Wilfrid Cumbermede

‘There! I told you so!’ cried Charley. Don’t you see? He is the most cunning arguer—beats Despair in the Fairy Queen hollow!’

By this time, either attracted by the stately flow of Sir Thomas’s speech, or by the tone of our disputation, the two girls had drawn nearer, and were listening.

‘What do you mean, Charley?’ I said, perceiving, however, the hold I had by my further quotation given him.

‘First of all, he tells you the easiest way of dying, and then informs you that it ends all your troubles. He is too cunning to say in so many words that there is no hereafter, but what else can he wish you to understand when he says that in dying we have the advantage over the evil spirits, who cannot by death get rid of their sufferings? I will read this book,’ he added, closing it and putting it in his pocket.

‘I wish you would,’ I said: ‘for although I confess you are logically right in your conclusions, I know Sir Thomas did not mean anything of the sort. He was only misled by his love of antithesis into a hasty and illogical remark. The whole tone of his book is against such a conclusion. Besides, I do not doubt he was thinking only of good people, for whom he believed all suffering over at their death.’

‘But I don’t see, supposing he does believe in immortality, why you should be so anxious about his orthodoxy on the other point. Didn’t Dr Donne, as good a man as any, I presume, argue on the part of the suicide?’

‘I have not read Dr Donne’s essay, but I suspect the obliquity of it has been much exaggerated.’

‘Why should you? I never saw any argument worth the name on the other side. We have plenty of expressions of horror—but those are not argument. Indeed, the mass of the vulgar are so afraid of dying that, apparently in terror lest suicide should prove infectious, they treat in a brutal manner the remains of the man who has only had the courage to free himself from a burden too hard for him to bear. It is all selfishness—nothing else. They love their paltry selves so much that they count it a greater sin to kill oneself than to kill another man—which seems to me absolutely devilish. Therefore, the vox populi, whether it be the vox Dei or not, is not nonsense merely, but absolute wickedness. Why shouldn’t a man kill himself?’

Clara was looking on rather than listening, and her interest seemed that of amusement only. Mary’s eyes were wide-fixed on the face of Charley, evidently tortured to find that to the other enormities of his unbelief was to be added the justification of suicide. His habit of arguing was doubtless well enough known to her to leave room for the mitigating possibility that he might be arguing only for argument’s sake, but what he said could not but be shocking to her upon any supposition.

I was not ready with an answer. Clara was the first to speak.

‘It’s a cowardly thing, anyhow,’ she said.

‘How do you make that out, Miss Clara?’ asked Charley. ‘I’m aware it’s the general opinion, but I don’t see it myself.’

‘It’s surely cowardly to run away in that fashion.’

‘For my part,’ returned Charley, ‘I feel that it requires more courage than I’ve got, and hence it comes, I suppose, that I admire any one who has the pluck.’

‘What vulgar words you use, Mr Charles!’ said Clara.

‘Besides,’ he went on, heedless of her remark, ‘a man may want to escape—not from his duties—he mayn’t know what they are—but from his own weakness and shame.’

‘But, Charley dear,’ said Mary, with a great light in her eyes, and the rest of her face as still as a sunless pond, ‘you don’t think of the sin of it. I know you are only talking, but some things oughtn’t to be talked of lightly.’

‘What makes it a sin? It’s not mentioned in the ten commandments,’ said Charley.

‘Surely it’s against the will of God, Charley dear.’

‘He hasn’t said anything about it, anyhow. And why should I have a thing forced upon me whether I will or not, and then be pulled up for throwing it away when I found it troublesome?’

‘Surely I don’t quite understand you, Charley.’

‘Well, if I must be more explicit—I was never asked whether I chose to be made or not. I never had the conditions laid before me. Here I am, and I can’t help myself—so far, I mean, as that here I am.’

‘But life is a good thing,’ said Mary, evidently struggling with an almost overpowering horror.

‘I don’t know that. My impression is that if I had been asked—’

‘But that couldn’t be, you know.’

‘Then it wasn’t fair. But why couldn’t I be made for a moment or two, long enough to have the thing laid before me, and be asked whether I would accept it or not? My impression is that I would have said—No, thank you; that is, if it was fairly put.’

I hastened to offer a remark, in the hope of softening the pain such flippancy must cause her.

‘And my impression is, Charley,’ I said, ‘that if such had been possible—’

‘Of course,’ he interrupted, ‘the God you believe in could have made me for a minute or two. He can, I suppose, unmake me now when he likes.’

‘Yes; but could he have made you all at once capable of understanding his plans, and your own future? Perhaps that is what he is doing now—making you, by all you are going through, capable of understanding them. Certainly the question could not have been put to you before you were able to comprehend it, and this may be the only way to make you able. Surely a being who could make you had a right to risk the chance, if I may be allowed such an expression, of your being satisfied in the end with what he saw to be good—so good indeed that, if we accept the New Testament story, he would have been willing to go through the same troubles himself for the same end.’

‘No, no; not the same troubles,’ he objected. ‘According to the story to which you refer, Jesus Christ was free from all that alone makes life unendurable—the bad inside you, that will come outside whether you will or not.’

‘I admit your objection. As to the evil coming out, I suspect it is better it should come out, so long as it is there. But the end is not yet; and still I insist the probability is that, if you could know it all now, you would say with submission, if not with hearty concurrence—“Thy will be done.”’

‘I have known people who could say that without knowing it all now, Mr Cumbermede,’ said Mary.

I had often called her by her Christian name, but she had never accepted the familiarity.

‘No doubt,’ said Charley, ‘but I’m not one of those.’

‘If you would but give in,’ said his sister, ‘you would—in the end, I mean—say, “It is well.” I am sure of that.’

‘Yes—perhaps I might—after all the suffering had been forced upon me, and was over at last—when I had been thoroughly exhausted and cowed, that is.’

‘Which wouldn’t satisfy any thinking soul, Charley—much less God,’ I said. ‘But if there be a God at all—’

Mary gave a slight inarticulate cry.

‘Dear Miss Osborne,’ I said, ‘I beg you will not misunderstand me. I cannot be sure about it, as you are—I wish I could—but I am not disputing it in the least; I am only trying to make my argument as strong as I can.—I was going to say to Charley—not to you—that, if there be a God, he would not have compelled us to be, except with the absolute fore-knowledge that, when we knew all about it, we would certainly declare ourselves ready to go through it all again if need should be, in order to attain the known end of his high calling.’

‘But isn’t it very presumptuous to assert anything about God which he has not revealed in his Word?’ said Mary, in a gentle, subdued voice, and looking at me with a sweet doubtfulness in her eyes.

‘I am only insisting on the perfection of God—as far as I can understand perfection,’ I answered.

‘But may not the perfection of God be something very different from anything we can understand?’

‘I will go further,’ I returned. ‘It must be something that we cannot understand—but different from what we can understand by being greater, not by being less.’

‘Mayn’t it be such that we can’t understand it at all?’ she insisted.

‘Then how should we ever worship him? How should we ever rejoice in him? Surely it is because you see God to be good—’

‘Or fancy you do,’ interposed Charley.

‘Or fancy you do,’ I assented, ‘that you love him—not merely because you are told he is good. The Fejee islander might assert his God to be good, but would that make you love him? If you heard that a great power, away somewhere, who had nothing to do with you at all, was very good, would that make you able to love him?’

‘Yes, it would,’ said Mary, decidedly. ‘It is only a good man who would see that God was good.’

‘There you argue entirely on my side. It must be because you supposed his goodness what you call goodness—not something else—that you could love him on testimony. But even then your love could not be of that mighty absorbing kind which alone you would think fit between you and your God. It would not be loving him with all your heart and soul and strength and mind—would it? It would be loving him second-hand—not because of himself, seen and known by yourself.’