The Master Knot of Human Fate
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Ellis Meredith >> The Master Knot of Human Fate
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"And yet people starved everywhere, and it seemed to me that the
farmers were the worst off of all."
"They farmed to make money, not to live, and they had no control over
the markets. They had to sell or build barns. It is only Dives who can
afford to tear down the old ones and build greater. It was easier for
them to sell cheap to a man who took their wheat and held it until it
could be sold back to them as dear flour. They were eaten up with
mortgages and pests and interest. Have you noticed that there are
almost no insects here, not even flies and mosquitoes? They were never
so bad in the mountains, and apparently they have been wiped out with
the rest."
"Truly, Adam," she said, "speaking just of the physical part of it,
would you regret this year?"
He stood up and stretched out his arms, a splendid type of manhood,
smooth-shaven, with clear-cut features, bronzed, square-shouldered,
and powerful.
"Oh, you are magnificent!" she cried involuntarily. "It has done you
good, great good. You are twice the man you were in strength and
health and resource; and if only we had been cast away on an island,
knowing we were sure to be rescued some day soon, I should not be
sorry at all."
He colored and answered frankly: "Without the mental strain, I should
not regret this year. Sometimes, when I am sure it is a dream, and
that presently we shall waken, I can't help wondering whether we shall
not wish we had fretted less and enjoyed it more. When I come to think
of it, I believe it is the first time since I was a child that ways
and means have not troubled me. It was a good thing to work as we
have, to keep our minds employed, but now that we are sure that
starvation is five or six years away, we might as well drop the old,
headlong rush to get more than we need. That has been the trouble ever
since men began to make history. It was the same thing,--power,
conquest, riches, everything; too much to eat, too much to drink, too
much to wear--"
"Well, you can't say that of us," said Robin ruefully, looking down at
her made-over gown.
"Well, perhaps not, and I don't mean that there ever was a time when
there was a general surfeit, but I mean that was the tendency. There
would have been plenty for all, if part had not taken more than their
share; as for the other part who had not enough, they only longed for
the opportunity to simulate their unwise betters. When they could,
they took too much, too, if it was only to drink and forget their
misery. We could have lived so well and so easily, if we had lived
more simply, coming more directly in contact with nature, as we have
this year."
She shook her head doubtfully. "This has not been real life at all. We
have only kept alive. We haven't read anything or done anything or
helped any one--"
"Except each other and the animals dependent on us. On the whole, I
don't know but that we have accomplished about as much as when we were
devoting most of our attention to paying board and rent bills. We have
helped each other more than we can measure. We should have died had we
been left alone with our thoughts. All of life is not in cities, nor
even in books."
She did not answer for some moments, and then said slowly, "If it were
a dream, and we were going back to the old life, what would you regret
most?"
"If we were going back to the world we know, I should regret a good
many things; first, I suppose, that I did not realize sooner that we
must be going back, instead of letting myself be utterly overwhelmed.
Then I think I should be sorry that I didn't practise, a la
Demosthenes, when I had a whole coast to myself, and most of all I
should regret that we have not kept a record of our lives from day to
day. There is other writing I should want to do,--but there is no
paper, and I don't know how to make any."
"There is plenty of time to do all that yet," she said. "What else
would you wish you had done?"
He looked at her, for there was something in her voice he did not
understand, but her eyes were turned from him. "I should regret that
we had not talked more. Do you know, we have been very silent? And we
used to have so many things to talk over in the old days. I should
have twinges of remorse that I did not make more of your companionship
when I had it, instead of raising more corn than we can eat in half a
dozen years, and letting you tear your hands shelling it." He stooped
and kissed one of her slender hands. She withdrew it quickly; there
had never been even a touch of the sentimental between them.
"What would you regret?" he asked suddenly.
She shrank a little, and her eyes looked far away, past the gateway.
"Some of the things you mention; very much that I had not encouraged
you more to go on with your work, but mainly--"
"Well, mainly?"
She jumped down from the rock where she had been sitting, and answered
evasively, "I don't think there is any mainly, unless it is that when
I had such a good chance to be a hermit, I couldn't remember all those
wonderful Mahatma practices that make one so good and so wise. The
only formulas I have really tried hard to recall are for cooking
without sugar, or spice, or fruit."
VI
Heap on more wood!--the wind is chill; But let it whistle as it
will, We'll keep our Christmas merry still.
SCOTT.
It was Christmas Eve, and the night being in a reminiscent mood, was
chillier than usual. Adam piled up the logs till the whole room was
full of the warm glow. "Let us hang up our stockings," he said, with
an attempt at gayety.
Robin spread out her hands with a gesture of comic distress. "If only
I had a pair to hang!" she said. "But they gave boxes in England,
didn't they? I noticed that the rain the other day seemed to have come
through the shed roof, and I fear the contents of those packing cases
may be the worse for it, especially if they happen to be sugar. Do you
think it would do to make ourselves presents of them? If you do,
please give me the smaller box; I am sure it has hair-pins and needles
and darning-cotton in it."
Adam laughed. "We will give them to each other," he said, "and perhaps
you'll find some stockings in your box, if there is no box in your
stockings. We can dream of their contents all night, and--who
knows?--we may have a merry Christmas, after all."
Robin hardly knew the place next morning. Adam had risen early and
decked every available spot with kinnikinnick until the room fairly
glistened. "I wish I knew how to thank him," she said.
"Do you like it?" he said, as he came in. "I was afraid I should waken
you putting it up."
"Like it!" she answered, "Why, Adam, it is beautiful. You are just an
ideal Santa Claus."
When they had finished their breakfast they went out and looked at the
boxes.
"You must open yours first," she said; "it's so big I know it doesn't
contain anything nice, so we would better save mine till the last, and
then I can divide with you. What do you think it is? You shall have
three guesses."
"It might be a piano from its size," he ventured.
"No," she said decidedly. "It's not the right shape."
"Or perhaps it's a feather-bed; I don't know of anything I want less."
"It's too large for that; now guess, really."
"As a matter of fact, I expect it is mining machinery, which will be
about as much use as another chimney; but here goes to find out." He
brought his hatchet down vigorously between the boards at one end,
where a slight crevice promised some leeway.
"Oh, do be careful," she cried "even if there's nothing in it but
stove-polish and excelsior, the nails and the boards are absolute
treasures!"
He proceeded more gently. There was any amount of hoop-iron, which he
removed carefully, and the nails were drawn with as much caution as if
they had been teeth, as they well might be, considering there were no
more on earth to draw. When the top of the box was finally off, and a
quantity of papers removed, they gave a simultaneous cry of delight.
The box was full of books. They took them out, one at a time, with
little exclamations of pleasure, as an old friend came to light.
Sitting down on the ground they piled the books about them on the
papers, and opening favorites here and there read to each other and
themselves till long after noon. It was really a fine library, well
chosen, covering a wide range of subjects and including an
encyclopaedia and an unusually fine edition of Shakespeare.
"Isn't it the most beautiful Christmas present you can imagine, Adam?"
she said. "If you are not suited with this it must be because, in the
old slang, you 'want the earth.'"
"But we haven't even opened your box," he said.
"I don't want to," she answered slowly. "Somehow I feel as if we would
better stop now and let well enough alone. Let us enjoy this awhile.
Perhaps the other box may spoil this one, or at least the day."
Adam laughed with good-natured tolerance. "How absurd!" he said. "Let
us see what there is. You know you said yours would be the nicest;
besides, if it contains sawdust and last year's almanacs, I shall have
to divide with you, and we may quarrel over the Shakespeare." He
opened the box while she stood watching him with a strange
unwillingness. It had been labeled, "This Side Up," and on the very
top there was a wooden case. He put it in Robin's arms, and she opened
it with trembling fingers. She replaced the broken strings, adjusted
the bridge, tucked the violin under her chin, tuned it, and
straightway escaped from every sorry care of earth.
Adam went on unpacking the box. It contained chiefly materials for
writing,--all the paraphernalia that the fastidious student requires.
There were many note-books, and at the bottom a large, handsomely
inlaid writing-desk. The name on the cover made him start and call
her. She put down the violin reluctantly, and then stooped and kissed
the vibrating wood with sudden feeling.
"It is a Steiner," she said. "You know the story of Steiner's violins,
do you not? No? Some day, perhaps, I may tell you. Can you open the
desk?"
He found the key and unlocked it. There were some letters, a few
papers and memoranda, and a journal. Adam turned to the last page
written, and read:--
"Have just completed arrangements for transportation of my
effects to the mountains. Close study of various phenomena
convinces me that I may have been in error, and that the
cataclysm is much closer at hand than I have thought. Within
a few months I shall burn this book, and confess that I
should be written down an ass, or turn to it to prove myself
a prophet. From the eyrie I have chosen I expect to be able
to write the story of the coming deluge. It will be of great
value to posterity to have a calm, scientific account, quite
free from any tinge of superstition or religion. I have
to-day written my Boston skeptics, forwarding copies of my
calculations, with references to former inundations, and
reasons for believing the Rocky Mountain region the safest
at this time. All geologists agree that--"
Here the journal terminated abruptly.
Robin hardly seemed to comprehend its full significance; or possibly
she was not surprised. She touched the book as gently as if it were
the napkin over the face of the dead.
"It is not to the wise that God has revealed himself," she said
softly. "Where is the hand that wrote this? You must finish it, Adam.
Here are the blank pages waiting for such a chapter as was never
written on earth."
But Adam only looked at the half-written page unseeingly. "It is all
true, then," he muttered to himself; "it is all true." He walked away
with a painful precision of motion, almost as if he were drunk; he
neither heard nor saw anything, yet was conscious of everything, and
while he thought he had been hopeless before, he knew now that he had
never given up hope, never until that moment ceased to expect a
rescue.
Robin took her violin and went indoors. Presently he heard its liquid
notes stealing out to him, like a power unknown and divine, brushing
its fingers across his heart, the harp of a thousand strings. She
played for a long time, and when she ceased, in some strange way he
felt that he was comforted.
VII
The World is too much with us; late and soon
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon.
* * * * *
Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn,--
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
WORDSWORTH.
They had been sitting by the fire in silence for a long time. Robin
had been sewing, but the blaze had sunk too low to see by it, and her
hands were folded idly upon her mending. She put it by, and went to
the window. It was a very dark night, and the stars shone brilliantly.
The stars had come to mean a great deal to them both, howbeit neither
had ever said so. The stars only were unchanged. "The thoughts of God
in the heavens" were the same, whatever might be His thought on earth.
She sighed so heavily, that Adam asked quickly, "What is it?" and she
answered, with a nervous laugh, "I was thinking of the old legend,
that the souls on other planets call ours 'the sorrowful world.' What
made it so sorrowful, Adam?"
"Ignorance would cover it all," he answered, "but to be specific,
intemperance, sensuality, avarice, and poverty. I don't mean
drunkenness only, when I say intemperance. I have known a few
prohibitionists in my time who were as intemperate in their eating as
any one could be in the matter of drink. I think intemperance in its
widest sense was the great curse of our time anyway; drink and tobacco
and tea and coffee; and as to our eating, there was too much, of
almost everything on earth that was not food, but which could be
over-salted and over-peppered, and treated with tabasco sauce. We
over-stimulated every activity of the body, and spent our lives doing
all kinds of things in which there was no sense. Think of reading one
or two morning and evening papers every day. To be sure we said there
was nothing in them, but we used up our eyesight over them, and let a
stream of silliness and scandal dribble through our minds. As to the
things we wore--"
Robin laughed. "I know," she said. "The sewing-machine didn't save
work; it only made ruffles. A dressmaker once said to me, 'It's a good
thing for me that these women haven't sense enough to spend their time
and money on themselves, in making their bodies free and strong and
beautiful. But no; they would rather have a stylish dress than a
graceful body. They don't care to be beautiful themselves; all they
want is a handsome gown to cover their ugliness.' Isn't it strange
that we never seemed able to realize that the Greek fashions were
immortal because they were beautiful?"
"Still, I don't think the dress of the Greek women would be very
convenient for housework," ventured Adam.
Robin shook her head. "You only say that because some woman has said
it to you. The Diana of the Stag wore the first rainy-day gown. The
Greek dress was capable of ever so many modifications. If I were
making a handbook of proverbs for women, I should say, 'A good
complexion is rather to be chosen than many fine dresses, and glossy
and abundant hair turneth away wrath.' I believe in the simplification
of life. I understand just how Thoreau felt when he threw out that
specimen because it had to be dusted daily. There are very few things
beautiful enough to pay for that amount of trouble. But perhaps that
is because I don't care for specimens, and I loathe dusting."
"You ought to have been a Jap," said Adam. "There was one in college,
in my class, and one day when I was fretting over something I could
not afford he said, in that immensely polite way of theirs, 'You I
cannot understand. With all American people it so is, even as by
Ruskin said was it; whatever you have, of it you more would get, and
where you are, you would go from. You happy are only when something
you get, and never that you yourself are.' But I think the Celestial
was wrong there. When a man is self-conscious of illy-made garments, a
mean domicile, a poor kind of half education, he is uncomfortable; he
hasn't accomplished his evolution from the conscious, the
self-conscious, to the unconscious. It was this very discomfort and
inequality that used so to enrage me, for it need not have been."
"I wish," said Robin, "we knew how to make paper; of all the
fascinating things in Bellamy's 'Equality,' there was nothing I liked
so well as the idea of paper garments, to be burned when one got
through with them. Think of never having any washing and ironing, and
always having new clothes."
"I wonder whether we could invent some of those things over again,"
said Adam, reflectively.
"I couldn't spare you any of my precious rags, if you could," said
Robin.
"Most of the paper was made out of wood, anyhow," answered Adam, "and
the ash that grows here in any quantity was considered particularly
fine for that purpose."
"'God made man upright, but he hath sought out many inventions,'"
quoted Robin, "and now we are going to seek them over again. I can't
imagine how anyone could ever make a lineotype, but the type and the
hand-press are easy enough, and if you can make paper, we may yet live
to read our 'published works.' You probably do not know that I used to
have a Wegg-like facility for dropping into poetry."
"Did you? That is another of the things you never told me; but your
speaking of Thoreau," answered Adam, "recalls what he said of the
amount of work necessary to sustain life beside Walden Pond. It took
six weeks out of the year, and that was in a most forbidding country.
In such a valley as this two months ought to be sufficient to more
than feed and clothe us; but then he didn't have to make his own
clothing."
"And out of nothing particular," interrupted Robin.
Adam laughed and went on. "Did you ever hear of a man called Hertzka?
He was an eminent Austrian sociologist, and he figured it out, that if
five million men should work a little less than an hour and three
quarters a day they could produce all the necessities of life for the
twenty-two million people of Austria. By working two hours and twelve
minutes daily for two months beside, they could have all the luxuries
also. And that not for a few, not for the Court and the nobility, but
for all. There could have been music and pictures and books and
theatres, and sufficient food and clothing. Isn't it strange that when
we might have been so happy we preferred to be so wretched? For even
if we had all we wanted ourselves, we could not escape the sights and
sounds that told of abject misery."
"It was always so," Robin answered moodily. "The poor we had always
with us. History always repeated itself."
"Still, it didn't exactly repeat itself," Adam said. "Our dark age
would have done for a golden age in the past. Greece was glorious for
a little while, but her literature tells us of her ideals. The isles
of Greece, where Byron contracted his last illness, would have left
him to die among the rocks twenty-five hundred years earlier, because
he had a lame foot. We at least were kinder to animals, and that means
a great deal."
"I don't know," she answered. "Perhaps; it seems to me I have read of
a hospital for sick animals on the island of Ceylon a long sometime B.
C. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu--or was it Lady Hester Stanhope?--said
she had traveled all over the world, and had never found but two kinds
of people,--men and women. I fancy the same thing is true of all the
ages as well as all the countries."
"No," Adam said, shaking his head; "our ideals change. The scheme of
life laid down by Christ was to the Greeks foolishness and to the Jews
a stumbling-block, and there were plenty of Greeks and Jews in our
day. By Greeks I mean people whose ideals were purely intellectual,
and by Jews those who saw no good save a material good, no God but the
God of Mammon. They would not hear either Moses or the prophets, and
the statute of limitations was as near as they could come to the
Sabbatic year. The Greek and the Jew have stood ready with their cup
of hemlock, their crown of thorns for every Christ-spirit that has
ever come to earth. Yet more people read Socrates, and believed on the
Nazarene every year. I don't mean in the church; the working-man did
not go to church, but he uncovered his head at the name of Christ, the
first lawgiver who confounded the scribes and Pharisees, and ate with
publicans and sinners."
"But Moses was the first lawgiver to forbid taking the nether
millstone as a pledge," objected Robin.
"True," he admitted, "and the laws of Moses would have made the world
over. He was the greatest writer on political economy this earth has
ever seen. His absolute fiat against the alienation of the land would
have done more for the common people than all Adam Smith's theories of
free competition, and Fourier's dream of a perfected communism. But
who would have known of Moses, save for Christ? The Old Testament
would have been merely the sacred book of the Hebrews, and save as a
literary and historic work, of very uncertain historic value, would
have been unread, as the Koran and other books of a similar nature
were unread."
"And yet you do not believe in the divinity of Christ," she said
slowly.
"No," he answered. "Is that necessary before one can believe in his
teachings? The truth is always divine. What difference does it make
whether the one who utters it be human or divine, bond or slave, AEsop
or Marcus Aurelius? the truth remains the same. A fable is only
another name of a parable. We have the story of the lost sheep; that's
a parable; and that of the lamb that muddied the stream, and that's a
fable. One is sacred, the other profane, but both are fables, both
parables. When you take them away from the context it is as easy to
feel for the lamb eaten by the wolf, as for the one that was rescued,
and has been immortalized in picture and song."
"Probably you are right," she said. "I never thought of it in just
that way before," and saying "good night" she went to her room.
Adam thought he heard her humming, "Away on the mountains cold and
bare."
VIII
When we mean to build
We first survey the plot, then draw the model,
And, then we see the figure of the house,
Then must we rate the cost of the erection.
SHAKSPERE.
The discovery of the incomplete journal made a subtle change in Adam.
He had been silent and self-absorbed from the first, but he had never
quite given up hope. Even now, Robin sought to keep up the pretence,
and dreading the despair which she saw creeping over Adam, she began
artfully to seek some means of interesting him in something else. The
question of a proper place for the books gave her an opportunity, and
Adam suggested that he build an addition to the house.
They planned it as eagerly as if it was to be a castle, and spent days
in looking for adobe, but finally decided that logs would be better,
and Adam's ax could have been heard ringing from morning till night. A
log house is not exactly a work of art, but it requires no little
skill to build one, and takes a good deal of time when the logs for
the floor must be planed and squared, so as to make a matched board
floor. Sometimes Robin went with Adam, and worked or read; sometimes
she took him his luncheon at noon, for the trees were at some little
distance from the house. The logs had to be "snaked" across the rough
ground and down the mountain, and when the floor had been laid, and
the location of the window decided upon, Robin planted morning-glory
seeds where it was to be. By dint of much pushing and hauling the logs
were finally put in place, and the roof battened down. The window was
truly worthy of a mediaeval castle, for it was simply an oblong hole,
boxed in with a casement made from some scraps of boards, while a slab
shutter, swung on leather hinges, shut out the elements.
The chinking was a simple matter, and when it was all done, including
a doorway into the main room, Robin was unfeignedly delighted. They
made rows of shelves with the packing-cases, and arranged the books
thereon. It was not an extensive library, but it occupied one side of
the room, and was a godsend to them. Under the window Robin placed the
green covered desk, and placed on it Adam's writing materials. Along
the inside wall Adam built a bunk, after the fashion in miners'
cabins, and with a mattress stuffed with the soft inner cornhusk, and
a pillow from the other room, and blankets from the one tiny closet,
the couch looked sufficiently inviting. On the floor Robin spread mats
made from plaited cornhusk, and in the doorway hung a portiere, woven
from the same material on a loom that a Navajo might not have utterly
despised.
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