Just as God did for
father. Even if we say there is no God at all, he thought there was and
acted on his thought--I suppose it's when we feel weak as father did
that we get the idea of God at all."
"It all seems rot to me," he told her. "I laugh at God--as a relic of
fetishism."
There was a long, hopeless silence. At last he said dully:
"There are some doctors--our old Dean at St. Crispin's, that I could
throw myself upon as your father threw himself upon God. But they're not
here."
As she sat, frowning, trying most desperately to help him, finding her
unready brain a blank thing like the desert, realizing that, in all her
reading there was nothing that could help, since there was no strong
helper in the world save that Strong Man God who had gripped her
father's imagination and could never grip Louis's, a whole pageant of
dreams passed before her; dreams, intangible ideas which she grasped
eagerly--visions--she saw herself John the Baptist, "making straight the
way of the Lord"--she saw Siegfried, King Arthur--and, with a
heart-leaping gasp she asked herself, "Why should not I be Louis's
Deliverer? Why should not I be God's pathway to him? Why should not I be
Siegfried?" And all the time her brain, peopled with myths, saw only the
shining armour, the glittering fight; she did not see the path of God
deeply rutted by trampling feet, burnt by the blazing footsteps of God.
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