If mans man-made God pleases him, let him worship him. That kind of deity does not please me. I no longer care whether He pleases me or not. He no longer exists as far as I am concerned.
Brisson, much interested, asked Palla whether the void left by discredited Divinity did not bewilder her.
There is no void, said the girl. It is already filled with my own kind of God, with millions of Godsmy own fellow creatures.
Your fellow beings?
Yes.
You think your fellow creatures can fill that void?
They have filled it.
Brisson nodded reflectively: I see, he said politely, you intend to devote your life to the cult of your fellow creatures.
No, I do not, said the girl tranquilly, but I intend to love them and live my life that way unhampered. She added almost fiercely: And I shall love them the more because of their ignorant faith in an all-seeing and tender and just Providence which does not exist! I shall love them because of their tragic deception and their helplessness and their heart-breaking unconsciousness of it all.
Ilse Westgard smiled and patted Pallas cheeks: All roads lead ultimately to God, she said, and yours is a direct route though you do not know it.
I tell you I have nothing in common with the God you mean, flashed out the girl.
Brisson, though interested, kept one grey eye on duty, ever hopeful of wolves. It was snowing hard nowa perfect geography scene, lacking only the wolves; but the étape was only half finished. There might be hope.
The rather amazing conversation in the sleigh also appealed to him, arousing all his instincts of a veteran newspaper man, as well as his deathless curiositythat perpetual flame which alone makes any intelligence vital.
Also, his passion for all documentsthose sewed under his underclothes, as well as these two specimens of human documentswere now keeping his lively interest in life unimpaired.
Loss of faith, he said to Palla, and inclined toward further debate, must be a very serious thing for any woman, I imagine.
I havent lost faith in love, she said, smilingly aware that he was encouraging discussion.
But you say you have lost faith in spiritual love
I did not say so. I did not mean the other kind of love when I said that love is sufficient religion for me.
But spiritual love means Deity
It does not! Can you imagine the all-powerful father watching his child die, horriblyand never lifting a finger! Is that love? Is that power? Is that Deity?
To penetrate the Divine mind and its motives for not intervening is impossible for us
That is priests prattle! Also, I care nothing now about Divine motives. Motives are human, not divine. So is policy. That is why the present Pope is unworthy of respect. He let his flock die. He deserted his Cardinal. He let the hun go unrebuked. He betrayed Christ. I care nothing about any mind weak enough, politic enough, powerless enough, to ignore love for motives!
One loves, or one does not love. Loving is giving The girl sat up in the sleigh and the thickening snowflakes drove into her flushed face. Loving is giving, she repeated, giving life to love; giving up life for lovegiving! giving! always giving!always forgiving! That is love! That is the only God!the indestructible, divine God within each one of us!
Brisson appraised her with keen and scholarly eyes. Yet, he said pleasantly, you do not forgive God for the death of your friend. Dont you practise your faith?
The girl seemed nonplussed; then a brighter tint stained her cheeks under the ragged sheepskin cap.
Forgive God! she cried. If there really existed that sort of God, what would be the use of forgiving what He does? Hed only do it again. That is His record! she added fiercely, indifference to human agony, utter silence amid lamentations, stone deaf, stone dumb, motionless. It is not in me to fawn and lick the feet of such an image. No! It is not in me to believe it alive, either. And I do not! But I know that love lives: and if there be any gods at all, it must be that they are without number, and that their substance is of that immortality born inside us, and which we call love! Otherwise, to me, now, symbols, signs, saints, rituals, vowsthese things, in my mind, are all scrapped together as junk. Only, in me, the warm faith remainsthat within me there lives a god of sortsperhaps that immortal essence called a souland that its only name is love. And it has given us only one law to live bythe Law of Love!
Brissons cigar had gone out. He examined it attentively and found it would be worth relighting when opportunity offered.
Then he smiled amiably at Palla Dumont:
What you say is very interesting, he remarked. But he was too polite to add that it had been equally interesting to numberless generations through the many, many centuries during which it all had been said before, in various ways and by many, many people.
Lying back in his furs reflectively, and deriving a rather cold satisfaction from his cigar butt, he let his mind wander back through the history of theocracy and of mundane philosophy, mildly amused to recognize an ancient theory resurrected and made passionately original once more on the red lips of this young girl.
But the Law of Love is not destined to be solved so easily; nor had it ever been solved in centuries dead by Egyptian, Mongol, or Greekby priest or princess, prophet or singer, or by any vestal or acolyte of love, sacred or profane.
No philosophy had solved the problem of human woe; no theory convinced. And Brisson, searching leisurely the forgotten corridors of treasured lore, became interested to realise that in all the history of time only the deeds and example of one man had invested the human theory of divinity with any real vitalityand that, oddly enough, what this girl preachedwhat she demanded of divinityhad been both preached and practised by that one man aloneJesus Christ.
Turning involuntarily toward Palla, he said: Cant you believe in Him, either?
She said: He was one of the Gods. But He was no more divine than any in whom love lives. Had He been more so, then He would still intervene to-day! He is powerless. He lets things happen. And we ourselves must make it up to the world by love. There is no other divinity to intervene except only our own hearts.
But that was not, as the young girl supposed, her fixed faith, definite, ripened, unshakable. It was a phase already in process of fading into other phases, each less stable, less definite, and more dangerous than the other, leaving her and her ardent mind and heart always unconsciously drifting toward the simple, primitive and natural goal for which all healthy bodies are created and destinedthe instinct of the human being to protect and perpetuate the race by the great Law of Love.
Brissons not unkindly cynicism had left his lips edged with a slight smile. Presently he leaned back beside Estridge and said in a low voice:
Purely pathological. Ardent religious instinct astray and running wild in consequence of nervous dislocations due to shock. Merely over-storage of superb physical energy. Intellectual and spiritual wires overcrowded. Too many volts That girl ought to have been married early. Only a lot of children can keep her properly occupied. Only outlet for her kind. Interesting case. Contrast to the Swedish girl. Fine, handsome, normal animal that. She could pick me up between thumb and finger. Great girl, Estridge.
She is really beautiful, whispered Estridge, glancing at Ilse.
Yes. So is Mont Blanc. That sort of beautythe super-sort. But its the other who is pathologically interesting because her wires are crossed and theres a short circuit somewhere. Who comes in contact with her had better look out.
Shes wonderfully attractive.
She is. But if she doesnt disentangle her wires and straighten out shell burn out Whats that ahead? A wolf!
It was the rest house at the end of the étapea tiny, distant speck on the snowy plain.
Brisson leaned over and caught Pallas eye. Both smiled.
Well, he said, for a girl who doesnt believe in anything, you seem cheerful enough.
I am cheerful because I do believe in everything and in everybody.
Brisson laughed: You shouldnt, he said. Great mistake. Trust in God and believe nobodythats the idea. Then get married and close your eyes and see what God will send you!
The girl threw back her pretty head and laughed.
Marriage and priests are of no consequence, she said, but I adore little children!
CHAPTER II
They were a weary, half-starved and travel-stained quartette when the Red Guards stopped them for the last time in Russia and passed them through, warning them that the White Guards would surely do murder if they caught them.
The next day the White Guards halted them, but finally passed them through, counselling them to keep out of the way of the Red Guards if they wished to escape being shot at sight.
In the neat, shiny, carefully scrubbed little city of Helsingfors they avoided the huns by some miracleone of Brissons customary miraclesbut another little company of Americans and English was halted and detained, and one harmless Yankee among them was arrested and packed off to a hun prison.
Also, a large and nervous party of fugitives of mixed nationalities and professionsconsuls, chargés, attachés, and innocent, agitated citizenswas summarily grabbed and ordered into indefinite limbo.
But Brissons daily miracles continued to materialise, even in the land of the Finn. By train, by sleigh, by boat, his quartette floundered along toward safety, and finally emerged from the white hell of the Red people into the sub-arctic sunEstridge with painfully scanty luggage, Palla Dumont with none at all, Ilse Westgard carrying only her Cossack saddle-bags, and Brisson with his damning papers still sewed inside his clothes, and owing Estridge ten dollars for not getting murdered.
They all had become excellent comrades during those anxious days of hunger, fatigue and common peril, but they were also a little tired of one another, as becomes all friends when subjected to compulsory companionship for an unreasonable period.
And even when one is beginning to fall in love, one can become surfeited with the beloved under such circumstances.
Besides, Estridges budding sentiment for Ilse Westgard, and her wholesome and girlish inclination for him, suffered an early chill. For the poor child had acquired trench pets from the Cossacks, and had passed on a few to Estridge, with whom she had been constantly seated on the front seat.
Being the frankest thing in Russia, she told him with tears in her blue eyes; and they had a most horrid time of it before they came finally to a sanitary plant erected to attend to such matters.
Episodes of that sort discourage sentiment; so does cold, hunger and discomfort incident on sardine-like promiscuousness.
Nobody in the party desired to know more than they already knew concerning anybody else. In fact, there was little more to know, privacy being impossible. And the ever instinctive hostility of the two sexes, always and irrevocably latent, became vaguely apparent at moments.
Common danger swept it away at times; but reaction gradually revealed again what is born under the human skinthe paradox called sex-antipathy. And yet the men in the party would not have hesitated to sacrifice their lives in defence of these women, nor would the women have faltered under the same test.
Brisson was the philosophical stoic of the quartette. Estridge groused sometimes. Palla, when she thought herself unnoticed, camouflaged her face in her furs and cried now and then. And occasionally Ilse Westgard tried the patience of the others by her healthy capacity for unfeigned laughtersometimes during danger-laden and inopportune moments, and once in the shocking imminence of death itself.
As, for example, in a vile little village, full of vermin and typhus, some hunger-crazed peasants, armed with stolen rifles and ammunition, awoke them where they lay on the straw of a stable, cursed them for aristocrats, and marched them outside to a convenient wall, at the foot of which sprawled half a dozen blood-soaked, bayoneted and bullet-riddled landlords and land owners of the district.
And things had assumed a terribly serious aspect when, to their foolish consternation, the peasants discovered that their purloined cartridges did not fit their guns.
Then, in the very teeth of death, Ilse threw back her blond head and laughed. And there was no mistaking the genuineness of the girls laughter.
Some of their would-be executioners laughed too;the hilarity spread. It was all over; they couldnt shoot a girl who laughed that way. So somebody brought a samovar; tea was boiled; and they all went back to the barn and sat there drinking tea and swapping gossip and singing until nearly morning.
That was a sample of their narrow escapes. But Brissons only comment before he went to sleep was that Estridge would probably owe him a dollar within the next twenty-four hours.
They had a hair-raising time in Helsingfors. On one occasion, German officers forced Pallas door at night, and the girl became ill with fear while soldiers searched the room, ordering her out of bed and pushing her into a corner while they ripped up carpets and tore the place to pieces in a swinishly ferocious search for information.
But they did nothing worse to her, and, for some reason, left the hotel without disturbing Brisson, whose room adjoined and who sat on the edge of his bed with an automatic in each handa dangerous opportunist awaiting events and calmly determined to do some recruiting for hell if the huns harmed Palla.
She never knew that. And the worst was over now, and the Scandinavian border not far away. And in twenty-four hours they were overBrisson impatient to get his papers to Washington and planning to start for England on a wretched little packet-boat, in utter contempt of mines, U-boats, and the icy menace of the North Sea.
As for the others, Estridge decided to cable and await orders in Copenhagen; Palla, to sail for home on the first available Danish steamer; Ilse, to go to Stockholm and eventually decide whether to volunteer once more as a soldier of the proletariat or to turn propagandist and carry the true gospel to America, where, she had heard, the ancient liberties of the great Democracy were becoming imperilled.
The day before they parted company, these four people, so oddly thrown together out of the boiling cauldron of the Russian Terror, arranged to dine together for the last time.
Theirs were the appetites of healthy wolves; theirs was the thirst of the marooned on waterless islands; and theirs, too, was the feverish gaiety of those who had escaped great peril by land and sea; and who were still physically and morally demoralized by the glare and the roar of the hellish conflagration which was still burning up the world around them.
So they met in a private dining room of the hotel for dinner on the eve of separation.