Strehlow returned the pressure of Stolz’s hand, and then Stolz said a short prayer and slowly moved out of the sickroom. He had suddenly become a shaken and a strangely quiet man. After he had gone, Strehlow sat in his chair with closed eyes. Now that he had composed all his affairs, and said all the things that still had to be said, he could afford to withdraw wholly within himself. Only eternity now remained to be faced. Whatever he had done in the merciless rush of his active years still had to await the final test posed by eternity. In past years his eyes had often turned to a large ornamental wooden plaque hanging in his study at Hermannsburg, whose inscription reminded him in moments of acute stress and deep despondency of that final judgment of a man’s worth that could be passed upon him and his works only after death. This plaque had borne the simple words:
Pour thy light
On Time’s night,
Bright Eternity!
Show us small things in their meanness,
Sharpen great things to full keenness,
Blest Eternity!
Like St Paul, he felt that he could say of himself that he had finished his course and was now ready to be offered. The only question that remained was whether the Lord, the righteous Judge, had laid up for him that crown of righteousness after which he had striven during his long, hard years in Central Australia.
Because of the hot night it had not taken the thermometer long to pass the century mark that morning; and from then on the temperature kept on rising steadily, hour after hour. In contrast to the previous days of howling sandstorms, Friday was a relatively calm day, with only occasional slight northerly gusts. By two o’clock in the afternoon the thermometer was registering a hundred and ten degrees in the shade of the verandah, and the galvanised iron sheets of the hotel roof crackled loudly as the curved flutes pressed and strained against their holding screws, expanded to their fullest extent by the merciless blaze from above. Even the tin ceiling sheets in the rooms creaked noisily at times, and the lining wall sheets of the hotel rooms grew noticeably hot to the touch of a hand. All outdoor work had stopped long before midday. Men, women, and children snatched what relief they could in the shade of the few trees and the iron buildings. Thirst could no longer be quenched, no matter how much liquid was consumed. Neither tea nor water was able to slake the thirst of any man for more than an hour. The hotel customers had given up consuming beer several days ago, for no bottles that depended for coolness on their being wrapped in damp bags lying in the draught on the hotel floor could be expected to yield a liquid that was fit for drinking. Only brandy, whisky, and rum still afforded a pleasurable kick to the tough throats of the hardened bush hotel guests. But on this hot afternoon the heavy drinking of spirituous liquors served only to increase the thirsts of the customers; and all water funnelled into pannikins from the large canvas waterbags hanging under the verandahs tasted lukewarm and insipid: the pace of consumption allowed insufficient time for the water to be cooled by evaporation to any significant extent.
In the stifling, suffocating heat of his room Strehlow was groaning with racking pains in his chest. Huge liquid beads, which he was too weak to wipe off, kept on emerging from his forehead, his face, his neck, and his chest; and from there they united and tumbled down in rivulets, soaking the lower part of his body in a stream of sweat which no amount of hot air could dry.
These physical sufferings were matched by the intensity of that other battle which was going on in his mind. No prayers were bringing him any relief from the torments of his body. On the contrary, he felt that God was increasing the unbearable load of his afflictions to the very breaking point – the point where these trials would shatter and overwhelm his strength, and utterly crush the last reserves of his courage, his endurance, and his faith. He felt that he was being extended and stretched out to his physical and spiritual limits, like a tough piece of steel wire clamped in a laboratory testing device that had been designed to measure the amount of strain that it would stand before breaking. Like an experimenter intent on ascertaining the breaking point of the material tested by him, God had been heaping pain upon pain and disappointment upon disappointment on him, one week after the other, during the past three and a half months. And now He had permitted an unseasonal heat-wave to add its fires to his torments. Cool changes, even cloudbursts that brought sharp downpours of rain, were common features of October weather in Central Australia: why would not God permit at least a cool breath of air to fan his tortured body? Instead the very atmosphere above the barren cliff tops beyond the hotel could be seen quivering and simmering in the summer heat.
Strehlow’s thoughts had frequently returned to the scene of Christ’s mental struggle in Gethsemane, as he tried to repeat ‘Thy will be done’ in the spirit in which Christ had uttered these words during his agony in the garden. But on this Friday afternoon Strehlow’s restless searchings for a fuller understanding of God’s purposes led him to meditate more and more deeply on Christ’s last day of suffering – on Good Friday and on the final events of Calvary. In his Lenten services he had often stressed the physical pains endured by Christ on Good Friday; but he was now beginning to appreciate even more the mental agony suffered by Christ on that grim day when all faith which he had kindled among men during the three years of his ministry had died like a flickering candle flame, unable to withstand the unexpected gale that had burst upon it. Christ’s physical tortures had been many: his head had been lacerated by a crown of thorns, his back had been turned into raw flesh by the metal pieces knotted into the many-tailed scourge used for flogging him, and his hands and feet had been gashed by the cruel nails driven through his flesh and bones. But his most terrible torment had resulted, not from the thoughts, words, and deeds of his enemies, but from the disloyalty and the silence of his friends and disciples. One of the latter had betrayed him, a second had publicly denied on solemn oath that he had ever known him. All the rest had fled in fear and shame and despair. Of all those who had been nearest to him only four persons had dared to stand close to his cross on Calvary – a man and three women. The man had been his favourite disciple, who up to the previous evening would have proudly proclaimed him to be the Son of God. This man had been present at his trial in the high priest’s palace, and had gathered up sufficient courage to come in order to express his mute farewell to him. But no longer had this last loyal disciple held any faith in Christ. His heart had been wrenched with sorrow for his dying master; but he had also been convinced that all the things he had believed in for three years had been only a dream and a myth, and that this dream and this myth would end with the death of his master on the cross. His deeply revered master had proved to be only a human being after all – and all his faith in Christ as the promised Messiah had already been dead while he was gazing at the figure nailed to the cross.
One of the three women had been Christ’s own mother – she who as a young and deeply pious girl had seen a vision in her home at Nazareth of the angel Gabriel, and had heard him calling her the blessed one among women. On that grim afternoon at Calvary she had stood at the foot of her son’s cross, heavy with unbearable sorrow, feeling as though a sword was piercing through her soul. Christ’s mother would have had a mother’s uncontestable right to proclaim her faith in him before the whole seething, muttering multitude. But she had not said a single word. Was it because she too had been torn and tormented by doubts whether all that she had ever experienced or believed in might only have been the result of a grim series of hallucinations? Scores of thousands of Christians in later decades, from one century to the next, had dared to proclaim their faith in Christ at their own places of execution, finding strength through their belief in his divinity to face death in all its forms, even the most horrible. Yet on Good Friday no confession of faith had been made at the foot of Christ’s cross: for when a god dies, all faith placed in him must needs die too. Immortality and eternity are inseparable from the notion of the divine. In the end Christ had said to the silent woman and to the silent man, ‘Woma
n, look, there is your son’, and, ‘Son, look, there is your mother.’ Even though death was fast approaching him, he had not addressed the silent woman as ‘mother’.
After that darkness had fallen upon Calvary and the whole surrounding country for three hours, during which Christ had, obedient to the will of his Father, tasted to the full all those spiritual torments through which men and women have to pass when they are no longer able to believe that there is any one, either in heaven or on earth, who cares for them, who loves them, or who will help them. After three hours of this torment in the black abyss of lost and forlorn loneliness Christ himself had startled the dense crowd that was gazing up at his cross by repeating from the twenty-second psalm that grimmest of all cries of despair that can be uttered by any man who has trusted in God all his life: ‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’ And when the Son of Man, who had so often spoken of himself as being one with the Father, had shouted that sentence of seemingly utter and absolute despair over the hill of Calvary, probably even the last waverers in the watching crowd around him had become convinced beyond any doubts that he had always been a fraud, and that it was his own fear of his impending hour of death which was now forcing him to admit publicly the full and complete falsity of his sacrilegious claim.
And thus all faith in Christ had died on Good Friday. All faith? Not quite. Two men had expressed their belief in Christ on the Roman execution hill for criminals. One of these had been a criminal who had been crucified at the side of Christ, the other the Roman centurion who had watched him dying. The criminal had been clubbed to death before sunset; but he had died with the promise of Christ ringing in his ears, ‘Today shalt thou be with me in paradise’. It was this criminal who had been the first of a long line of witnesses who had died affirming their faith in the divinity of Christ. But the voices of these two men had been the only two voices raised on Good Friday that had publicly professed their belief in Christ in spite of his death; and one of these voices had been silenced for ever at sundown on that same day. After his death none of the terror-stricken men who had been his disciples had dared to be present at his burial. Joseph of Arimathaea alone, a wealthy and powerful member of the Jewish Establishment, had possessed the almost foolhardy courage to ask the tired and angry Roman governor for leave to take Christ’s body down from the cross and bury it in his own newly-hewn rock grave. He had been helped at the burial by Nicodemus, a highly educated man of deep religious learning, who had risked the anger of his authoritarian church leaders by supplying the costly resins intended for the later embalming of the body. When Christ’s body had been laid to rest, all faith once placed in him by his friends had been buried too. Good Friday had witnessed not merely the death of Christ but the extinction of his message to the world as well: the powers of darkness, death, and hate had prevailed over the Lord of light and life and love. It had needed the miracle of Easter to rekindle the quenched flames of belief in Christ.
If Christ himself, after he had chosen to experience for himself the temptations and the sufferings of mortal men, and while he was identifying himself in all respects with mortal men at the will of the Father, had been forced to call out ‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’, then it was clear that there were dark moments in human suffering which could crush the faith of even the strongest of men. Not that these men would, even in such moments, doubt the existence of God. Far from it. Paradoxical though it might sound, their overwhelming despair would spring from the unshakeable strength of their belief in the existence of God. Their anguish would stem from their conviction that, although God existed beyond any doubt, He was deliberately refusing to listen to their prayers and that He had deliberately broken off all links between Himself and them.
As the hours slowly dragged on in the sickroom at Horseshoe Bend, Strehlow was coming to dread more and more that he, too, was going to be one of those men whose rock-like faith in God was going to be put to the final, crushing trial. Or that, like steel wire stretched taut in a laboratory testing device, it would have weight upon weight added to it till it snapped. While the corrugated iron building around him groaned and creaked in the fierce sun, he was fighting for his very breath, as his life was being slowly choked out of him, gasp by strangled gasp. He felt as though the clutch of giant hands was crushing his chest till his lungs could no longer take in sufficient quantities of life-giving air.
At four o’clock, as a last desperate measure, he was given a draught of medicine prepared by a chemist in Quorn for the relief of ‘asthma due to a dropsical condition’. It had been procured by Stolz to alleviate Strehlow’s breathing troubles. No one knew what the medicine consisted of, and no one had much faith in its efficacy. Unfortunately, this drug did not lessen Strehlow’s breathing difficulties: if anything, his gasps grew even worse, till the last reserves of his strength were being consumed in the effort of getting air into his choked lungs. When Pastor Stolz left the room, after watching the tortured victim writhing in his chair for almost an hour, Mrs Strehlow, who had been sitting nearby in helpless fear, moved closer to her husband. To comfort him, she began to sing one of his old favourite hymns that gave expression to a believer’s trust in God in situations like the present. It was the hymn Sollt es gleich bisweilen scheinen, whose first two stanzas ran as follows:
Should dark doubts sometimes awaken
That God’s folk are left forsaken,
Then in faith I know for sure:
God helps those who long endure.
Help He has today suspended
He has not forever ended
Though at times in vain we plead,
Help He gives in deepest need.
At this point the sick man interrupted his wife’s singing. ‘Don’t sing that hymn any more, Frieda,’ he begged, in a strangely dull and strangled voice: ‘God doesn’t help!’
‘O darling, please don’t talk like that,’ she pleaded tearfully, slipping down on her knees before him. ‘God will help when His time has come. You have always said so. Perhaps His hour has come now.’
The sick man did not reply. His body shook, his lips quivered, the swollen veins in his purple face pulsed heavily; but he remained silent. He had, at long last, spoken what he knew to be the full truth – that his hour of death was at hand and that any further pleas to God were futile. God had said a final ‘no’ to all prayers – the communication line between God and the two people in the sickroom had been severed inexorably.
The clock in the next room struck five. Mrs Strehlow persisted bravely in pouring out her words of comfort, but it was doubtful whether the sick man was even capable of listening to them any longer. He had clearly come to the end of his strength. After some minutes he closed his eyes, still without uttering a word; and Mrs Strehlow rose to her feet and sat down on the chair opposite, patiently watching him. Stolz came in quietly for a few moments, and then went out on tiptoe so as not to disturb the sick man’s rest; for he seemed to have fallen asleep at last.
It was as though Strehlow’s final remark had greatly helped to ease his mind. He had ceased pretending to his wife that even a rock-like faith could sway the Almighty. What he had said represented, in a way, a free version of the psalmist’s despairing cry, ‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’ He had been completely honest at last with himself, with the wife who still believed that he would live, and with God. And now his restlessness slowly disappeared. His breathing, too, became less strained and more regular, as though great physical relief had come to him at last.
Strehlow slept for a little longer than half an hour, during which time his wife watched him with lessening anxiety. Then he suddenly gave a gasp, followed by a deep sigh. His breathing stopped for a few moments. Mrs Strehlow sat up, startled and suddenly apprehensive. There was a second deep sigh. After that the sleeper’s body slumped against the back of the chair, and lay there motionless. The great swollen veins that had stood out so clearly in the wasted throat pulsed convulsively a few times. Then all movements stopped
in the body, and a bluish tinge began to spread over the face.
It was a quarter to six in the evening.
With a cry of cold fear Mrs Strehlow leapt from her chair. ‘O my God, he’s dead!’ she sobbed wildly and collapsed before the moveless body that lay before her, slumped in the high-backed easy-chair.
Soft swift footsteps behind her made her turn her head back. It was Mrs Elliot, who had been standing outside the door, whispering with Pastor Stolz about the sick man. ‘O Mrs Elliot,’ she sobbed, ‘he’s dead – my Carl is dead. And I didn’t even know that he was dying…’ She broke down in a spasm of convulsive sobs. The young woman put her arms around her and raised her to her feet. ‘Dear Mrs Strehlow,’ she said in a voice almost choked by tears, ‘your husband doesn’t have to suffer any more. He is at peace at last. You must come away from here with me. I’ve got a new room ready for you for tonight.’
Mrs Strehlow stopped sobbing. ‘But I don’t want to leave my Carl yet,’ she whispered. ‘He has always been so good to me. Oh, what will I do without him? Please let me stay with him a little longer!’
‘Please, my dear, you must come with me now,’ insisted Mrs Elliot, gently but firmly. ‘There are lots of things that still have to be done for your husband. We must get him out of the chair onto the bed and wash his body before it grows rigid. But there are others who’ll help me – it’s better that you shouldn’t be there when we do these things. You’d only be upset, and you’re completely worn out already. You’ve nursed him all on your own for two months already, and you need a break. Please do come with me now – you can look at him again, once everything is over and he is lying on the bed.’
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