Part 4 (1/2)
You had a good ti a bad time and are wretched Perhaps in the future, when your ood tiht and the dark That is all there is to hope for, and wein the face Only I confess, e should be avoided at whatever inconvenience Indeed I have long wondered that anyone can take the responsibility of bringing a child into the world But probably nobody does in cold blood, except uided idiots like Bastin,” he added ”He would have twenty, had not his luck intervened”
”Then you believe in nothing, Friend,” I said
”Nothing, I am sorry to say, except what I see and my five senses appreciate”
”You reject all possibility of miracle, for instance?”
”That depends on what you mean by reat grandfathers would have calledto understand Give me an instance”
”Well,” I replied at hazard, ”if you were assured by someone that a man could live for a thousand years?”
”I should tell him that he was a fool or a liar, that is all It is impossible”
”Or that the sa principle--call it what you will--can flit froes? Or that the dead can co?”
”Convince s, Arbuthnot, and mind you I desire to be convinced, and I will take back every word I have said and walk through Fulco e Hospital to cut out Widow Jenkins's varicose veins They are tangible and real at any rate; about the largest I ever saw, indeed Give up dreao back to your fiction writing; you sees that way, and you know you need not publish the stories, except privately for the edification of your friends”
With this Parthian shaft Bickley took his departure to s
I took his advice During the next few hts for a while, more or less It lies in my safe to this minute, for somehow I have never been able to make up my mind to burn what cost me so much physical and mental toil
When it was finished myin the house took a tongue and cried to me of past days
Its walls echoed a voice that I could never hear again; in the very looking-glasses I saw the reflection of a lost presence Although I had moved myself for the purposes of sleep to a little roo, footsteps seeht and I heard the rustle of a rerew hateful to oa book and in a state of high indignation This work, written, as he said, by sorossly traduced the character of missionaries to the South Sea Islands, especially of those of the Society to which he subscribed, and he threw it on the table in his righteous wrath Bickley picked it up and opened it at a photograph of a very pretty South Sea Island girl clad in a feers and nothing else, which he held towards Bastin, saying:
”Is it to this child of Nature that you object? I call her distinctly attractive, though perhaps she does wear her hibiscus blooms with a difference to our women--a little lower down”
”The devil is always attractive,” replied Bastin gloomily ”Child of Nature indeed! I call her Child of Sin That photograph is enough to rave”
”Why?” asked Bickley; ”seeing that wide seas roll between you and this dusky Venus Also I thought that according to your Hebrew legend sin caarments”
”You should search the Scriptures, Bickley,” I broke in, ”and cultivate accuracy It was fig-leaves that syarments, which I think were of skin, developed later”
”Perhaps,” went on Bickley, who had turned the page, ”she” (he referred to the late Mrs Bastin) ”would have preferred her thus,” and he held up another illustration of the same woman
In this the native belle appeared after conversion, clad in broken-down stays--I suppose they were stays--out of which she seee and flow in every direction, a dirty white dress several sizes too small, a kind of Salvation Army bonnet without a crown and a prayer-book which she held pressed to herhideous, and in some curious way, ih I admit her clothes do not seeht But it is not of the pictures so much as of the letterpress with its false and scandalous accusations, that I complain”
”Why do you coh that we could never ascertain without visiting the lady's home”
”If I could afford it,” exclaio there and expose this vile traducer of my cloth”
”So should I,” answered Bickley, ”and expose these introducers of consu of gin, a an innocent and Arcadian people”