CHAPTER XXII.THE PROP THAT FAILED.
“Ye have read, ye have heard, ye have thought,” he said, and the tale is still to run.“By the worth of the body that once ye had, give answer—what have ye done?”—Rudyard Kipling.
“Ye have read, ye have heard, ye have thought,” he said, and the tale is still to run.
“By the worth of the body that once ye had, give answer—what have ye done?”—Rudyard Kipling.
Two years passed, and Mrs. Doring still sat at her editorial desk. Farnsworth had been the kindest and most considerate of employers. The envious said no woman ever had an easier situation. They raised their eyebrows, when they said this, implying the usual sentimental insinuations; but they were mistaken. Farnsworth’s regard for Cartice had no sentimental coloring whatever. He admired her ability and delighted in giving her a chance, and making that chance as pleasant as possible, having views on the unfair, industrial, political and social rulings from which women suffer.
He had come to New York, a talented struggler. Now he was a millionaire, chief proprietor of a great publishing house, which had become great under his management, and he loved to make the road a little smoother for those less able and less fortunate.
Cartice loved him, it is true; but not as thecommon mind understands the term. Sometimes her eyes grew moist, while she looked at him and wished she might have a chance to prove her gratitude. He was to her like the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. In the weakness of spirit ages have bred in her sex, she regarded him as a wall that stood between her and possible calamity.
“I need fear no financial disaster, while he lives,” she thought. “His hand will be ever friendly; his heart ever kind.”
Farnsworth was far above the average of men, but he had a serious weakness of character that made curious comradeship with his better attributes. Anybody, the least trustworthy, the most malicious, could sow in him seeds of suspicion against his best friend, and in ten hours they would be full-grown trees, loaded with bitter and baneful fruit. When this happened his kindness vanished and he could be as cruel as hate. His conscience fled the field, whenever his vanity was ruffled.
Knowing this a woman poisoned his mind against Cartice Doring, by a few lying words—a woman who believed it would be to her interest to get Cartice out of her way. The seed sown sprouted, grew, blossomed and bore fruit within twenty-four hours.
The next day Cartice found a note of dismissal on her desk, the curtness of which was incompatiblewith the pretensions of a gentleman, if addressed to one merely in the capacity of employee. But when the employee was a social equal, a faithful friend of years and a lady, it showed a lack of self-control on the part of the writer seldom surpassed.
The tenor of it was that, as she was “not doing justice” to the work entrusted to her care, her services were dispensed with. A check for the whole of the unfinished week was enclosed.
Cartice read the letter and sat like one frozen, and the heart-breaking, unbearable look of long ago came again into her eyes.
Every one who has received an unexpected, felling blow from the hand of a friend can understand the blended astonishment and anguish of that moment.
She knew who had turned Farnsworth against her and why it had been done, but that could not help the irremediableness of the situation. She could not go to Farnsworth and mortify him by telling him this; and she knew his implacable spirit too well to hope that he would so much as allow her an audience. Serious as was the blow to her finances, its worst effect was on her heart. Black and deep are the bruises made by the hands we love.
“I must not forget what I owe him for past kindness,” she said,—“must not let this cruelty put hatred into my heart. I must forgive him,for he knows not what he does. Being a man, he cannot know how difficult is life for a woman, under the existing order of things. Neither does he know how often heretofore my heart has bled from cruelty; nor how I have loved him; nor how weary and feeble I am much of the time.
“No; he doesn’t know. Would any of us ever hurt another if we knew all that other has to bear? Besides, it is better to be the victim of injustice than the perpetrator of it. Ugly as is poverty, it is better to endure it than to have the power which the possession of millions confers and misuse it.
“Poor Farnsworth,” she said. “Success has spoiled your naturally beautiful soul.
“The great destroyer of human conscience that goes by the name of business permits you to put me out of your service in a summary and humiliating manner, which puts me out of your life and friendship at the same time, though moral right to treat another human being in this way you have none. But the law of causality is ever operative, and you cannot escape the consequences of your deeds. You will get back your meed as you measure.
“I accept your dismissal as part and parcel of the destiny I am working out. Sooner or later every earthly prop on which I lean is taken from me. Everything has a meaning and purpose. The lesson I have been slow to learn is now plainto me. It is that I must stand alone, and so must every soul, somewhere, some time. Props are destroyers of strength and character. In all the universe there is but one on which we may lean without inviting weakness, and that is Eternal Being, the background of all life.”
Gathering up her little possessions from the place that had been her official home for eight years, Mrs. Doring walked out of it heavy-hearted and solitary. The rock from which she had expected shelter had vanished from her horizon forever. More! It had never been there, save in her imagination. It was an illusion from which now she was free.
Curiously enough we regret the loss of our illusions, yet we ought to thank God fervently every time we get rid of one, for it means that we are emerging from ignorance and darkness into light and knowledge,—approaching nearer to the truth that shall make us free.
On reaching home Mrs. Doring sat down to take a practical view of the situation. For nearly twenty years had she worked faithfully, having begun at seventeen. She had lived in modest comfort, and by dint of self-denial had saved one thousand dollars. What man above mediocrity would think that a fair recompense for half a lifetime’s work?
A sudden cutting off like that is what any one may expect who has given his or her time andtalents to the building up of another’s business. It is the soul’s vengeance for not trusting it entirely, and confidently following whithersoever it may lead.
But there is something shamefully immoral in our business methods, when an employee after years of faithful service can be flung out without a chance for a word of defence. It is as though our father should unexpectedly open the door of his home and bid us begone forever. And is not our employer our business father, from whom we have a right to expect consideration? Does he owe us nothing more than our weekly wage? Must his relation to us be always measured only by dollars and cents?
Among the letters Mrs. Doring took with her from the office unopened was one from Bardell, now in Paris, famous and prosperous beyond his dreams. Strange irony of fate that brought to her his glad story of fresh successes on the day that carried defeat to her.
With the superstition common to Bohemia Bardell considered Cartice his mascot. His letters were always frank, friendly and charming. His last words were: “Follow your ideals. They will lead you into freedom.”
This reminded her of her book. It was finished long since; but the writing was scarcely half the battle. It languished for want of a publisher. Those to whom it had been submitted,had returned it, one and all, with the contempt, but thinly veiled with regrets, it had excited in their infallible minds.
One plainer spoken and less heavily veneered with the world’s polish than the rest, said to her face:
“Come now, Mrs. Doring, you mustn’t expect anybody to publish stuff of that kind—digging into the meaning of life, higher methods of evolution, ‘shall we live after we die?,’ ‘ultimate destiny of the human race,’ and all such heavy timber. People take no interest in these questions. What we want is a rattling good love-story, with plenty of hugging and kissing in it. I like that in or out of a novel myself. There must be some iron-clad obstructionists in it, too, cruel parents or other able marplots, and the hero must get her in the last chapter or sooner. Anything but a story that doesn’t end all right. The public abhors it. Now, your book is loaded with high-up, mountain-peak thought, and wouldn’t sell at all.”
Another, with whom also, she had a personal interview, a young man with extraordinary faith in his own wisdom, smiled as he returned her manuscript, and made his smile so vocative it needed few accompanying words. “It is, ah—you know, Mrs. Doring, so wide a departure from the standard of art in fiction, that it might make even a publisher ridiculous, to say nothing of theauthor. One must keep somewhere within sight of the existing canons. This, if you will pardon me, flies in the face of every one of them.”
“I dare say,” answered Cartice. “I never troubled myself about the existing canons. It is life as I know it that I have tried to portray; not life as somebody else says it should be painted in books.”
After a number of equally disheartening experiences, the book was carefully laid aside to await the judgment day.
Meantime these same publishing houses were exuding cart-loads of marketable abominations, which were scattered in all directions, doing their share in weakening the minds of their unfortunate readers. Life, as depicted by them, was a mere sex-chase, more or less interrupted by the usual difficulties, all of which was quite in accordance with the “existing canons,” so much respected by the young man with the smile.
Perhaps nothing gives us a lonelier feeling than to be cut off from our field of daily activity, whatever it may have been. Cartice found herself set back to the dreadful days of her beginning in New York. It was as though she had gone steadily up a steep slope, to a respectable height, only to be knocked violently to the bottom by the hand that was helping her upward.
“Had I developed the best that was in me—followedmy ideals”—she said, “this could not have happened. In that case I should have stood alone long since, leaning on no prop, depending on no person’s caprice. Set-backs and knock-downs are our schoolmasters, and they are ever busy with us until we learn our lessons.”
A loneliness assailed her heart, poignant, sharp, deep. All her life its resistless waves had at times rolled over her spirit,—a flood that would not be stayed. It was that kind of loneliness that creates a solitude which is not placed in a densely peopled universe.
Then came the comforting reflection that we are never alone, never solitary, however much we may seem to be, and never absolutely on our own hands, in spite of appearances. About us are ever the spiritual hosts, and back of us, within us and about us, the Supreme Self, to which each is both inlet and outlet.
On the evening of Mrs. Doring’s first day of idleness, Gabriel Norris called to see her. For several years he had been a resident of New York. In the worst of the thick mass of the miserables he had set up his cobbler’s bench, and opened an adjoining reading-room; and there he fished for the souls of men, in the great ocean of wretchedness whose huge waves beat about his door.
Cartice told him the story of her summaryejectment from the place that she had so long occupied, and the various shifts that she had been making in her mind for the future.
“It’s a good thing,” he said, “when you don’t know just what to do, not to do anything—to wait,—wait without worry or anxiety—wait and trust. Unseen influences are ever at work on our destiny. We can hurry nothing, change nothing. Rest for a time. You have been so busy most of your life that you have had but little chance to get acquainted with yourself. You have a little capital ahead; rest on that. New ideas come in seasons of repose, for then the mind is receptive.”
“That is what I had half-decided to do,” she answered, “though I am still so much a slave to the old, erroneous belief that I carry myself on my own shoulders, I scarcely could get my consent to it.”
“And when you feel so disposed,” continued Gabriel, “come to my reading-room and read a story or a poem to my sheep—‘my po’ los sheep o’ de sheepfol,’ whom I try so hard to gather in. You may not know it—you know yourself so little—but you have the most beautiful voice I ever heard. Your reading, as well as your speech, is exquisite music. ‘The soul of man is audible, not visible,’ says Longfellow. ‘It reveals itself in the voice. A sound alone betrays the flowing of the eternal fountain.’”
Anxiety and worry fell away from Cartice Doring soon as she determined to rest and trust. A profound philosophic truth is here revealed. When we trust, God Himself carries our burdens, and we are set free from care. Trust is the essence, the vital principle of religion, which is at heart a recognition of the divine intelligence within us, about us, and is reflected by us,—the reality we call God.
It was a joy to be the mistress of her own time, to know when she began the day that she could do with it what she pleased. It was luxury to sit at an open window and feel the air blow over her, and not be goaded by any thought of duty undone. She went about the city and enjoyed its treasures of art and beauty. She formed new friendships and cultivated old ones. She read and, through sympathy, entered into, the lives and feelings of authors and the people of their creation, as never before. She became better acquainted with herself, and by that means with all others. She went to Gabriel Norris’s unsectarian temple and helped him feed his sheep. There the music of her beautiful voice called in many a lost one. The bitter loneliness that shadowed her at times fled away and troubled her no more. Her spirit came in sympathetic and loving touch with others, with all that is, with the universal mind itself, for this is the purpose of life, the union of the entire beingwith its original. This is the true freedom which is the destiny of the human race. The individual self becomes one with the universal, and is henceforth free from limitations, from restrictions, from bondage of every kind. It exchanges its little circle of personal desires for the great world-consciousness. Whosoever does this even in the most limited degree puts care and trouble behind him.
Thus it was that this truth which Cartice Doring had long theoretically accepted, became a part of her being. She began to live it and be it, for we only really accept truth when we are it. Her eyes lost the look of suffering that lighted them at times with a moving and resistless fire, and became trustful, hopeful, peaceful, like those of a happy child.
Difficulties and disappointments vanished and fear vexed her no more. She was like those who have won all battles, put all troubles behind them. She had the knowledge that within herself was power over all temporal dragons; that her welfare depended on no man’s whim; that there are no accidents; that He who slumbers not nor sleeps, is “guiding each of His creatures in the current of an eternal purpose”; that she was as indestructible as the universe, and as old, as young and as deathless as its builder. She thought no more of happiness, because blessedness had come into her life,—the blessednesswhich “consists in progress toward perfection.” In an undefined way she felt herself approaching high summits, understanding that there is neither high nor low, near nor far in the universe save in thought.