[This excerpt is from The Story of Jesus In The World's Literature. Ed. Edward Wagenknecht. Il. Fritz Kredel. Copyright, 1946. Creative Age Press, Inc. New York, N.Y.]
Andrew was a little Jewish boy who lived, very
many years ago, in Palestine, in a small city called
Tiberias, which was on the west shore of the Sea of
Galilee. He lived with his father, Reuben, who was
a fisherman, and two older brothers, Joseph and
Judas. They made their home in a little, flat-roof,
one-room house.
Perhaps if his mother had lived, Andrew might
have been a happy little boy, but she had died while
he was so small that he could just barely remember
her.
Andrew and his father and his brothers were very
poor, but that was not what made the little boy
unhappy. Everybody was poor in Tiberias. At least,
everybody that Andrew knew. Andrew had never
known anything but poverty; it did not occur to him
to ask for anything else. He was unhappy because
he was lonely. The world was such a vast, unfriendly
place. Nobody in it seemed to understand him much
better than his father or his brothers did. And they
did not understand him at all.
Reuben, the father, did not wish to be unkind. He
was a man who worked hard himself, from morning
until night, and he expected everybody else to work
also. As soon as his sons were old enough they were
trained to help him when he went out fishing in his
little boat. It was hard work to pull up the nets --
even when you had not taken very much-- and Reuben
had need of all the hands he could get.
Reuben did not expect Andrew to work as hard as
Joseph and Judas worked, for they were older and
stronger than he was. But he did expect him to show
some interest and do his part.
You are not to suppose that Andrew was a bad
boy. Joseph and Judas were disobedient sometimes,
or got into mischief, but he never did. He always
seemed willing to go out with the boat whenever his
father told him to do so. But it was easy to see that
his heart was not in his work. Even when his hands
were working, his mind would be off somewhere
wool-gathering, far away. When things quieted
down he would go off by himself and sit quietly in
a corner of the boat, and as likely as not when Reuben
wanted him he might have to call three or four
times before the boy gave any sign that he had
heard. To a man who had never done anything except
catch fish-- and who had never wished to do anything
except catch fish-- to a father who believed
that unless his son learned how to catch fish he
would probably starve to death after he grew up,
all this was very annoying.
Andrew kept much to himself. He loved to wander
alone, across the fields or along the seashore. If,
when he returned, you asked him where he had
been or what he had done, he never seemed to have
anything he could tell you.
That which satisfied his father and his brothers
was not enough for him: he was looking for something
more.
At first Reuben had been very patient with the lad.
For one thing, he felt sorry for him, deprived so
early of a mother's care. Leah had dearly loved her
youngest child, and Reuben loved him too, for her
sake if not for his own. There had been something
of the dreamer about her also.
"It will pass," said Reuben to himself. "He is still
very young. His mother's milk is not yet out of him."
Again he would say: "He is not a bad boy. He is
only a little slow. When he gets older he will take
hold of things, as Joseph and Judas do."
But it did not seem to be working out that way.
Andrew was nine now; only three years more, and
he must be ready to take his place in the congregation
of Israel. And he seemed only to grow more
dreamy, and -- as far Reuben could see--more useless
as time went on. The fisherman was shocked one
day when he realized for the first time that he almost
hated his child. Small-minded, ignorant people always
hate what they cannot understand, and Reuben
was both ignorant and small-minded, though he was
a good man according to his lights. He knew that
Andrew had something inside of him that he did not
have himself, something that he never could have,
not if he were to live a hundred years. He resented
the boy's superiority to himself, resented it even
while he refused to acknowledge it.
Reuben hated himself because he hated his son.
And because he hated himself, he only hate his son
the more. He did not actually mistreat the boy, but
he rarely spoke to him nowadays except when he
ordered him to get to work.
Andrew suffered silently under such treatment,
for he was the kind of boy who greatly needs to have
love about him. He did not love his father and his
brothers--as he had loved his mother, or even as he
loved the birds and the little lambs-- for they had
never given him a chance. But he would have loved
them if the chance had come, for he was terribly
lonely with nobody but the lambs and the birds to
talk to.
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