CHAPTER XX.PEOPLE OF THE PAST.
“Here sits he, shaping wings to fly:His heart forebodes a mystery;He names the name eternity.”—Tennyson.
“What birth is, that also is death; it is the same line drawn in two directions.”—Schopenhauer.
“What birth is, that also is death; it is the same line drawn in two directions.”—Schopenhauer.
One evening at the house of a famous orator Mrs. Doring saw a face with which she had been familiar since childhood, yet never before had she seen it outside of the enchanted realm of imagination.
It was a woman’s face, strong, noble, beautiful, and the eyes, the brown eyes of it, had in them a compassion that embraced the whole human race.
Cartice looked upon it with an all-compelling fascination, for it was the face of one of her own people—the very dearest one—the Helen of her young dreams, to whom she used to tell her hopes and yearnings, and who always understood, and gave sympathy and cheer.
How often had she pictured that face on paper, trying to make objective what she saw clearly with her subjective sight, but how impossible it had ever been to give the eyes the direct, comprehensive, compassionate glow that distinguishedthem,—the light of the soul itself, which went straight to other souls!
She would not ask the name lest it prove to be one below her ideal. She hardly dared look away lest the precious vision vanish, while her eyes were turned aside. No; it were better to hold the glad fancy as long as possible. “Do you know Helen Gardener?” asked a voice at her side.
She turned to the speaker, dazed and scarcely understanding.
“Whom?”
“Helen Gardener, the author,—that lady you were looking at just now. Like Huxley and some of the more humble of us she believes that the main thing is to have done with lying.”
“Then she is my Helen,” thought Cartice. “How remarkable, too, that she has the very same name I gave her.”
“Come, Mrs. Doring,” said her friend, “I want to have you meet her. I fancy you two will be pleased with each other.”
When Cartice found herself talking with the incarnation of one of her ideal people of long ago, she had a flash of knowledge of the oneness, inseparableness and unchangeableness of all things past, present and future.
Did her new-found, old-time friend recognize her? It would seem so, for she was strongly attracted to Cartice from the first moment.
The question under discussion in the little group of whom she was one, was whether art, especially the art of fiction, should exist for art’s sake only—that is to give pleasure—or should it also aim to instruct.
“I believe,” said Helen Gardener, “and have lived up to my belief, that fiction which merely entertains, and carefully steers clear of the deep and often dark problems that face all thoughtful minds is pernicious in its effect. The literature of the optimist is the literature of shallowness and selfishness, a bid for surface appreciation, an appeal to a light and superficial taste. Life is tragic. If it be represented in fiction, let the picture be true to nature. The novel should be a tonic, not an opiate. What think you, Mrs. Doring?”
“Like Goethe and Schiller I think art ‘no luxury of leisure, no mere amusement to charm the idle nor relax the care-worn; but a mighty influence, serious in its aims, although pleasurable in its means.’ The advocates of art for art’s sake, say that its object is the creation of the beautiful. What is the beautiful? Is it that which pleases the eye only, or has it power to thrill the soul? The great novels have all carried great messages. They have shaken the hearts of men and aroused them to new knowledge; they have broken the bonds of prejudice, and set the bondsmen free. They have effected a movement ofthe thought-world in the direction of ‘that far-off, divine event toward which the whole creation moves.’ They have spoken the truth as their authors beheld it.”
Helen Gardener’s brown eyes glowed and she smiled affectionately, saying:
“You and I belong to the same ethical family, Mrs. Doring.”
That night as she lay down to sleep, Cartice half persuaded herself that she was again a child, day-dreaming under the elm tree, the world unknown and still idealized, and the years that lay between that time and the present obliterated.
“Do I wish it were so?” she asked herself.
“No. I am glad so much of the journey has been accomplished. The future is always better than the past. It has in it that which we are to become, for life is endless becoming.”
Cartice and the new-found Helen became warm friends; but not till their friendship had stood the test of time did Cartice tell her how the creative power we call imagination had found her years before.
Quite as unexpectedly did Mrs. Doring one day meet the stranger to whom she had confided her ambitions and dreams under the elm tree long ago. She recognized him instantly, though of course he did not know her.
The great world knew him well. The bauble fame, and the jewel of success were his.
It was he who had sung:
“I’d rather fail in Bohemia, than win in another land.
Its honors not garnered by thrift or trade,But for beauty and truth men’s souls have made.”
When she made herself known to him, his first question was, “Have you found your own people?”
“A few,” she answered, “a faithful few; but the search goes on forever.”
In a little while he went away—went into the silence.
Still another picture of the past came and blended with the present.
In the parlors of a friend one evening, Mrs. Doring met a number of the most eminent women from all parts of the country, who work for the political liberty of their sex. There had been a convention in Washington, and many of the delegates were “doing” New York before returning home.
A lady from what then was a territory, but is now a state, charmingly told some of her experiences in laboring with members of her legislature. She mentioned name after name, relating various incidents, some humorous, and some exciting compassion on account of their revelationof the depths of ignorance in certain legislative minds.
“After several encounters with darkened minds of the class I have just mentioned,” said the speaker, “it was a pleasure to have a chat with Representative Kendall. We knew well where he stood, for throughout his career, as editor and lawmaker, he has distinguished himself as the staunch friend of every movement that promised to help women win a greater freedom and therefore gain a greater usefulness.
“Once I asked him how it was that he who had appreciated women personally so little as never to have married one, was yet so loyal a supporter of them in the aggregate that he cheerfully put his shoulder to the wheel of every cart which carried their burdens.
“‘Now that,’ said he, with a boyish laugh and sunny smile, ‘has its root in a bit of sentiment; but I don’t deny that it has grown into a principle. The only woman I found indispensable to me found me very dispensable to her. Through that experience I learned that love, if it be genuine, can rise higher than possession. She was of your emancipated; that is, she made a place for herself in the world, and leaned on no one. Her life showed me that woman could grow to heroic mental stature, if she would think, work and act for herself. The one of whom I speak requested me to do what I couldall my life to make it easier for women to get out of their dependent condition. I have done so and have found pleasure in it. She is in the world somewhere, still, and I feel that everything I do for women helps her. That’s my story. Take it and use it, if you wish, as an example of how the monster man can be humanized and regenerated by a woman who neither loved him nor married him.’
“‘Whatever good I may have done, whatever I have achieved in any praiseworthy direction, I owe to that woman. But for her wholesome encouragement, if living at all, I should be still a clerk at some more prosperous man’s desk, withered in spirit and wasted in body, and with no brains at all. It used to be quite the correct thing, in stories, for good women to marry rakish fellows, and ‘make men of them,’ as the phrase had it. I am now convinced they achieve that result far quicker, when they don’t marry them, whether rakish or otherwise, but make them stand on their own feet entirely.’”
Mrs. Doring listened to this story, feeling very much as might a ghost who comes wandering back to its old haunts and hears some one talking of its life when on earth, for this Kendall was her old lover whom she loved not and she was the woman of whom he spoke. Turning to the writing desk of her hostess, she wrote:
“Cartice Hill Doring sends regards to theHonorable Charles Kendall. It is with grateful pleasure she learns that he has been faithful to the promise made to her long ago, to do what he could to make life broader and freer for womankind.”
The response was prompt and full. He told the story of his life from the day of their parting to the day of writing. Then came these paragraphs:
“I am more than glad to have found you again. Not that I ever really lost you, for you have an eternal abiding-place in my mind and heart. Though I have forgotten much and wish I could forget still more of the rubbish of memory, neither you nor aught pertaining to you can be forgotten. You are not forgettable. But I am glad to be able to talk with you once more, although it be only on paper and across a continent. For me the end of the drama is near. I am in the last act, which has but few scenes. Life and death! what are they? We know as much of one as of the other, for we understand neither. We drop the question of whence because the imminent whither faces us and must be met, and dark enough it looms before us as we confront it at short range. Who can answer this cry of perplexed humanity?
“I turn to you as I did in the past, and bade you decide whether I should go or stay. Now I have no choice but to go; yet tell me, shall I gowith peace and trust into light, or must I lie down to be wrapped in darkness and silence forever? It is a time when my own strength is insufficient, and I reach out for the clasp of an assuring hand.
“Is it strange that I turn to you for the help I need on this journey, which, though lonesome, is brief? It seems a natural thing to do. In all the years since I saw you, and have known nothing of you, when the way was uncertain, I always turned to you for guidance. I said to myself: ‘Would Cartice Hill wish me to do this?’ And I did that which I thought you would sanction. So you see you have been with me all the time. We have never been separated.
“To me you are always young—young and full of courage and hope. I see you as I saw you last, a precious picture in my memory. The years that have passed since then are blown like a breath away. I am sitting beside you in the park again. I can almost touch your blue dress, and I hear the scratching of your parasol as you wrote with its tip on the ground.
“The disease that was incipient in me in youth has been bravely baffled by this climate. I sometimes think it is the insidious agent that will ultimately destroy the human race. The end must come, however, even here, and I see that it is coming.
“So tell me what life has taught you about death, if anything. No matter how hard and grim and fearsome the knowledge may be, I want to know it. Strange that although we devote our lives to learning, and many become vain of their acquirements, of this, the most important of all subjects, nobody knows anything, and nobody cares to learn till about to open the dread door.”
This appeal Cartice answered by telling the story of her communion with friends called dead, and she told this with a directness and simplicity that went straight to the mark. To her it was clear enough that, if a man die, he shall live again,—and shall grow, his growth depending upon his aspirations. Genius itself has been described as a “faculty for growth.” Being a citizen of the universe, man is destined to know the universe as his native village. The form only changes. Death is not.
To this Kendall wrote:
“You have destroyed the last enemy for me. ‘Only the form changes.’ Need we dread that? We may even be said to be used to it. We haven’t the same bodies we began life with. They have changed in every particular, again and again.
“How extraordinary have been your privileges of learning those things to which most of ushave been so blind. Why not write the story out more fully and publish it? Since it has helped me, might it not help others? But don’t put it into a newspaper. There it would take no higher rank than the traditional, blood-curdling ghost-story. Make a book of it. That will place it on its own feet, to stand or fall by its merits.
“Yes, tell your experiences with those who dwell in what we call another world; in fact, however, another condition.
“I have had an instinctive, though not unwavering belief that this life was not the end of us—perhaps not the beginning; but I had my hours of gloomy doubt. The old twaddle of an eternity of happiness made up of harps and golden streets did not appeal to either my intelligence or taste. Perhaps, it was a shade less attractive than annihilation.
“Learning to grow and to do, that is what makes an immortality worth having.
“I have lived on good terms with my conscience, which is of an old-fashioned cut, not from fear of hell or hope of heaven, but because I am that sort of man. I could not do otherwise. Yet I wish I might have learned what you tell me, earlier. I think it would have made the ills of life here of less moment and might have enhanced its joys and beauties.
“Who, understanding the philosophy of continued life as it has been revealed to you, could fail to try and acquire some of the capital, thieves cannot steal, with which to begin the larger life that opens to us, when we pass the gates of death? It is helping me to make my remaining time of more value.
“You have influenced me as no other person has done ever since I knew you. Now you light the road out of the world for me. I begin to see that there are no accidents.
“Let who will write the shallow tales that reach no farther than the wedding-day. Write you the wonderful story of the love of God, as ’twas told you by those who have tasted death and found it not bitter—tell how this love encompasses and pervades everything in the universe, conserving all and destroying nothing. Tell of the happiness destined for the soul of man, which consists in endless unfolding. Tell all this as simply and directly as you have told it to me, and you will inspire the doubting and cheer the despairing.”
To which Cartice replied: “In an old book it is written, ‘Though one returned from the dead, they would not believe.’”
Kendall wrote: “In the same book it is written, ‘Let your light shine.’”
That night she sat down to write the first chapter of the book, but instead wrote this:
He came, my dead love, at the close of the day,Though the earth had long covered his garments of clay.His face glowed with light and with love as he smil’dAnd spoke in the voice that my heart had beguil’d—The beautiful voice that my heart had beguil’d.“You have wondered, my darling, what soul was the oneTo first greet me with love when my dying was done—When I woke from the slumber that stretches betweenThe flesh-and-blood world and the kingdom unseen—The world that you see and the kingdom unseen.“Know then that the spirit, earth’s veil cast away,Sees only the true in that radiant day.He who first o’er my spirit, newborn, bent and smiled,Was the foe who had gone from me unreconciled—My foe who had gone from me unreconciled.”So spake my dead love and then vanished away,Like the mist of the valley when riseth the day.But I know, since that moment, that hate is a dreamFrom which the soul wakes when it crosses Death’s stream—Awakes to love only, across that dark stream.I know, too, that Death cannot change, cannot killE’en the person. My lover, though dead, loves me still;For he came, as of old, and upon me he smil’d,And spoke in the voice that my heart had beguil’d—The beautiful voice that my heart had beguil’d.
The book was begun. The writing of it was not an easy task in spite of the writer’s warm interest in her theme. Little snatches of time, after the daily grind at her editorial desk was over, were all she could devote to it. Often she was too tired to write a line until she had restedhours. Then, perhaps, to make up for such indulgence, she wrote far into the night—wrote as though bayonets were pressing her—wrote with no thought of publisher or public in mind. The truth, to write the truth, as it was revealed to her, this was her inspiration, her strength, her reward.