Black Rock - Ralph Connor (books to read to increase intelligence txt) 📗
- Author: Ralph Connor
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As the supper went on my fears began to vanish, for if Graeme did not ‘roar,’ he did the next best thing—ate and talked quite up to his old form. Now we played our matches over again, bitterly lamenting the ‘if’s’ that had lost us the championships, and wildly approving the tackles that had saved, and the runs that had made the ‘Varsity crowd go mad with delight and had won for us. And as their names came up in talk, we learned how life had gone with those who had been our comrades of ten years ago. Some, success had lifted to high places; some, failure had left upon the rocks, and a few lay in their graves.
But as the evening wore on, I began to wish that I had left out the wines, for the men began to drop an occasional oath, though I had let them know during the summer that Graeme was not the man he had been. But Graeme smoked and talked and heeded not, till Rattray swore by that name most sacred of all ever borne by man. Then Graeme opened upon him in a cool, slow way—
‘What an awful fool a man is, to damn things as you do, Rat. Things are not damned. It is men who are; and that is too bad to be talked much about but when a man flings out of his foul mouth the name of Jesus Christ’—here he lowered his voice—‘it’s a shame—it’s more, it’s a crime.’
There was dead silence, then Rattray replied—
‘I suppose you’re right enough, it is bad form; but crime is rather strong, I think.’
‘Not if you consider who it is,’ said Graeme with emphasis.
‘Oh, come now,’ broke in Beetles. ‘Religion is all right, is a good thing, and I believe a necessary thing for the race, but no one takes seriously any longer the Christ myth.’
‘What about your mother, Beetles?’ put in Wig Martin.
Beetles consigned him to the pit and was silent, for his father was an Episcopal clergyman, and his mother a saintly woman.
‘I fooled with that for some time, Beetles, but it won’t do. You can’t build a religion that will take the devil out of a man on a myth. That won’t do the trick. I don’t want to argue about it, but I am quite convinced the myth theory is not reasonable, and besides, it wont work.’
‘Will the other work?’ asked Rattray, with a sneer.
‘Sure!’ said Grame; ‘I’ve seen it.’
‘Where?’ challenged Rattray. ‘I haven’t seen much of it.’
‘Yes, you have, Rattray, you know you have,’ said Wig again. But Rattray ignored him.
‘I’ll tell you, boys,’ said Graeme. ‘I want you to know, anyway, why I believe what I do.’
Then he told them the story of old man Nelson, from the old coast days, before I knew him, to the end. He told the story well. The stern fight and the victory of the life, and the self-sacrifice and the pathos of the death appealed to these men, who loved fight and could understand sacrifice.
‘That’s why I believe in Jesus Christ, and that’s why I think it a crime to fling His name about!’
‘I wish to Heaven I could say that,’ said Beetles.
‘Keep wishing hard enough and it will come to you,’ said Graeme.
‘Look here, old chap,’ said Rattray; ‘you’re quite right about this; I’m willing to own up. Wig is correct. I know a few, at least, of that stamp, but most of those who go in for that sort of thing are not much account’
‘For ten years, Rattray,’ said Graeme in a downright, matter-of- fact way, ‘you and I have tried this sort of thing’—tapping a bottle—‘and we got out of it all there is to be got, paid well for it, too, and—faugh! you know it’s not good enough, and the more you go in for it, the more you curse yourself. So I have quit this and I am going in for the other.’
‘What! going in for preaching?’
‘Not much—railroading—money in it—and lending a hand to fellows on the rocks.’
‘I say, don’t you want a centre forward?’ said big Barney in his deep voice.
‘Every man must play his game in his place, old chap. I’d like to see you tackle it, though, right well,’ said Graeme earnestly. And so he did, in the after years, and good tackling it was. But that is another story.
‘But, I say, Graeme,’ persisted Beetles, ‘about this business, do you mean to say you go the whole thing—Jonah, you know, and the rest of it?’
Graeme hesitated, then said—
‘I haven’t much of a creed, Beetles; don’t really know how much I believe. But,’ by this time he was standing, ‘I do know that good is good, and bad is bad, and good and bad are not the same. And I know a man’s a fool to follow the one, and a wise man to follow the other, and,’ lowering his voice, ‘I believe God is at the back of a man who wants to get done with bad. I’ve tried all that folly,’ sweeping his hand over the glasses and bottles, ‘and all that goes with it, and I’ve done with it’
‘I’ll go you that far,’ roared big Barney, following his old captain as of yore.
‘Good man,’ said Graeme, striking hands with him.
‘Put me down,’ said little Wig cheerfully.
Then I took up the word, for there rose before me the scene in the League saloon, and I saw the beautiful face with the deep shining eyes, and I was speaking for her again. I told them of Craig and his fight for these men’s lives. I told them, too, of how I had been too indolent to begin. ‘But,’ I said, ‘I am going this far from tonight,’ and I swept the bottles into the champagne tub.
‘I say,’ said Polly Lindsay, coming up in his old style, slow but sure, ‘let’s all go in, say for five years.’ And so we did. We didn’t sign anything, but every man shook hands with Graeme.
And as I told Craig about this a year later, when he was on his way back from his Old Land trip to join Graeme in the mountains, he threw up his head in the old way and said, ‘It was well done. It must have been worth seeing. Old man Nelson’s work is not done yet. Tell me again,’ and he made me go over the whole scene with all the details put in.
But when I told Mrs. Mavor, after two years had gone, she only said, ‘Old things are passed away, all things are become new’; but the light glowed in her eyes till I could not see their colour. But all that, too, is another story.
A man with a conscience is often provoking, sometimes impossible. Persuasion is lost upon him. He will not get angry, and he looks at one with such a faraway expression in his face that in striving to persuade him one feels earthly and even fiendish. At least this was my experience with Craig. He spent a week with me just before he sailed for the Old Land, for the purpose, as he said, of getting some of the coal dust and other grime out of him.
He made me angry the last night of his stay, and all the more that he remained quite sweetly unmoved. It was a strategic mistake of mine to tell him how Nelson came home to us, and how Graeme stood up before the ‘Varsity chaps at my supper and made his confession and confused Rattray’s easy-stepping profanity, and started his own five-year league. For all this stirred in Craig the hero, and he was ready for all sorts of heroic nonsense, as I called it. We talked of everything but the one thing, and about that we said not a word till, bending low to poke my fire and to hide my face, I plunged—
‘You will see her, of course?’
He made no pretence of not understanding but answered—
‘Of course.’
‘There’s really no sense in her staying over there,’ I suggested.
‘And yet she is a wise woman,’ he said, as if carefully considering the question.
‘Heaps of landlords never see their tenants, and they are none the worse.’
‘The landlords?’
‘No, the tenants.’
‘Probably, having such landlords.’
‘And as for the old lady, there must be some one in the connection to whom it would be a Godsend to care for her.’
‘Now, Connor,’ he said quietly, ‘don’t. We have gone over all there is to be said. Nothing new has come. Don’t turn it all up again.’
Then I played the heathen and raged, as Graeme would have said, till Craig smiled a little wearily and said—
‘You exhaust yourself, old chap. Have a pipe, do’; and after a pause he added in his own way, ‘What would you have? The path lies straight from my feet. Should I quit it? I could not so disappoint you—and all of them.’
And I knew he was thinking of Graeme and the lads in the mountains he had taught to be true men. It did not help my rage, but it checked my speech; so I smoked in silence till he was moved to say—
‘And after all, you know, old chap, there are great compensations for all losses; but for the loss of a good conscience towards God, what can make up?’
But, all the same, I hoped for some better result from his visit to Britain. It seemed to me that something must turn up to change such an unbearable situation.
The year passed, however, and when I looked into Craig’s face again I knew that nothing had been changed, and that he had come back to take up again his life alone, more resolutely hopeful than ever.
But the year had left its mark upon him too. He was a broader and deeper man. He had been living and thinking with men of larger ideas and richer culture, and he was far too quick in sympathy with life to remain untouched by his surroundings. He was more tolerant of opinions other than his own, but more unrelenting in his fidelity to conscience and more impatient of half-heartedness and self-indulgence. He was full of reverence for the great scholars and the great leaders of men he had come to know.
‘Great, noble fellows they are, and extraordinarily modest,’ he said—‘that is, the really great are modest. There are plenty of the other sort, neither great nor modest. And the books to be read! I am quite hopeless about my reading. It gave me a queer sensation to shake hands with a man who had written a great book. To hear him make commonplace remarks, to witness a faltering in knowledge—one expects these men to know everything—and to experience respectful kindness at his hands!’
‘What of the younger men?’ I asked.
‘Bright, keen, generous fellows. In things theoretical, omniscient; but in things practical, quite helpless. They toss about great ideas as the miners lumps of coal. They can call them by their book names easily enough, but I often wondered whether they
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