Produced by David Widger
By Winston Churchill
Life had indeed become complicated, paradoxical. He, John Hodder, aclergyman, rector of St. John's by virtue of not having resigned, hadentered a restaurant of ill repute, had ordered champagne for anabandoned woman, and had no sense of sin when he awoke the next morning!The devil, in the language of orthodox theology, had led him there. Hehad fallen under the influence of the tempter of his youth, and all inhim save the carnal had been blotted out.
More paradoxes! If the devil had not taken possession of him and led himthere, it were more than probable that he could never have succeeded inany other way in getting on a footing of friendship with this woman, KateMarcy. Her future, to be sure, was problematical. Here was no simple,sentimental case he might formerly have imagined, of trusting innocencebetrayed, but a mixture of good and evil, selfishness and unselfishness.And she had, in spite of all, known the love which effaces self! Couldthe disintegration, in her case, be arrested?
Gradually Hodder was filled with a feeling which may be called amazementbecause, although his brain was no nearer to a solution than before, hewas not despondent. For a month he had not permitted his mind to dwellon the riddle; yet this morning he felt stirring within him a new energyfor which he could not account, a hope unconnected with any mentalprocess! He felt in touch, once more, faintly but perceptibly, withsomething stable in the chaos. In bygone years he had not seen thechaos, but the illusion of an orderly world, a continual succession ofsunrises, 'couleur de rose', from the heights above Bremerton. Now werethe scales fallen from his eyes; now he saw the evil, the injustice, thedespair; felt, in truth, the weight of the sorrow of it all, and yet thatsorrow was unaccountably transmuted, as by a chemical process, intosomething which for the first time had a meaning—he could not say whatmeaning. The sting of despair had somehow been taken out of it, and itremained poignant!
Not on the obsession of the night before, when he had walked down DaltonStreet and beheld it transformed into a realm of adventure, but upon hispast life did he look back now with horror, upon the even tenor of thosedays and years in the bright places. His had been the highroad of afancied security, from which he had feared to stray, to seek his Godacross the rough face of nature, from black, forgotten capons to theflying peaks in space. He had feared reality. He had insisted upongazing at the universe through the coloured glasses of an outworntheology, instead of using his own eyes.
So he had left the highroad, the beaten way of salvation many others haddeserted, had flung off his spectacles, had plunged into reality, to bescratched and battered, to lose his way. Not until now had something ofgrim zest come to him, of an instinct which was the first groping of avision, as to where his own path might lie. Through what thickets andover what mountains he knew not as yet—nor cared to know. He feltresistance, whereas on the highroad he had felt none. On the highroadhis cry had gone unheeded and unheard, yet by holding out his hand in thewilderness he had helped another, bruised and bleeding, to her feet!Salvation, Let it be what it might be, he would go on, stumbling and