Whitewash

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 851, 20 December 1929, Page 3 (Supplement)

Whitewash

I ♦ By '

K. M. KNIGHT

l-T, * said Holder, "we disagreed f about religion. It was no use mv talking to hint. We always crashed S' on the same issue We rutile I right up against this point. Wright would agree that the churches had fallen a bit flat, lately; ever since the Middle Ages, in fact; ever since they had started to get broader. But he blamed the fact of their having widened out. You couldn’t have unity, and solidarity, he said, if you were going to admit any differences of opinion. It was better that there should be unity than dissension, even if unity meant shutting out much light. Rettev to lean on the light one had. than to risk it and lose it." “And your point was?" Nichols asked him "Just the opposite. In fact I went right back to the beginnings of things with Wright one night." The two men were sitting in Holder’s beautiful room. There was always an air of luxury about Holder. His books, his clothes, his music, his home, his mind—there was nothing shoddy üboiu any of them. He lived on a hill overlooking the city, and on nights like these, when there was moonlight to wash the earth and sliver the harbour. Nichols loved to sit by the open French doors and watch the lights twinkling across the dark stretch of trees that surrounded Holder's home. ’’And so you got right home with the man. eh? Got right down to fundamentals?" “We did. It was a night just like this one. about a month ago. Wright was getting the Christmas feeling—he’s a stickler for anniversaries of all kinds, you know, and acknowledging Christmas always seems to him to be a sacred duty as well as a pleasure. We talked a bit about prose yarns, and drama, and Wright got all hot about the gills over something I said about religion. I couldn’t help It. I said that religion was a heed of man’s, the same as romance, and love, and food and clothes. And I said that man made his religion to fill his wants, to over shadow his fears, and to answer the questings of his own mind. Take any religion you like—the serious, set, staid religion of the ancients, or the more easy going religions of today—they all promise men as certainties in the next world, the things they have wanted most in this one. What is more natural than that man should promise himself a land flowing with the suppressed desires of his heart? But Wright didn't see It this way.” “No. And you will never get anyone who will. Religion is, to the average man. a thing that grows in God’s mind, not in man’s.” “I don’t think so. God is older than our knowdedge of Him. He dates further back than the prophets, further back than their records of Him. He was old when this world was tossed off the sun. “That’s what gets me about "Wright," Holder said, suddenly leaning forward in his chair. “Hr dates God back about 7,000 years, just giving Him a few years to straighten out His limbs before Hr tried His hand at creating Adam and Eve. Good Bord, isn’t it bad enough to try to place the age of man, without guessing at the age of God?" “I don’t suppose he really thinks he is. He is just accepting a habit of thought.” “Yes. A habit. A bad habit of years; of taking his brain fuod ready digested for him. I wonder Wright’s mental machine doesn’t slop altogether." “You are too hard on Wright, Freddy. There are millions of men in the world who get on quite well, and don’t think any more than Wright does. After all, none of us knows much. We can only go on what we do know, and try to live up to it. It we live fair and square and clean we are doing our bit. Relief, after all. Is a small thing. Many of us, most of us, don’t know what we do believe. And if we did, we’d find that our beliefs, shed of their various names and dates and. differences, all boiled down to the same denominator.” There was a knock on the door. Nichols started, but checked himself. He glanced at Holder, but Holder only raised his eyebrows. He made no further sign. “Shall I, Holder?” “No. Leave it. It Is probably only my wife. If it is anyone else, they will knock again. My wife never disturbs me when I talk.” Nichols made a movement of irritation. Something in Holder’s voice grated on him. It was as though he had been sailing along a river in the moonlight, wrapped in a dream where there were only stars on the water, shining there, and the long dark shadows of overhanging trees; where there was only the moon’s long silver line of light in the boat’s course, when suddenly her keel had grated on rocks. But Holder went on imperturbably: “Many systems of religion have grown up since man first learned to write. Even before then. I suppose, there were gods who were not able to communicate themselves by means of the written word. Man has gone on knowing more about God. end more about Him. from the very earliest limes,

until today man’s God is quite a likeable creature, •fr-ho ha- even the intelligence to judge between the different religious sects, and to know the enemy from the enemy on a field of battle.” Nichols listened, in spite of himself. There was something so polished in Holder’s reasoning. It was like his life, and his home, and everything about him. People who said that Holder's wife had a rough time of it were probably jealous of Holder's success. All the same, Nichols wished that Holder had opened the door. It seemed ridiculous not to perform such an elementary act of courtesy. ■’Well, as 1 was saying,” Holder went on, ‘‘God has developed along with man for a long while now. But where I disagree so radically from AVright, from most men I have talked to, is here: Religion is more than 2,000 years old. Why, didn't Jesus Himself say: 'Before Abraham was, 1 Am. That is where I start my creed, if one could call it a creed. at it like this; before there were books in the world to record men's experiences, there were men; before there were men, needing, as they do, and always did, to look up to something higher than themselves, there was that something higher; before there were any systems of organised religion, there was beauty in the sky at sunset; there was music in the first wave that dashed over the rocks on coastlines widely removed from ours. Before there were churches. Nichols, there were forests of trees, and the wind moaning through them; there were clouds piled up like mountains, and rivers running, and wide seas. There was beauty before man could understand it, and there was life before man was a part of it. There was God before anyone knew about it, but God Himself. 'Before Abraham was. I Am.' Isn’t that plain enough? Even the mixing of the tenses, denying that time exists in the scheme of creation. I hate to think that we can measure the age of the universe. It is mere childish folly to attempt it. We know nothing of our own planet, let alone others that are a part of creation.” “You would take a great deal of the beauty out of life. Holder,” Nichols said quietly. “Men love their creeds and dogmas, patched up by so many holy fingers. There is great beauty In the things men have made, bit at a time, out of their growing understanding. Think of losing the old saints, and getting nothing of their contribution to religion. AVe couldn’t do without Peter, and Paul, and Brother Lawrence and St. Francis.” “We wouldn’t be doing without them, or any of the holy men of any of the ages. AVe would only be taking off the whitewash that creeds have put across the face of religion since the days of the old prophets. There has been too much attention paid to the prophecies of men, and too little to the realities of God. “Look here,” Holder said, moving his chair a little nearer to Nichols, "Religion is all whitewash today. People are afraid to look things in the face. They like to get behind systems that, cover ur their real instincts and desires, and make them look pretty. Take many of the men you know——real bad eggs, ashamed to meet themselves after dark—aren’t they pillars of the church? It whitewashes them over, to feel that they have an organised system of whitewash behind them. They won’t be asked any inconvenient questions, their real motives in life will be covered up and glossed over, and they will be able to live an elaborate system of«pretence.” Nichols shook his head, slowly, but he said no word. There was something about Holder that fascinated him. He was talking bunk, but under it all there was a mighty grain of truth. If anyone else had told him these things, he might have listened from a different motive. But he felt that Holder was making use of him to try out a new philosophy. Yet he seemed sincere enough. If there was anything in Holder that didn’t ring true, Nichols did but sense it. He couldn’t have told what it was, or where it lay. “Tbis hatred of truth gets me,” Holder was saying. “It is ridiculous of man not to admit that God is older, wiser, than he is himself. It is equally ridiculous to erect Jesus, who pointed ail the while to the Father AVho sent Him, as a barrier between oneself and that Father. *. . . Before Abraham was, lAm. . . ’ I’d like to see men get back to that primitive understanding of God; an understanding of God, as the First Great Cause, the Only Creator in the universe, as the One and Only Beginning, and the One Source of all life. “Back of everything,” Holder said, “is justice. If you cut out man’s idea of justice from the picture, and go back to God’s —right back to the beginning of life, as far as we can go; back beyond the time when Jesus was born under that great white star, isn’t it easier to understand what the Christ meant by loving one’s enemies, and being brother to the sea? Life must be seen whole, not as dating from the birth of Christ.” There' came again at the door that quiet insistent knock. Nichols was on his feet to let the- intruder in, but Holder didn’t even hear it. A deep flush spread over Nichol’s face. “Holder," he began. “There is someone . . ." “Yes? I said it was likely to be my wife. As I was saying, Nichols, back of all these things we can see, all we can feel, all we know, is some great power that never had its birth in human understanding. Life itself, Nichols, never had a beginning, and any attempt ou our parts to arrange a calendar littered with dates is sheer futility. Man is greater than he knows, greater than he dreams, greater than the God he has pictured for himself. Jesus the Christ told us that.” Nichols sat quietly and watched the lights twinkling out .across the harbour. There was moonlight down there in the garden, and great pools of shadow beneath each tree; there was a wind moving the trees to music, and bearing the scent of flowers down into toe hollow at the foot of Holder's garden. "Lift, is a great thing, Nichols,” Holder said, “if you get to seeing it whole. If you get to seeing yourself as standing alongside every other created thing, and taking no account o? the barriers that man has built up between himself and God, it is a wonderful thing. If you take no notice of the creeds, and the whitewash that covers up reality and makes powerful truths into harmless trivialities, it is a great pleasure to be alive.” Still Nichols made no reply. There was growing on him a sense of dis-ease in Holder’s presence. .He wished he could get away. It was amounting almost to some strange fear, like a childish nightmare. He felt that at any minute he might, find himself sitting, not in a soft chair overlooking a garden full of moonlight, but on the edge of some new and terrifying planet, with his legs dangling in space and eternity all arojind him. Holder, sitting beside him, had become a figure of enormous proportions, threatening him. At any moment this gigantic figure, pitiless, inhuman, might push him off the edge of the planet, and he might find himself falling, falling through an interminable, starlit space. He moved uneasily. He fancied he heard someone in the hall outside the door, and once he thought he heard the sound of sobbing. If only the man would open the door, his fear would vanish. It was absurd, this talking of first great, causes, while there was someone outside the door wanting to come in. “Pity, and beauty, and Io' r e,” Holder was saying, “all have come to mean more to us since the birth of Christ. We should really look upon Christmas time as the birthday of pity and love, 1 think, tor before Christ, men knew little of love.” Nichols was not listening. There was surging about him this nameless, absurd fear He still saw himself sitting on the edge cl this strange planet, with the black doptns beneath him. Again someone knocked on the door, and this time Nichols sprang to his fec-t. “For the love of God.” he said, "open that door. Open it—do your hear ? Do you thir k that I can sit here and talk of philosophies aid creeds and know that there is someone waiting on the other side of a closed doer?” He was trembling like a child. Holder looked at him. a trifle amused! “Well,” he said, “there is no need to get upset about it. It is not the first time people have had to wait for me. 1 hate being disturbed l when I have friends visiting me.” ■ Nichols came and stood beside him, looking

down into the man’s face. His own face was set like a white mask. “Either you will open that door immediately, or I will put my boot through your face. Do you understand?” "No, I don’t.” Nichols thought that Holder looked at him with eyes as cool and grey as the barrel of a gun. He wondered why he had never noticed before that Holder had steely eyes. He followed Holder to the door. With his hand on the knob Holder turned and smiled at him. Then he opened the door. There was only a woman there —a little broken woman, crying. “Oh Fred,” she said, “I knocked before. You should have opened the door. You should have come. An hour ago I might have saved her.” “What are you talking about? Saved who?” “Myra. My baby . . . her throat . . . diphtheria ... Oh my God, you could have got me a doctor.” Holder looked at his wife as she leant against the wall for support. She stared back at him, fascinated, as Nichols had been; fascinated, as a rabbit looking into the eyes of a stoat. “You could have come to me,” he said. She laughed. “After what happened once before?” The woman laughed in his face —-wild, hysterical laughter. “Well, she’s dead now,” she said, and laughed again. Nichols felt that he had his feet on the earth again. He looked at Holder, and he fancied be could see the whitewash crumbling off him as it does off a shrunken wall. It was peeling off him. showing the bare boards underneath . . . He never knew how he got out into the road, but there was moonlight about him, and a scent of flowers, borne by the wind from Holder's garden .... K. M. KNIGHT