CHAPTER LIV.
Because of the haste and confusion brought about by conflicting school
tasks, I had not for many months found time to read my Bible; indeed I
scarcely had time for a morning prayer.
I still went to church regularly every Sunday; that is we all went
there together. I reverenced the family pew where we had assembled for
so many years; and apart from that reason I hold it dear because it is
associated in my memory with my mother.
It was at church, however, that my faith continued to receive its most
damaging blows; it was there that religion seemed a cold and
meaningless term to me. Usually the commentaries, the narrow human
reasoning and dissection took away from the beauty of the Bible and
the Gospels, and deprived them of their grandly solemn and exquisite
poetry. For a peculiar nature like mine it was very difficult to have
any one touch upon holy subjects (in such a way as did the minister)
without in some measure, in my opinion, desecrating them. The family
worship, held every evening, awakened in me the only religious
meditation that I now knew, for the voice that read or prayed was
exceedingly dear to me, and that changed everything.
My untiring contemplation of nature, and the reflections that I
indulged in in the presence of the fossils I had brought from the
mountains and cliffs, and placed in my museum, indicated that there
had been bred in me a vague and unconscious pantheism.
In short my deeply rooted and still-living faith was covered over with
encumbering earth. At times it threw out a green shoot, but for the
most part it lay like an entirely dead thing in the cold ground.
Moreover, I was too much troubled to pray; my conscience, still
restive and timid, gave me no rest during the time that I was on my
knees,--I always felt remorse gnaw at me then because of the slovenly
and half-done tasks, and because of the feelings of hate I had for the
"Big Ape" and the "Bull of Apis," emotions that I was obliged to hide
and disguise until I shuddered at the falsehoods I spoke and acted.
These things gave me poignant remorse and excruciating moral distress,
and to escape from these emotions I indulged in noisy sports and
foolish laughter; and when my conscience troubled me most, and I dared
not, therefore, appear before my parents, I took refuge with the
servants, played tennis, jumped the rope, or make a great racket.
For two or three years I had not spoken of a religious vocation, for I
now understood that such a desire was a thing of the past, was
impossible; but I had not found anything to put in its place. When
strangers asked what career I was being prepared for, my parents, a
little anxious in regard to my future, did not know what to say; and I
knew still less what to reply.
However my brother, who was also much concerned over my enigmatical
future, in one of those letters that seemed always to come from an
enchanted land, suggested, because of a certain facility in
mathematics and a certain precision of nature, certainly anomalies in
one of my temperament, that it might be well for me to study
engineering. And when they consulted me and I replied apathetically:
"Very well, it is agreeable enough to me," the matter seemed
satisfactorily settled.
I would need to spend a little more than a year at a polytechnic
school in order to prepare myself. To be there or elsewhere, what
difference did it make to me? . . . When I contemplated the men of a
certain age who surrounded me, those occupying the most honorable
positions, who had every claim to respect and consideration, I would
say to myself: "It will some day be necessary for me to live a useful,
sedate life in a given place and fixed sphere as they do, and to grow
old as they are--and that is all!" And a bitter hopelessness
overwhelmed me as I brooded on the thought; I yearned for the
impossible; I longed most of all to remain a child forever, and the
reflection that the years were fleeing, and that, whether I would or
would not, I must become a man, was anguish to me.
