If anything could cure an intelligent boy of morbid religious fears, it was a denominational school like that to which Claude had been sent.  Now he dismissed all Christian theology as something too full of evasions and sophistries to be reasoned about.  The men who made it, he felt sure, were like the men who taught it.  The noblest could be damned, according to their theory, while almost any mean-spirited parasite could be saved by faith.  “Faith,” as he saw it exemplified in the faculty of the Temple school, was a substitute for most of the manly qualities he admired.  Young men went into the ministry because they were timid or lazy and wanted society to take care of them; because they wanted to be pampered by kind, trusting women like his mother.

Though he wanted little to do with theology and theologians, Claude would have said that he was a Christian.  He believed in God, and in the spirit of the four Gospels, and in the Sermon on the Mount.  He used to halt and stumble at “Blessed are the meek,” until one day he happened to think that this verse was meant exactly for people like Mahailey; and surely she was blessed!

VIII

On the Sunday after Christmas Claude and Ernest were walking along the banks of Lovely Creek.  They had been as far as Mr. Wheeler’s timber claim and back.  It was like an autumn afternoon, so warm that they left their overcoats on the limb of a crooked elm by the pasture fence.  The fields and the bare tree-tops seemed to be swimming in light.  A few brown leaves still clung to the bushy trees along the creek.  In the upper pasture, more than a mile from the house, the boys found a bittersweet vine that wound about a little dogwood and covered it with scarlet berries.  It was like finding a Christmas tree growing wild out of doors.  They had just been talking about some of the books Claude had brought home, and his history course.  He was not able to tell Ernest as much about the lectures as he had meant to, and he felt that this was more Ernest’s fault than his own; Ernest was such a literal-minded fellow.  When they came upon the bittersweet, they forgot their discussion and scrambled down the bank to admire the red clusters on the woody, smoke-coloured vine, and its pale gold leaves, ready to fall at a touch.  The vine and the little tree it honoured, hidden away in the cleft of a ravine, had escaped the stripping winds, and the eyes of schoolchildren who sometimes took a short cut home through the pasture.  At its roots, the creek trickled thinly along, black between two jagged crusts of melting ice.

When they left the spot and climbed back to the level, Claude again felt an itching to prod Ernest out of his mild and reasonable mood.

“What are you going to do after a while, Ernest?  Do you mean to farm all your life?”

“Naturally.  If I were going to learn a trade, I’d be at it before now.  What makes you ask that?”