That I was, just like him, carrying my thoughts to their logical conclusion, at last made me see the true nature of the company into which my Godless logic had taken me.
But did I really belong there? It certainly looked as though I did for, in my own small way, I was bending the rules to suit my needs, just like mankind in general did, and now, slowly but surely, I had reached the point where I was giving serious consideration to applying the ultimate sanction. Murder might not be in my heart, but it was certainly in my head.
“Come on John, say the word. Do we top him or do we not?” Andy shouted, his words from the real world crashing into my thought world. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
I went over and looked into the cabin. Sears was lying tied up on the bunk, just as Andy had been a short while before.
“Don’t let them do this, Grant,” he whined. “What possible harm can I do you now?”
It wasn’t that Sears posed much of a threat, I began to realise. It was more the idea of it. He was terrified of what we might do, and terrified of the Operation. And more importantly, from my point of view, he had no idea that I had kept back half of the money. The money was gone as far as he was concerned.
“Well, what’s it to be, John?” Andy asked impatiently.
“I suppose he’s taken a big enough loss already. What harm can he do us now,” I said. “Look at him.”
Andy’s face was expressionless.
“Not much, I suppose” he agreed.
“Maybe we should just let him go,” I suggested.
Was I being magnanimous in victory because of some of these men I had read of in the Book Collection and my aversion to their behaviour. Or was I trying to convince myself that, even under pressure, I would never behave like they had and try to utterly destroy my enemy, as most people sanctimoniously believe of themselves, until their own lives are threatened.
My very uncertainty, however, did say something. While evil might originate in the heart, as the Pastor said, the part played by the mind couldn’t be left out. While we might shrink from doing certain things we could talk ourselves into anything, absolutely anything, even good people thinking it necessary to do evil in a good cause, and bad people to achieve their ambitions.
It was a great pity, therefore, that the people history shows us to be, the good as well as the bad, don’t seem capable of self-improvement. If good people even yet could pass unwise laws and commit acts of great injustice then the solution certainly didn’t lie in democratic government and legal niceties. Maybe Linda and the Pastor did, in actual fact, have the answer to all this, I felt really seriously, for the first time.
As Sears jumped onto the jetty looking ridiculous in his wet clothes, yet sufficiently recovered to hurry away as if he was trying to catch a bus, I felt euphoric as I took stock of the situation. He wasn’t the only one who thought all of the money had floated out to sea. Everybody else did, too. No one but me knew of the 100 thousand pounds lying hidden under the freezer. No one.
chapter twenty-six
The danger had passed, all of it, but before I went to the party that was to take place at Liz’s that night, I still had some important decisions to make. Going into the kitchen, I got down on my knees and pushed my hand under the freezer to get tangible proof of the fact that financial success, not failure, had become the key word in my life. I could now think about things from a position of strength. My problems, what remained of them, no longer seemed insurmountable.
Since no-one but me knew about the money, what exactly I should do with it didn’t seem urgent and, of the several other matters competing for my attention, my thoughts on Linda and Karen soon re-gained the ascendancy.
The problem I had with Karen seemed to have unravelled itself in respect of the relationship I had thought she had with Andy, although I still had no idea where I really stood with her. The problem with Linda remained as it was. I couldn’t separate her in my mind’s eye from her enthusiasm for the Church and from the fact that she was Pastor Mackenzie’s daughter. It seemed that, if I was to take things any further with her I would, at the very least, have to do more than just appear accommodating to what she and her father believed, that is if she really saw me as a man and not just as a potential convert, which unfortunately I was by no means certain of. They would expect me to become fully immersed in their world-view and to make up my mind which side I was on. It wouldn’t be good enough just to stand in the sidelines as I had been doing. I would have to join them in their struggle to uphold their beliefs, in effect becoming a different kind of man from the one that I really was.
In their scheme of things there weren’t many different kinds of men to choose from. There weren’t even three – believers, unbelievers and those who couldn’t make up their mind. There were only two. Those who were in, and those who were out. A choice quotation was to them the supreme word of authority on this matter. “He that denies me before men I also will deny before my father who is in Heaven.”
One of these two men, I mused, the one who is imbued with the Spirit of the Age, will be searching the heavens with a telescope hoping to find a star which has a planet on which life might exist. If he can detect the presence of water on it he will feel he is on the right track because of the likelihood that life here on earth began in water, in a warm puddle.
This man with the telescope, will be awed by what he sees through it. The universe is so big that he will almost get lost in the vast distances he is able to cover, and in the ones even beyond these that he knows are there. When his friend with the microscope reverses the process and tells him of the not dissimilar wonders that he can see, the man will feel confident that all such things owe their existence to something other than an old-fashioned God who has a particular concern for man and a personal interest in his affairs.
The second of the two men, I continued to suppose, almost but not quite out of my depth in this elevated subject, feels that he doesn’t need to look through the telescope, or the microscope, with the same sense of urgency. What he needs to know about the origin of life he thinks has already been revealed to him, although he does have at least one thing in common with the first man. Neither of them, the historical geologists and their opponents among them, can rightly say that science has proved or disproved that there was a great worldwide flood and that Noah and his ark actually existed. The opinion of a scientist is not necessarily any more scientific than the opinion of a layman, as the Pastor was always pointing out. Denying something is not the same as refuting it. Both men believe or disbelieve things they can’t prove about things they cannot fully understand.
The trouble was, however, these things, and what went with them, weren’t just strongly held opinions to her father. His whole way of life was based on them. To him, history with all its political, religious and moral developments had been made by them, and current events were being shaped by them. Although divine intervention in human affairs was strong stuff, even for someone who owned a Book Collection, I had found it surprisingly easy to pull things out of that very Book Collection in support of some of the national events, which he had attributed to God:
1.Ancient Syria fell, according to the Pastor, because of its barbaric treatment of others.
And so did at least two present day great nations, Germany and Japan, only seventy odd years ago.
2.Ammon suffered because it attacked another country purely to add to its own possessions.
And so, too, more recently, did Italy, which invaded Ethiopia in 1935, only to be itself attacked and brought low by Germany some ten years later.
3.Edom, was humbled because it thought itself impregnable and trusted in its own greatness.
As was present day America, for inclining towards this error, when one of its great cities, New Orleans, was devastated by a flood the humiliating effects of which were heightened by the length of time it took to send help.
That m
any forms of divine intervention were said by the Pastor to be a warning rather than a final punishment I thought lifted some of the heaviness from his world-view. After all, without a restraining influence of some kind acting on the affairs of men how many great political criminals hell-bent on conquering the world, would have brought about the total destruction of the human race, or reduced mankind to the level of the beast, were it not for that force or that principle which has operated against them throughout history: “Thus far shall you come and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stayed.”
The idea of fully indentifying with the Pastor in his way of life rather than merely subscribing to his beliefs, was another matter, however. Perhaps only a few generations ago these beliefs wouldn’t have been so far from the mainstream but now, in holding so strictly to them, he appeared to be an almost cult-like figure. In subscribing to certain basic tenets he was certainly a fundamentalist, if not quite in the derogatory sense the word was being used today. Unfortunately there were many who couldn’t see past the label, and in entering into this way of life what would that make me appear to be, too?
Very enthusiastic, but in a balanced and realistic way, he was in no sense a fanatic, always responding to criticism in a gentle and forthright manner. Nor did the Pastor resemble a false teacher whose personal opinions were being cleverly put forward as facts. But he nevertheless had a way of wearing you down. Seemingly aware of what was going on in your mind he would put your own cherished contemporary beliefs under scrutiny and make you doubt their true validity just as you had at first doubted his.
It hadn’t taken him long, in the first instance, to persuade me that there was more than a grain of truth in some of his ‘outlandish’ assertions, and that some of these might well be on an agenda other than that drawn up by modern man.
To say that natural catastrophes, whether brought on by global warming, geological upheavals, or just the weather in general, were sometimes controlled and directed by an unseen hand didn’t mean, he was at pains to point out, that he refuted the scientific explanations concerning these things, only that he was suggesting another point of origin and another purpose in certain specific cases – the storm that scattered the Spanish Armada sent against England in 1588, the rain at Waterloo which helped Wellington defeat Napoleon in 1815 and many more events were to him examples of divine intervention, and those who preferred not even to consider this were, according to him, running away from reality or were being driven by their emotions rather than by their intellect.
And if these interventions, or visitations, as the Pastor sometimes called them, concerned nations and the component parts of those nations – men, it didn’t seem unreasonable of him to make the point that very few people, when personally threatened by the effect of a great natural disaster, continued to believe that God had nothing to do with it. Rather the opposite, he contended. Such people were often brought to their knees and made to realise how puny and insignificant they were – which, according to him, was one of the reasons these events occurred in the first place. And these people were the lucky ones, he argued – if their experiences made them sit up and think, if they heeded the warning, such as the one associated with the Great Flood.
But the majority of men who were not themselves directly affected by these great disasters, were hardly going to be dumbfounded because a few thousand people had perished in some foreign land during a great convulsion. It was here, therefore, that the Pastor came into his own, as far as I was concerned. He had the ability to make these things into something that affected you personally, regardless of your circumstances, to make you feel that his world-view was the right one, that he was a witness to the fact that not only did divine intervention occur in the affairs of nations and in the affairs of men in general but in your own in particular. And as I had sat there in the car deciding to sever my connection with Andy’s people it had really been this, or rather the consequences implicit in disregarding it, that had been the deciding factor.
That I had afterwards changed my mind, and, like mankind in general, had thought at the time I had a very good excuse, didn’t alter the fact that I could now see the truth of the matter. No longer was there that great moral ache within me which symptomatically asked questions like the one Job had asked. “Why do bad people prosper?” “They don’t”, I once more remembered the Pastor saying. “Away with fractional knowledge and selective memory”, he had said “and look more closely at the facts. See what happens with the passage of time, even if you can’t look into their hearts “right now.”
But in spite of all this, wasn’t I right to be concerned about how deeply involved I got? In lamenting that I was no stranger to the feeling of not belonging surely my sense of identity was important. What I would look like to other people would be what Linda and the Pastor had first looked like to me. I could hardly leave my image out of it.
The Pastor, in this respect, certainly belied the projected popular image of his Master, who in appearance was often depicted as a gormless looking man with a beard wearing robes like curtains. Instead he had well-chiselled features with the thin lips, sloping forehead and slightly set back eyes of a man of vigour and determination. His rugged features and sturdy build were more like those of a building site foreman than a man of a the cloth and there was a firm friendliness in his manner of speaking that made most people, inside and outside the Church, respectful and passive in their dealings with him. As a person he was someone I myself could like, as well as respect.
Also on the positive side, with regard to the demands all this would make on me was a very surprising and significant fact from the Book Collection. Hadn’t Grand Admiral Doenitz, capable head of the German Navy in World War II, on the wrong side, but surely sincerely wrong – his two sons were lost in the same cause – hadn’t he in later life attached himself to the same ‘Master’ as the Pastor had? As had a Japanese pilot who was prominent in the attack on Pearl Harbour. Strange as it may seem, I would be in some quite good company.
*
But where did all these things leave me, right now, with regard to Linda? Was I right in thinking that my relationship with her was inextricably linked to them, or was there a shade of meaning that I had failed to grasp? I began to see that there was.
The true Church was an organism rather than an organisation, the Pastor had once told me, and there was no doubt about where I stood with regard to the two for, rightly or wrongly, I had never been too keen on the organisation, while Linda, in this respect, was exactly the opposite. The Church organisation was her life.
That she was only going to accept me on this basis, I could see now was inevitable and, as I had already concluded, it would take a lot of hard work on my part to bridge a gap of this kind. Was this something I would be able to cope with in such a close personal relationship? Would I end up, if things took their natural course, changing my title to husband while in practice I was still a kind of suitor? Was I forever going to be a supplicant, then? Would there once more be a big desk in my life with me sitting permanently on the wrong side of it. It was this, rather than her actual beliefs themselves, that was the problem. The two were closely related, but I could see at last that it was the nature of our relationship which was bothering me, not the nature of her beliefs. They were two different things.
But there was a serious flaw in my relationship with Karen, too. Getting it wrong about where she stood with Andy had coloured everything I had said to her and had prevented me from even hinting at what I felt about her. I didn’t really know where I stood with her now any more than I did with Linda. Had these occasions when our eyes had met, when she had looked at me in that strange way, merely been her response to the situation, not to me?
That I was now beginning to think about her almost in the same way as I had first thought about Linda didn’t seem right for I didn’t feel the same way about them. This was something that only the night at the flat with Karen had made me r
ealise. Although my feelings for Linda were very strong, they were different in texture from those that had made me that evening, associate Karen with Chopin. The music had enabled me to see something I had been unable to put into words?
In that other world of being, to which had music so often transported me, there were emotions that existed in this world, too. Some of these I could find a name for – tenderness, longing. But there were emotions that came to life only in that other world, and for which I had no name, which gave me the deepest satisfaction. It was these, I saw at last, that were present in the effect that Karen always, and Linda never, had on me. This could mean only one thing, and there was a kind of finality about it.
In an attempt to clear my head I went over to the window and looked out onto the car park. There was no longer the danger of having unwelcome visitors. A great weight had been lifted from my mind. I felt secure in my possession of the money and could indeed look out at the world from a position of strength now. I could, to a much greater extent than before, choose my actions but there was no doubt about it, it still didn’t give me the final say in what the result of these actions was going to be. The money wasn’t going to solve anything as far as my problems with Linda and Karen were concerned.
In these, I had to find another angle, another way of looking at things, and almost at once I could see that while I was worried so much about the demands Linda might make on me, the only misgivings I had ever had about Karen concerned the relationship I thought she had had with Andy. Any great regret I would feel in parting from Linda would be tempered, however slightly, by the relief I would feel at no longer having to think about the many adjustments I might have to make to my way of life. It would be nothing like this with Karen. Parting from her would only have a down side. There would be a sense of loss attached to it, real loss, and I now knew at this very point, with absolute certainty, that it was her and not Linda that I wanted to be with.
Am I Being Followed? Page 20