I did not yield;
oh, no, I did not yield! I resisted,--passively. I laid hold upon the
eternal fact that there was a God; the blind and blank universe spun
about me; its pillars of support wavered like waterspouts; all that I
had ever believed or loved whirled up and down in one howling chaos,
and circled through all space in clouds of dust and floating atoms; but
through all I knew there was a God,--feel it I could not, neither did I
see nor did one of Nature's tongues spell me the lesson,--I only knew
it. And I did not, no, I did not rush before Him; but I lay at the
bottom of the river.
I have heard it said that drowning persons recall, as by a sudden
omniscience, all their past lives, as soon as the water closes above
them and the first shock of horror is past. It was not so with me. I
remembered nothing beyond the events of the past week; but, by some
strange action of the mind, as soon as the gasping sense of an unnatural
element passed away, my thoughts went forward. I became, as it were,
another man; and above me on the bank I saw calmly the stone where my
living double had left his cripple's cane, and thought to myself for one
sharp moment, "Fool!"--for I looked forward. _If I had not drowned_,
that was the key-note of the theme. Something that was me and was not me
rose up from the water-wall and went away,--a man racked and broken by
a great sorrow, it is true, but a man conscious of God. Life had turned
its darkest page for him, but there was the impassable fact that it was
the darkest; no further depths remained to dread; the worst had come,
and he looked it in the face and studied it; suffer he might, but
with full knowledge of every agony.
Pages:
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209