The Lifted Bandage | Page 4

he had been trained, from which he had broken free only five years before. He had faced the batteries of the two older brains at that time, and come out with the brightness of his new-found faith untarnished, but without, he remembered, scratching the armor of their profound doubt in everything. One could see, looking at the slender black figure, at the visionary gaze of the gray wide eyes, at the shape of the face, broad-browed, ovalled, that this man's psychic make-up must lift him like wings into an atmosphere outside a material, outside even an intellectual world. He could breathe freely only in a spiritual air, and things hard to believe to most human beings were, perhaps, his every-day thoughts. He caught a quick breath of excitement as it flashed to his brain that now, possibly, was coming the moment when he might justify his life, might help this man whom he loved, to peace. The breath he caught was a prayer; his strong, nervous fingers trembled. He spoke in a tone whose concentration lifted the eyes below him, that brooded, stared.
"I can't bear it to stand by and see you go under, when there's help close. You said that if you could believe that they were living, that you would have them again, you would be perfectly happy no matter how many years you must wait. They are living as sure as I am here, and as sure as Jack was here, and Jack's mother. They are living still. Perhaps they're close to you now. You've bound a bandage over your eyes, you've covered the vision of your spirit, so that you can't see; but that doesn't make nothingness of God's world. It's there--here--close, maybe. A more real world than this--this little thing." With a boyish gesture he thrust behind him the universe. "What do we know about the earth, except effects upon our consciousness? It's all a matter of inference--you know that better than I. The thing we do know beyond doubt is that we are each of us a something that suffers and is happy. How is that something the same as the body--the body that gets old and dies--how can it be? You can't change thought into matter--not conceivably--everybody acknowledges that. Why should the thinking part die then, because the material part dies? When the organ is broken is the organist dead? The body is the hull, the covering, and when it has grown useless it will fall away and the live seed in it will stand free to sunlight and air--just at the beginning of life, as a plant is when it breaks through earth in the spring. It's the seed in the ground, and it's the flower in the sunlight, but it's the same thing--the same life--it is--it is." The boy's intensity of conviction shot like a flame across the quiet room.
"It is the same thing with us too. The same spirit-substance underlies both worlds and there is no separation in space, only in view-point. Life goes on--it's just transfigured. It's as if a bandage should be lifted from our eyes and we should suddenly see things in whose presence we had been always."
The rushing, eager voice stopped. He bent and laid his hand on the older man's and stared at his face, half hidden now in the shadows of the lowering fire. There was no response. The heavy head did not lift and the attitude was unstirred, hopeless. As if struck by a blow he sprang erect and his fingers shut hard. He spoke as if to himself, brokenly.
"He does not believe--a single word--I say. I can't help him--I can't help him."
Suddenly the clinched fists flung out as if of a power not their own, and his voice rang across the room.
"God!" The word shot from him as if a thunderbolt fell with it. "God! Lift the bandage!"
A log fell with a crash into the fire; great battling shadows blurred all the air; he was gone.
The man, startled, drew up his bent shoulders, and pushed back a lock of gray hair and stared about, shaking, bewildered. The ringing voice, the word that had flashed as if out of a larger atmosphere--the place was yet full of these, and the shock of it added a keenness to his misery. His figure swung sideways; he fell on the cushions of the sofa and his arms stretched across them, his gray head lying heedless; sobs that tore roots came painfully; it was the last depth. Out of it, without his volition, he spoke aloud.
"God, God, God!" his voice said, not prayerfully, but repeating the sound that had shocked his torture. The word wailed, mocked, reproached, defied--and yet it was a prayer. Out of a soul in mortal stress that word comes sometimes driven by a