Bertha pushed her soft sallow face into yours. Her big black eyes bulged out under her square fringe. Her wide red mouth curled and glistened. There were yellowish stains about the roots of her black hair. Her mouth and eyes teased you, mocked you, wouldn’t let you alone.
Bertha began: “I know something you don’t know.”
You listened. You couldn’t help listening. You simply had to know. It was no use to say you didn’t believe a word of it. Inside you, secretly, you knew it was true. You were frightened. You trembled and went hot and cold by turns, and somehow that was how you knew it was true; almost as if you had known all the time.
“Oh, shut up! I don’t want to hear about it.”
“Oh, don’t you? You did a minute ago.”
“Of course I did, when I didn’t know. Who wouldn’t? I don’t want to know any more.”
“I like that. After I’ve told you everything. What’s the good of putting your fingers in your ears now?”
There was that day; and there was the next day when she was sick of Bertha. On the third day Bertha went back to Woodford Bridge.
V
It was dreadful and at the same time funny when you thought of Mr. Batty and Mr. Propart with their little round hats and their black coats and their stiff, dignified faces. And there was Uncle Edward and his whiskers. It couldn’t be true.
Yet all true things came like that, with a queer feeling, as if you remembered them.
Jenny’s wedding dress. It would be true even of Jenny. Mamma had said she would rather see her in her coffin than married to Mr. Spall. That was why.
But—if it was true of everybody it would be true of Mamma and Papa. That was what you hated knowing. If only you had gone on looking at the water instead of listening to Bertha—
Mamma’s face, solemn and tender, when you said your prayers, playing with the gold tassel of her watch-chain. Papa’s face, on your birthday, when he gave you the toy lamb. She wouldn’t like you to know about her. Mark wouldn’t like it.
Mark: her mind stood still. Mark’s image stood still in clean empty space. When she thought of her mother and Mark she hated Bertha.
And there was Jimmy. That was why they wouldn’t talk about him.
Jimmy. The big water-jump into the plantation. Jimmy’s arms, the throb of the hard muscles as he held you. Jimmy’s hand, your own hand lying in it, light and small. Jimmy’s eyes, looking at you and smiling, as if they said, “It’s all right, Minky, it’s all right.”
Perhaps when Papa was young Mamma thought about him as you thought about Jimmy; so that it couldn’t be so very dreadful, after all.
Chapter XIII
I
Mary was glad when Bertha went away to school. When the new year came and she was fourteen she had almost forgotten Bertha. She even forgot for long stretches of time what Bertha had told her. But not altogether.
Because, if it was true, then the story of the Virgin Mary was not true. Jesus couldn’t have been born in the way the New Testament said he was born. There was no such thing as the Immaculate Conception. You could hardly be expected to believe in it once you knew why it couldn’t have happened.
And if the Bible could deceive you about an important thing like that, it could deceive you about the Incarnation and the Atonement. You were no longer obliged to believe in that ugly business of a cruel, bungling God appeased with bloodshed. You were not obliged to believe anything just because it was in the Bible.
But—if you didn’t, you were an Infidel.
She could hear Aunt Bella talking to Uncle Edward, and Mrs. Farmer and Mrs. Propart whispering: “Mary is an Infidel.”
She thought: “If I am I can’t help it.” She was even slightly elated, as if she had set out on some happy, dangerous adventure.
II
Nobody seemed to know what Pantheism was. Mr. Propart smiled when you asked him and said it was something you had better not meddle with. Mr. Farmer said it was only another word for atheism; you might as well have no God at all as be a pantheist. But if “pan” meant “all things,” and “theos” was God—
Perhaps it would be in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The Encyclopaedia told you all about Australia. There was even a good long bit about Byron, too.
Panceput—Panegyric—Pantheism! There you were. Pantheism is “that speculative system which by absolutely identifying the Subject and Object of thought, reduces all existence, mental and material, to phenomenal modifications of one eternal, self-existent Substance which is called by the name of God. … All things are God.”
When you had read the first sentence five or six times over and looked up “Subject” and “Object” and “Phenomenal,” you could see fairly well what it meant. Whatever else God might be, he was not what they said, something separate and outside things, something that made your mind uncomfortable when you tried to think about it.
“This universe, material and mental, is nothing but the spectacle of the thoughts of God.”
You might have known it would be like that. The universe, going on inside God, as your thoughts go on inside you; the universe, so close to God that nothing could be closer. The meaning got plainer and plainer.
There was Spinoza. (“Spinning—Spinoza.”) The Encyclopaedia man said that the Jewish priests offered him a bribe of two thousand florins to take back what he had said about God; and when he refused to take back a word of it, they cursed him and drove him out of their synagogue.
Spinoza said, “There is no substance but God, nor can any other be conceived.” And the Encyclopaedia man explained it. “God, as the infinite substance, with its infinity of attributes is the natura naturans. As the infinity of modes under which his attributes
