The Scarlet Letters Read Free

mildly restraining hand on his shoulder it was distaste, and not, as he had previously imagined, to guard her frail body from the possibly unpremeditated assault of a wild and undependable beast. And then, alerted by jealousy, he took careful note when she put her arms around Stuffy's neck or chucked Rosebud under the chin.
    Oh yes, it had become a different world. Seventeen is a violent age, and it doesn't take much to turn the landscape sour. When Ambrose went fishing with his father now, in the latter's fly club in the Catskills, he would no longer, on a wide rock by an idling stream at noon, while they ate their sandwiches and drank their beer, relate to him his tales of school and football. He knew now that his parent never listened; Elias Vollard was perfectly content with the sunshine and silence and nothingness.
    If the rock basis of parentage is once displaced the rest of the edifice will soon cave in. The cloud that darkened the home soon caught the school in its shadow. Wasn't it part and parcel of the same fabric? Surely the deity so punctiliously worshiped by his starchly dressed parents on Sunday, so regularly invoked at grace before meals and so grovelingly implored at night, was the same who presided over the Chelton chapel and inspired the headmaster's throaty sermons about boys keeping themselves pure for the pure maidens they might one day hope to wed. Dr. Close himself, a small plump man with toadlike features, and as Ambrose now saw him, a Trollopian snob, conducted a fifth-form class in sacred studies in which the sharp note of his once docile student's emancipation was first heard.
    The class discussion was of the superiority of monotheism, as devised by Jews, Moslems and, best of all, Christians, to the worship of a more populated Olympus by pagan rites.
    "But why, sir?" Ambrose wanted to know. "Might it not be better to have several gods rather than just one? Is there anyone of our faith wiser than Socrates? Or Cicero? Or even Augustus Caesar?"
    "But from the very multitude of pagan deities, Vollard, must one not infer that they have different personalities? Different qualities? If they were all the same, they would have to be one, would they not? And if they are different they cannot all be perfect; only one can be that. Which means that all but one would be imperfect. And imperfection implies faults. Why should we worship a god with faults? One, for example, who would turn a maiden into a tree for resisting his lust?"
    The headmaster nodded to the class as if to invite the titters that respectfully followed, and turned back to his notes as if he had coped with Ambrose's interruption. But he hadn't.
    "But it seems to me, sir, that this one God had faults."
    "How do you mean, Vollard?" The tone was graver now. "And be careful in how you state it. You mustn't tread lightly on the faith of others."
    "I can only say what I think, sir. Is a god perfect—is he even very good—if he created organisms that could only survive by eating each other?"
    Dr. Close frowned. But he wished to keep at least the appearance of a free discussion alive. "There are things that pass our understanding, Vollard. Their meaning may not be divulged in this lifetime."
    "But this God, sir, not only created men who had to kill to live. He wants them to praise him and magnify him forever! If a man did that, wouldn't we call him a pompous ass?"
    "That will be all, Vollard. We have heard enough from you. More than enough. I'll see you after class. And now let me hear from some of the rest of you."
    A much less adventuresome discussion followed this.
    Somewhat to Ambrose's surprise, but not at all to the alleviation of his new doubts, the headmaster, normally so high and distant with the boys, accorded him two long individual sessions in which he mildly and tediously lectured him on Christian orthodoxy. He had, after all, a soul to save. But Ambrose was obdurate. He stoutly declined to consider being confirmed in the church and