Then for a long moment he and I sat again involved in the emptiness of
the universe that Tristan's love song had opened for us, and I knew that
with ruthless feet I had entered his Holy of Holies and was being
allowed to stand across the threshold.
"Forgive me," I gasped.
"I never felt that I could tell it before," he said, slowly, and the
bounds of the emptiness retreated still further away as he turned so
that he sat facing me and again bent his dull gold head closer to mine.
In a second I knew why in my mind I had been calling him a Harpeth
jaguar. It was just my pictorial expression for the word freedom, the
freedom that comes from power. I knew that mentally and bodily I was
looking upon the first free man I had ever encountered, and I was
abashed.
"Don't tell me," I said, with a gentleness in my voice I had never heard
before, and that came from something that I felt to be strangely like
meekness, though I had never before met that emotion in myself.
"You know the romance of my father's life," the soft voice went on,
speaking as if I had not interrupted him, "but nobody knows the tragedy.
Love for my mother came upon him like an arrow shot out of ambush, and
he married into a worldly, pleasure-loving, agnostic circle of people
who all adored and flattered him until he--he became confused and
doubting. He had transgressed the law: 'yoke not yourselves with
unbelievers,' and he suffered. She never understood. It killed him, and
when he had been dead nearly twenty years I found the diary he kept the
months before he died. It was last year, just after her death. It was a
cry to me, who at that time was a mere babe, and it--it lighted the
flame he had almost let go out. As I read, the apostolic call came to me
and I answered. I was starting to the front in France, and I went on. My
year there was a series of experiences that gave me my surety. One day
it came more clearly than ever. I had gone out into one of the trenches
of the first line, because I am so strong that I can carry any man back
to the stretchers across my back or in my arms. I have carried two at a
time. There were nineteen men in the trench, and I made the twentieth.
Suddenly a machine gun found the range and mowed them all down like
cornstalks or wheat heads. Only I was left standing, bleeding under my
left ribs. I raised my voice and praised God for my surety of
immortality, and then fell. While I was practically dying in the
hospital with a clip in my lung I got suddenly and unaccountably well
and strong, and felt I must come back to try and help others to see what
we must see to assure every man of his immortality. When the race
awakens to that fact there will be no more use for machine guns. I may
not help much, but I can only try. Perhaps I do only work through the
emotions as yet, but I believe that my ministry will have its fruits. I
can wait." And the humility and patience in his voice beat against my
heart and bruised it so that I cried out.