I remember well trying to think about mankind. I used to try to build up something that would look like mankind because the word Man I knew, and Kind I knew. And I thought at last, that mankind was a very tall man with a beard who was very kind and always bending over people and being good and polite.
I told that to Mrs. Tom one evening when the others had gone and I was helping her to put Tom right for the night.
"That is a good picture of Jesus, Huw," she said.
"Is Jesus mankind, then?" I asked her, and very surprised I was.
"Well, indeed," she said, and she was folding Tom in a blanket, "He did suffer enough to be mankind, whatever."
"Well, what is mankind, then, Mrs. Jenkins?" I asked her, for I was sure to have an answer because I had puzzled long enough.
"Mankind is all of us," Mrs. Tom said, "you and me and Tom and everyone you can think of all over the world. That is mankind, Huw."
"Thank you, Mrs. Jenkins," I said, "but how is it you ask every morning for us to help mankind, then?"
"Because," she said, "I want you all to think not only of yourselves and your families but everybody else who is alive. We are all equal, and all of us need helping, and there is nobody to help mankind except mankind."
"But why do we pray to God if there is only mankind to help?" I asked, because my father was always saying that God was the only help a man could put his trust in, and what Mrs. Tom was saying was new to me.
"Only God will tell you that, Huw," she said, and she was looking at Tom. But Mrs. Tom never knew I heard what she said under her breath. "If there is a God," she said to herself.
She was looking at Tom just before she slipped his night-cap on. He had caught the iron over his head and shoulders. He was blind, of course, and his nose was burnt off, and his mouth was like a buttonhole with his teeth all black inside, and his head was naked and a purplish color. He would have been about thirty, then, and my father said he had been a well-favored man and the finest tenor in the Valley. Now he could only make funny noises in his throat, and I'm not sure he knew Mrs. Tom or his little girls. So looking back I'm not sure I can blame her for saying what she did.
That was when I started to think for myself, and perhaps that was what made me come down to this.
Not that I am not satisfied with what I have become, or that I am where I am. Only that if I had not started to think things for myself, I might have had a happier life by ordinary standards, and perhaps I might have been more respected.
Though neither happiness nor respect are worth anything, because unless both are coming from the truest motives, they are simply deceits. A successful man earns the respect of the world never mind what is the state of his mind, or his manner of earning. So what is the good of such respect, and how happy will such a man be in himself? And if he is what passes for happy, such a state is lower than the self-content of the meanest animal.
Yet, looking around this little room, such thinking is poor comfort indeed, and strangely empty of satisfaction, too. There must be some way to live your life in a decent manner, thinking and acting decently, and yet manage to make a good living.
My father was a great one for honest dealing, but he never had his reward down here, and neither did my mother. I am not bitter about anything, and I have no feeling left inside me to be scornful. I am only saying what is in my mind.