"You get terribly sarcastic at times, Miss Carr," Thompson complained.
"A man can preach the Gospel without losing his manhood."
"If he had any clear conception of manhood I don't see how he could
devote himself to preaching as a profession," she said composedly. "Of
course, it's perhaps an excellent means of livelihood, but rather a
parasitic means, don't you think?"
"When Christ came among men He was reviled and despised," Mr. Thompson
declared impressively.
"Do you consider yourself the prototype of Christ?" the girl inquired
mockingly. "Why, if the man of Galilee could be reincarnated the first
thing He would attack would be the official expounders of Christianity,
with their creeds and formalisms, their temples and their self-seeking.
The Nazarene was a radical. The average preacher is an out-and-out
reactionary."
"How do you know?" he challenged boldly. "According to your own account
of your life so far, you have never had opportunity to find the truth or
falsity of such a sweeping statement. You've always lived--" he looked
about the enfolding woods--"how can one know what the world outside of
Lake Athabasca is, if one has never been there?"
She laughed.
"One can't know positively," she said. "Not from personal experience.
But one can read eagerly, and one can think about what one reads, and
one can draw pretty fair conclusions from history, from what wise men,
real thinkers, have written about this big world one has never seen. And
the official exponents of theology show up rather poorly as helpful
social factors, so far as my study of sociology has gone."
"You seem to have a grudge against the cloth," Thompson hazarded a
shrewd guess. "I wonder why?"
"I'll tell you why," the girl said--and she laughed a little
self-consciously. "My reason tells me it's a silly way to feel. I can
never quite consider theology and the preachers from the same
dispassionate plane that dad can. There's a foolish sense of personal
grievance. Dad had it once, too, but he got over it long ago. I never
have. Perhaps you'll understand if I tell you. My mother was a vain,
silly, emotional sort of person, it seems, with some wonderful capacity
for attracting men. Dad was passionately fond of her. When I was about
three years old my foolish mother ran away with a young minister. After
living with him about six months, wandering about from place to place,
she drowned herself."
Thompson listened to this recital of human frailty in wonder at the calm
way in which Sophie Carr could speak to him, a stranger, of a tragedy so
intimate. She stopped a second.
"Dad was all broken up about it," she continued. "He loved my mother
with all her weaknesses--and he's a man with a profound knowledge of and
tolerance for human weaknesses. I daresay he would have been quite
willing to consider the past a blank if she had found out she cared most
for him, and had come back. But, as I said, she drowned herself. We
lived in the eastern States. It simply unrooted dad. He took me and came
away up here and buried himself. Incidentally he buried me too. And I
don't want to be buried. I resent being buried. I hope I shall not
always be a prisoner in these woods. And I grow more and more resentful
against that preacher for giving my father a jolt that made a recluse of
him. Don't you see? That one thing has colored my personal attitude
toward preachers as a class. I can never meet a minister without
thinking of that episode which has kept me here where I never see
another white woman, and very seldom a man. It's really a weak spot in
me, holding a grudge like that. One wouldn't condemn carpenters as a
body because one carpenter botched a house. And still--"