Mary Olivier: a Life Part 23

You listened. You couldn't help listening. You simply had to know. It was no use to say you didn't believe a word of it. Inside you, secretly, you knew it was true. You were frightened. You trembled and went hot and cold by turns, and somehow that was how you knew it was true; almost as if you had known all the time.

"Oh, shut up! I don't _want_ to hear about it."

"Oh, don't you? You did a minute ago."

"Of course I did, when I didn't know. Who wouldn't? I don't want to know any more."

"I like that. After I've told you everything. What's the good of putting your fingers in your ears _now_?"

There was that day; and there was the next day when she was sick of Bertha. On the third day Bertha went back to Woodford Bridge.

V.

It was dreadful and at the same time funny when you thought of Mr. Batty and Mr. Propart with their little round hats and their black coats and their stiff, dignified faces. And there was Uncle Edward and his whiskers. It couldn't be true.

Yet all true things came like that, with a queer feeling, as if you remembered them.

Jenny's wedding dress. It would be true even of Jenny. Mamma had said she would rather see her in her coffin than married to Mr. Spall. That was why.

But--if it was true of everybody it would be true of Mamma and Papa. That was what you hated knowing. If only you had gone on looking at the water instead of listening to Bertha--

Mamma's face, solemn and tender, when you said your prayers, playing with the gold ta.s.sel of her watch-chain. Papa's face, on your birthday, when he gave you the toy lamb. She wouldn't like you to know about her. Mark wouldn't like it.

Mark: her mind stood still. Mark's image stood still in clean empty s.p.a.ce. When she thought of her mother and Mark she hated Bertha.

And there was Jimmy. That was why they wouldn't talk about him.

Jimmy. The big water-jump into the plantation. Jimmy's arms, the throb of the hard muscles as he held you. Jimmy's hand, your own hand lying in it, light and small. Jimmy's eyes, looking at you and smiling, as if they said, "It's all right, Minky, it's all right."

Perhaps when Papa was young Mamma thought about him as you thought about Jimmy; so that it couldn't be so very dreadful, after all.

XIII

I.

Mary was glad when Bertha went away to school. When the new year came and she was fourteen she had almost forgotten Bertha. She even forgot for long stretches of time what Bertha had told her. But not altogether.

Because, if it was true, then the story of the Virgin Mary was not true.

Jesus couldn't have been born in the way the New Testament said he was born. There was no such thing as the Immaculate Conception. You could hardly be expected to believe in it once you knew why it couldn't have happened.

And if the Bible could deceive you about an important thing like that, it could deceive you about the Incarnation and the Atonement. You were no longer obliged to believe in that ugly business of a cruel, bungling G.o.d appeased with bloodshed. You were not obliged to believe anything just because it was in the Bible.

But--if you didn't, you were an Infidel.

She could hear Aunt Bella talking to Uncle Edward, and Mrs. Farmer and Mrs. Propart whispering: "Mary is an Infidel."

She thought: "If I _am_ I can't help it." She was even slightly elated, as if she had set out on some happy, dangerous adventure.

II.

n.o.body seemed to know what Pantheism was. Mr. Propart smiled when you asked him and said it was something you had better not meddle with. Mr.

Farmer said it was only another word for atheism; you might as well have no G.o.d at all as be a pantheist. But if "pan" meant "all things," and "theos" was G.o.d--

Perhaps it would be in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_. The Encyclopaedia told you all about Australia. There was even a good long bit about Byron, too.

Panceput--Panegyric--Pantheism! There you were. Pantheism is "that speculative system which by absolutely identifying the Subject and Object of thought, reduces all existence, mental and material, to phenomenal modifications of one eternal, self-existent Substance which is called by the name of G.o.d.... All things are G.o.d."

When you had read the first sentence five or six times over and looked up "Subject" and "Object" and "Phenomenal," you could see fairly well what it meant. Whatever else G.o.d might be, he was not what they said, something separate and outside things, something that made your mind uncomfortable when you tried to think about it.

"This universe, material and mental, is nothing but the spectacle of the thoughts of G.o.d."

You might have known it would be like that. The universe, going on inside G.o.d, as your thoughts go on inside you; the universe, so close to G.o.d that nothing could be closer. The meaning got plainer and plainer.

There was Spinoza. ("Spinning--Spinoza.") The Encyclopaedia man said that the Jewish priests offered him a bribe of two thousand florins to take back what he had said about G.o.d; and when he refused to take back a word of it, they cursed him and drove him out of their synagogue.

Spinoza said, "There is no substance but G.o.d, nor can any other be conceived." And the Encyclopaedia man explained it. "G.o.d, as the infinite substance, with its infinity of attributes is the _natura naturans_. As the infinity of modes under which his attributes are manifested, he is the _natura naturata_."

Nature naturing would be the cause, and Nature natured would be the effect. G.o.d was both.

"G.o.d is the immanent"--indwelling--"but not the transient cause of all things" ... "Thought and Extension are attributes of the one absolute substance which is G.o.d, evolving themselves in two parallel streams, so to speak, of which each separate body and spirit are but the waves. Body and Soul are apparently two, but really one and they have no independent existence: They are parts of G.o.d.... Were our knowledge of G.o.d capable of present completeness we might attain to perfect happiness but such is not possible. Out of the infinity of his attributes only two, Thought and Extension, are accessible to us while the modes of these attributes, being essentially infinite, escape our grasp."

So this was the truth about G.o.d. In spite of the queer words it was very simple. Much simpler than the Trinity. G.o.d was not three incomprehensible Persons rolled into one, not Jesus, not Jehovah, not the Father creating the world in six days out of nothing, and muddling it, and coming down from heaven into it as his own son to make the best of a bad job. He was what you had felt and thought him to be as soon as you could think about him at all. The G.o.d of Baruch Spinoza was the G.o.d you had wanted, the only sort of G.o.d you cared to think about. Thinking about him--after the Christian G.o.d--was like coming out of a small dark room into an immense open s.p.a.ce filled with happy light.

And yet, as far back as you could remember, there had been a regular conspiracy to keep you from knowing the truth about G.o.d. Even the Encyclopaedia man was in it. He tried to put you off Pantheism. He got into a temper about it and said it was monstrous and pernicious and profoundly false and that the heart of man rose up in revolt against it.

He had begun by talking about "attempts to transgress the fixed boundaries which One wiser than we has a.s.signed to our intellectual operations." Perhaps he was a clergyman. Clergymen always put you off like that; so that you couldn't help suspecting that they didn't really know and were afraid you would find them out. They were like poor little frightened Mamma when she wouldn't let you look at the interesting bits beyond the place she had marked in your French Reader. And they were always apologising for their G.o.d, as if they felt that there was something wrong with him and that he was not quite real.

But to the pantheists the real G.o.d was so intensely real that, compared with him, being alive was not quite real, it was more like dreaming.

Another thing: the pantheists--the Hindu ones and the Greeks, and Baruch Spinoza--were heathen, and the Christians had tried to make you believe that the heathen went to h.e.l.l because they didn't know the truth about G.o.d. You had been told one lie on the top of another. And all the time the truth was there, in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_.

Who would have thought that the Encyclopaedia could have been so exciting?

The big puce-coloured books stood in a long row in the bottom shelf behind her father's chair. Her heart thumped when she gripped the volumes that contained the forbidden knowledge of the universe. The rough morocco covers went Rr-rr-rimp, as they sc.r.a.ped together; and there was the sharp thud as they fell back into their place when she had done with them.

These sounds thrilled her with a secret joy. When she was away from the books she liked to think of them standing there on the hidden shelf, waiting for her. The pages of "Pantheism" and "Spinoza" were white and clean, and she had noticed how they had stuck together. n.o.body had opened them. She was the first, the only one who knew and cared.

III.

She wondered what Mark and her mother would say when they knew. Perhaps Mark would say she ought not to tell her mother if it meant letting out that the Bible said things that were not really true. His idea might be that if Mamma wanted to believe in Jehovah and the Atonement through Christ's blood, it would be unkind to try and stop her. But who on earth _would_ want to believe that dreadful sort of thing if they could help it? Papa might not mind, because as long as he knew that he and Mamma would get into heaven all right he wouldn't worry so much about other people. But Mamma was always worrying about them and making you give up things to them; and she must be miserable when she thought of them burning in h.e.l.l for ever and ever, and when she tried to reconcile G.o.d's justice with his mercy. To say nothing of the intellectual discomfort she was living in. When you had found out the real, happy truth about G.o.d, it didn't seem right to keep it to yourself.

She decided that she would tell her mother.

Mark was in the Royal Field Artillery now. He was away at s...o...b..ryness.