8. CHAPTER VIII.
THE STRUGGLE IN THE DARK.
IT was a long, lonesome, fearful night that the
school-master passed, lying with nerves on edge
and eyes wide open in that comfortless bed in the
“furdest corner” of the loft of Pete Jones's house,
shivering with cold, while the light snow that was
falling sifted in upon the ragged patch-work quilt that covered
him. Nerves shattered by sleeplessness imagine many things,
and for the first hour Ralph felt sure that Pete would cut his
throat before morning. And you, friend Callow, who have
blunted your palate by swallowing the Cayenne pepper of the
penny-dreadfuls, or of a certain sort of Sunday-school books,
you wish me to make this night exciting by a hand-to-hand
contest between Ralph and a robber. You would like it better
if there were a trap-door. There's nothing so convenient as a
trap-door, unless it be a subterranean passage. And you'd like
something of that sort just here. It's so pleasant to have one's
hair stand on end, you know, when one is safe from danger to
one's self. But if you want each individual hair to bristle with
such a “Struggle in the Dark,” you can buy trap-doors and
subterranean passages dirt-cheap at the next news-stand. But
it was, indeed, a real and terrible “Struggle in the Dark”
that Ralph fought out at Pete Jones's.
When he had vanquished his fears of personal violence by
reminding himself that it would be folly for Jones to commit
murder in his own house, the question of Bud and Hannah
took the uppermost place in his thoughts. And as the image
of Hannah spelling against the master came up to him, as the
memory of the walk, the talk, the box-alder tree, and all the
rest took possession of him, it seemed to Ralph that his very
life depended upon his securing her love. He would shut his
teeth like the jaws of a bull-dog, and all Bud's muscles should not
prevail over his resolution and his stratagems.
It was easy to persuade himself that this was right. Hannah
ought not to throw herself away on Bud Means. Men of some
culture always play their conceit off against their consciences.
To a man of literary habits it always seems to be a great boon
that he confers on a woman when he gives her his love. Reasoning
thus, Ralph had fixed his resolution, and if the night
had been shorter, or sleep possible, the color of his life might
have been changed.
But sometime along in the tedious hours came the memory of
his childhood, the words of his mother, the old Bible stories, the
aspiration after nobility of spirit, the solemn resolutions to be true
to his conscience. These angels of the memory came flocking
back before the animal, the bull-doggedness, had “set,” as
workers in plaster say. He remembered the story of David and
Nathan, and it seemed to him that he, with all his abilities and
ambitions and prospects, was about to rob Bud of the one ewelamb,
the only thing he had to rejoice in in his life. In getting
Hannah, he would make himself unworthy of Hannah. And
then there came to him a vision of the supreme value of a true
character; how it was better than success, better than to be loved,
better than heaven. And how near he had been to missing it!
And how certain he was, when these thoughts should fade, to
miss it! He was as one fighting for a great prize who feels his
strength failing and is sure of defeat.
This was the real, awful “Struggle in the Dark.” A human
soul fighting with heaven in sight, but certain of slipping inevitably
into hell! It was the same old battle. The Image of God
fought with the Image of the Devil. It was the same fight that
Paul described so dramatically when he represented the Spirit as
contending with the Flesh. Paul also called this dreadful something
the Old Adam, and I suppose Darwin would call it the
remains of the Wild Beast. But call it what you will, it is the
battle that every well-endowed soul must fight at some point.
And to Ralph it seemed that the final victory of the Evil, the Old
Adam, the Flesh, the Wild Beast, the Devil, was certain. For,
was not the pure, unconscious face of Hannah on the Devil's
side? And so the battle had just as well be given up at once,
for it must be lost in the end.
But to Ralph, lying there in the still darkness, with his conscience
as wide-awake as if it were the Day of Doom, there
seemed something so terrible in this overthrow of the better
nature which he knew to be inevitable as soon as the voice of
conscience became blunted, that he looked about for help. He
did not at first think of God; but there came into his thoughts the
memory of a travel-worn Galilean peasant, hungry, sleepy, weary,
tempted, tried, like other men, but having a strange, divine Victory
in him by which everything evil was vanquished at his
coming. He remembered how He had reached out a Hand to
every helpless one, how he was the Helper of every weak one.
And out of the depths of his soul he cried to the Helper, and
found comfort. Not victory, but, what is better, strength. And
so, without a thought of the niceties of theological distinctions,
without dreaming that it was the beginning of a religious experience,
he found what he needed, help. And the Helper gave his
beloved sleep.
