“But what should we do?” asked Cecily.
There came a hiatus in their talk.
Mr. Direck took a deep breath.
“You see that old felled tree there. I was sitting on it the day before yesterday and thinking of you. Will you come there and sit with me on it? When you sit on it you get a view, oh! a perfectly lovely English view, just a bit of the house and those clumps of trees and the valley away there with the lily pond. I’d love to have you in my memory of it. …”
They sat down, and Mr. Direck opened his case. He was shy and clumsy about opening it, because he had been thinking dreadfully hard about it, and he hated to seem heavy or profound or anything but artless and spontaneous to Cecily. And he felt even when he did open his case that the effect of it was platitudinous and disappointing. Yet when he had thought it out it had seemed very profound and altogether living.
“You see one doesn’t want to use terms that have been used in a thousand different senses in any way that isn’t a perfectly unambiguous sense, and at the same time one doesn’t want to seem to be canting about things or pitching anything a note or two higher than it ought legitimately to go, but it seems to me that this sort of something that Mr. Britling is always asking for in his essays and writings and things, and what you are looking for just as much and which seems so important to you that even love itself is a secondary kind of thing until you can square the two together, is nothing more nor less than Religion—I don’t mean this Religion or that Religion but just Religion itself, a Big, Solemn, Comprehensive Idea that holds you and me and all the world together in one great, grand universal scheme. And though it isn’t quite the sort of idea of lovemaking that’s been popular—well, in places like Carrierville—for some time, it’s the right idea; it’s got to be followed out if we don’t want lovemaking to be a sort of idle, troublesome game of treats and flatteries that is sure as anything to lead right away to disappointments and foolishness and unfaithfulness and—just Hell. What you are driving at, according to my interpretation, is that marriage has got to be a religious marriage or else you are splitting up life, that religion and love are most of life and all the power there is in it, and that they can’t afford to be harnessed in two different directions. … I never had these ideas until I came here and met you, but they come up now in my mind as though they had always been there. … And that’s why you don’t want to marry in a hurry. And that’s why I’m glad almost that you don’t want to marry in a hurry.”
He considered. “That’s why I’ll have to go on to Germany and just let both of us turn things over in our minds.”
“Yes,” said Cecily, weighing his speech. “I think that is it. I think that I do want a religious marriage, and that what is wrong with Teddy and Letty is that they aren’t religious. They pretend they are religious somewhere out of sight and round the corner. … Only—”
He considered her gravely.
“What is Religion?” she asked.
Here again there was a considerable pause.
“Very nearly two-thirds of the papers read before our Massachusetts society since my connection with it, have dealt with that very question,” Mr. Direck began. “And one of our most influential members was able to secure the services of a very able and highly trained young woman from Michigan University, to make a digest of all these representative utterances. We are having it printed in a thoroughly artistic mariner, as the club book for our autumn season. The drift of her results is that religion isn’t the same thing as religions. That most religions are old and that religion is always new. … Well, putting it simply, religion is the perpetual rediscovery of that Great Thing Out There. … What the Great Thing is goes by all sorts of names, but if you know it’s there and if you remember it’s there, you’ve got religion. … That’s about how she figured it out. … I shall send you the book as soon as a copy comes over to me. … I can’t profess to put it as clearly as she puts it. She’s got a real analytical mind. But it’s one of the most suggestive lil’ books I’ve ever seen. It just takes hold of you and makes you think.”
He paused and regarded the ground before him—thoughtfully.
“Life,” said Cecily, “has either got to be religious or else it goes to pieces. … Perhaps anyhow it goes to pieces. …”
Mr. Direck endorsed these observations by a slow nodding of the head.
He allowed a certain interval to elapse. Then a vaguely apprehended purpose that had been for a time forgotten in these higher interests came back to him. He took it up with a breathless sense of temerity.
“Well,” he said, “then you don’t hate me?”
She smiled.
“You don’t dislike me or despise me?”
She was still reassuring.
“You don’t think
