Dr. Barton was still anxious. “Will you report direct to me, dear boy? I feel responsible to your father.”
“Certainly,” David said. “I realize that I am supposed to be helping you, sir.”
They shook hands and he left the close sweet air of the study and went into the outer freshness. It was one of the city’s rare days, the winds blew in from the sea and cleansed the streets of smoke and mist. He headed for the station, reaching it early enough to buy a couple of sandwiches for his luncheon later on in the hills. In the train the car was almost empty at this hour of the day, and he sat by a window and gazed at fleeting tenements and dirty streets, comparing them in his mind with the crowded sidewalks in Bombay and the dusty squalor of Indian villages. Why should his father dream of sending missionaries to India and China or to any part of the foreign world when here not five miles from his own door were heathen as valid as any to be found? He knew very well the answer to this. His father would declare again, as he had often declared before, that idleness, the fruit of laziness, was the sole cause for poverty in a rich country, and he would give himself as proof. Had he not been poor, the son of a country parson, and had he not raised himself without help until today he was one of the richest men in the world? What he had done others could do in any free and Christian country.
“But could I?” David inquired of himself. He did not believe that he could, if he had been born in a filthy room level with the track. He looked into one sordid cell after another as the train rolled by and he saw dirty children, frowsy women, unshaven men, broken furniture. Had he been born there he could not have pulled himself out of ft. Crushed, by such fate, who would have delivered him? No one, for no one came to deliver such people.
He turned his troubled mind away from a problem he could not solve, and was grateful that the tenements gave way to scattered streets and then to the pleasant countryside. Here was something better to be seen, indeed, than the countryside of India. Instead of dry and barren fields, dust beneath the heat of a burning sun, here were green crops, trees and grass and comfortable farmhouses, barns to store harvests and place for children’s play. Why should not a practical religion destroy the tenements? But he knew that his father would say that tenements could not be destroyed. If they were, others would spring up to take their place. In their separate ways Darya and his father were alike. Darya would say that tenements did not matter. They were man’s fate, but man’s abodes were transient, and there was no reason why a tenement could not be as suitable as a mansion, a habitation for a saint.
Nor would Darya consider the obvious retort. “But you, Darya, live in a mansion and it is easy for you to talk of a tenement as suitable. You will never live in a tenement.”
And Darya would say in his laughing fashion, “Ah, but I was born in a mansion, and I live only where I was born. Had I been born in a tenement, then I would live there. It is meaningless, this difference between mansion and tenement, so long as I am one with God.”
His father, David knew very well, did not dream of destroying poverty, which was the result of what he would call shiftlessness. Poverty was a very proper punishment for such behavior. His father believed that through the right religion civilization could develop which would provide opportunity for all, and then men like himself would rise as he had risen, and those who did not make use of opportunity were the surplus, the scum, useless except as they provided labor. That, in a few words, David thought grimly, was his father’s gospel. God was on the side of the strong.
And perhaps his father was right, and who could say he was not? Perhaps the battle was to the strong and the race to the swift.
III
AT MIDAFTERNOON DAVID LEFT the hilltop and walked down toward the river, the Hudson, at this distance from the city a wide and placid stream. He was hot, for he had chosen to walk instead of hiring a rig, and the coolness of the morning had changed to a still white heat under the blazing sun, and the thought of a swim in the river had become a necessity. He had found the site suggested by Dr. Barton, it was a beautiful place, he agreed, a low hilltop surrounded by higher mountains, facing the distant vista of the river. Yet it was strangely remote and silent, far from human life. He had eaten his sandwiches on the grassy flat, his back against a grey rock, his feet outstretched, and he had tried to imagine buildings, people, young men and their teachers, living here. It was too much like a monastery, he decided, too different from the crowded streets of Bombay and the tenements of New York, and he began to be troubled by the whole idea of the school which was to be a memorial to his mother.
How did men learn of God? How be born again? It would be easy to absorb the message of earth and sky, and creation might seem divine at this height, but would the lessons learned in such idyllic schooldays serve when the days were over? He searched thoughtfully his own experience of religion, nothing very valid, he feared, the usual business of Sunday School and church, and then when he was at prep school and college the required chapel. He could not say that he had ever had an experience of God, although he had joined the church of his parents when he was sixteen or so because it was the right thing to do, or perhaps only the proper thing, and for normal human beings that might be the same thing. He knew that he was not a natural rebel, there had been nothing in his life against which to rebel, and he had found life good until his mother died. He lay back on the grass after he had eaten and lying with his arms under his head and his eyes closed, he thought about his mother. It was impossible to believe that she was not alive in whatever form she might be. She had been too vivid a creature, too positive, too gay to be dead. It was easier to believe that she lived, and that from somewhere at this very moment she looked upon him and knew what he was thinking. She had always an instinct so aware of him that she had often been able to divine his thinking. People were talking a lot about mental telepathy these days, but it might be something more. Nobody knew, and perhaps faith was the easiest way when the alternative was ignorance. It was as wise to assert as to deny when there was no way of knowing anything. Even science was limited. Thus far, it could only deal with chemicals and physical forces. One had to choose.
The sun beat upon him and the wind died down and he slept for an hour and awoke thirsty and hot. Yet he was conscientious and he roamed about the hilltop before he decided that the place was good enough, beautiful if one wanted that, and that he might as well agree with Dr. Barton. The wide silvery band of the river shining through a valley between the low mountains tempted him. It could not be more than a mile or two away straight downhill, and the railroad ran near enough so that he had only to follow it southward to come to a station. He found a small path and by following it or leaving it to crash through trees, he reached a level height on a mild cliff which he had not noticed from above.
The level was that of a spacious lawn where the grass had not been clipped and in the midst of the lawn he saw a large and even splendid house. It was occupied, there were chairs on the porch behind the massive pillars which reached from the roof in the style of the Greek Renaissance in the South. Yet, despite the splendor, the house looked untended. Terraces led down to sunken gardens on either side and there the rose bushes grew too high. A solitary peacock walked slowly on the edge of the upper terrace, its tail folded and dragging.
He drew near and saw that the wide front door was open, although no one was about. A magnificent site this, he thought, only a few hundred feet above the river, which made a sweeping westward curve as though to add more magnificence. Then the peacock saw him and began to screech and bridle. It stretched its small foolish head and lifted its tail and almost immediately he heard a girl’s voice from the garden.