had managed to warn Tom Peters not to do so.

I had simply written her that after the campaign I had gone for a rest to California;yet in her letters to me,after this information had reached her,I detected a restrained anxiety and affection that troubled me.

Sequences of words curiously convey meanings and implications that transcend their literal sense,true thoughts and feelings are difficult to disguise even in written speech.Could it be possible after all that had happened that Maude still loved me?I continually put the thought away from me,but continually it returned to haunt me.Suppose Maude could not help loving me,in spite of my weaknesses and faults,even as Iloved Nancy in spite of hers?Love is no logical thing.

It was Matthew I wanted,Matthew of whom I thought,and trivial,long-forgotten incidents of the past kept recurring to me constantly.I still received his weekly letters;but he did not ask why,since I had taken a vacation,I had not come over to them.He represented the medium,the link between Maude and me that no estrangement,no separation could break.

All this new vision of mine was for him,for the coming generation,the soil in which it must be sown,the Americans of the future.And who so well as Matthew,sensitive yet brave,would respond to it?I wished not only to give him what I had begun to grasp,to study with him,to be his companion and friend,but to spare him,if possible,some of my own mistakes and sufferings and punishments.But could I go back?Happy coincidences of desires and convictions had been so characteristic of that other self I had been struggling to cast off:I had so easily been persuaded,when I had had a chance of getting Nancy,that it was the right thing to do!And now,in my loneliness,was I not growing just as eager to be convinced that it was my duty to go back to the family which in the hour of self-sufficiency I had cast off?I had believed in divorce then--why not now?Well,I still believed in it.I had thought of a union with Nancy as something that would bring about the "self-realization that springs from the gratification of a great passion,"--an appealing phrase I had read somewhere.But,it was at least a favourable symptom that I was willing now to confess that the "self-realization"had been a secondary and sentimental consideration,a rosy,self-created halo to give a moral and religious sanction to my desire.Was I not trying to do that very thing now?It tortured me to think so;I strove to achieve a detached consideration of the problem,--to arrive at length at a thought that seemed illuminating:that the it wrongness"or "rightness,"utility and happiness of all such unions depend upon whether or not they become a part of the woof and warp of the social fabric;in other words,whether the gratification of any particular love by divorce and remarriage does or does not tend to destroy a portion of that fabric.

Nancy certainly would have been justified in divorce.It did not seem in the retrospect that I would have been:surely not if,after I had married Nancy,I had developed this view of life that seemed to me to be the true view.I should have been powerless to act upon it.But the chances were I should not have developed it,since it would seem that any salvation for me at least must come precisely through suffering,through not getting what I wanted.Was this equivocating?

My mistake had been in marrying Maude instead of Nancy--a mistake largely due to my saturation with a false idea of life.Would not the attempt to cut loose from the consequences of that mistake in my individual case have been futile?But there was a remedy for it--the remedy Krebs had suggested:I might still prevent my children from making such a mistake,I might help to create in them what I might have been,and thus find a solution for myself.My errors would then assume a value.

But the question tortured me:would Maude wish it?Would it be fair to her if she did not?By my long neglect I had forfeited the right to go.

And would she agree with my point of view if she did permit me to stay?

I had less concern on this score,a feeling that that development of hers,which once had irritated me,was in the same direction as my own....