Vanamee, your talk is that of a foolish child.You are like one of the Corinthians to whom Paul wrote.Do you remember? Listen now.I can recall the words, and such words, beautiful and terrible at the same time, such a majesty.They march like soldiers with trumpets.'But some man will say'--as you have said just now--'How are the dead raised up? And with what body do they come? Thou fool! That which thou sowest is not quickened except it die, and that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain.It may chance of wheat, or of some other grain.But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body....It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.' It is because you are a natural body that you cannot understand her, nor wish for her as a spiritual body, but when you are both spiritual, then you shall know each other as you are--know as you never knew before.Your grain of wheat is your symbol of immortality.You bury it in the earth.It dies, and rises again a thousand times more beautiful.Vanamee, your dear girl was only a grain of humanity that we have buried here, and the end is not yet.But all this is so old, so old.The world learned it a thousand years ago, and yet each man that has ever stood by the open grave of any one he loved must learn it all over again from the beginning."Vanamee was silent for a moment, looking off with unseeing eyes between the trunks of the pear trees, over the little valley.
"That may all be as you say," he answered after a while."I have not learned it yet, in any case.Now, I only know that I love her--oh, as if it all were yesterday--and that I am suffering, suffering, always."He leaned forward, his head supported on his clenched fists, the infinite sadness of his face deepening like a shadow, the tears brimming in his deep-set eyes.A question that he must ask, which involved the thing that was scarcely to be thought of, occurred to him at this moment.After hesitating for a long moment, he said:
"I have been away a long time, and I have had no news of this place since I left.Is there anything to tell, Father? Has any discovery been made, any suspicion developed, as to--the Other?"The priest shook his head.
"Not a word, not a whisper.It is a mystery.It always will be."Vanamee clasped his head between his clenched fists, rocking himself to and fro.
"Oh, the terror of it," he murmured."The horror of it.And she--think of it, Sarria, only sixteen, a little girl; so innocent, that she never knew what wrong meant, pure as a little child is pure, who believed that all things were good; mature only in her love.And to be struck down like that, while your God looked down from Heaven and would not take her part." All at once he seemed to lose control of himself.One of those furies of impotent grief and wrath that assailed him from time to time, blind, insensate, incoherent, suddenly took possession of him.Atorrent of words issued from his lips, and he flung out an arm, the fist clenched, in a fierce, quick gesture, partly of despair, partly of defiance, partly of supplication.
"No, your God would not take her part.Where was God's mercy in that? Where was Heaven's protection in that? Where was the loving kindness you preach about? Why did God give her life if it was to be stamped out? Why did God give her the power of love if it was to come to nothing? Sarria, listen to me.Why did God make her so divinely pure if He permitted that abomination? Ha!"he exclaimed bitterly, "your God! Why, an Apache buck would have been more merciful.Your God! There is no God.There is only the Devil.The Heaven you pray to is only a joke, a wretched trick, a delusion.It is only Hell that is real."Sarria caught him by the arm.
"You are a fool and a child," he exclaimed, "and it is blasphemy that you are saying.I forbid it.You understand? I forbid it."Vanamee turned on him with a sudden cry.
"Then, tell your God to give her back to me!"Sarria started away from him, his eyes widening in astonishment, surprised out of all composure by the other's outburst.
Vanamee's swarthy face was pale, the sunken cheeks and deep-set eyes were marked with great black shadows.The priest no longer recognised him.The face, that face of the ascetic, lean, framed in its long black hair and pointed beard, was quivering with the excitement of hallucination.It was the face of the inspired shepherds of the Hebraic legends, living close to nature, the younger prophets of Israel, dwellers in the wilderness, solitary, imaginative, believing in the Vision, having strange delusions, gifted with strange powers.In a brief second of thought, Sarria understood.Out into the wilderness, the vast arid desert of the Southwest, Vanamee had carried his grief.For days, for weeks, months even, he had been alone, a solitary speck lost in the immensity of the horizons; continually he was brooding, haunted with his sorrow, thinking, thinking, often hard put to it for food.The body was ill-nourished, and the mind, concentrated forever upon one subject, had recoiled upon itself, had preyed upon the naturally nervous temperament, till the imagination had become exalted, morbidly active, diseased, beset with hallucinations, forever in search of the manifestation, of the miracle.It was small wonder that, bringing a fancy so distorted back to the scene of a vanished happiness, Vanamee should be racked with the most violent illusions, beset in the throes of a veritable hysteria.
"Tell your God to give her back to me," he repeated with fierce insistence.
It was the pitch of mysticism, the imagination harassed and goaded beyond the normal round, suddenly flipping from the circumference, spinning off at a tangent, out into the void, where all things seemed possible, hurtling through the dark there, groping for the supernatural, clamouring for the miracle.
