The Master Knot of Human Fate
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Ellis Meredith >> The Master Knot of Human Fate
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"Yes," she answered, "I have thought."
"And decided?"
"No," she said wearily; "we must decide together. We are not children,
Adam, nor are we in any way the prototypes of those first parents of
ours. I think sometimes that ever since their day their children have
been walking in a blind circle, eating not the fruit of knowledge, but
of the knowledge of good and evil. And what do we know, you and I,
after all these years? Are you sure what we ought to do? It is as if
God had taken us into a conspiracy to renew the old, or create a new,
scheme of existence. Possibly we are being tried, tested, to prove
whether or not we have learned our lesson. We must be brave enough to
think, not what is our will, but what is our duty. Think of the awful
responsibility, whichever way we choose."
"I can't," said Adam. "I can't think of anything but you."
"Nor I of aught but you," she said, moving away, "when you hold me so.
But we _must_ think."
"I have," answered Adam, gravely. "All my life I have thought. I have
wanted the perfect companionship of the one woman in all the world who
could give it; I have always known she would come. I have wanted a
home; I have wanted to see my sons and daughters grow up about me. I
wanted to be a power for good in this world of which we are a part,
and where we live for some good purpose, if there be any purpose in
life. I have so conducted myself that I can look a good woman in the
face, and offer her my life, for whatever it is worth, without damning
recollections to come between us. My children will have a clean
heritage of blood and name. The family tree was scoffed at in America,
but, thank God, mine was an oak that had weathered many a gale. Not
very great folk, but honest, upright, fearless men and women, true to
their king or their country and their faiths; true to their ideals,
too, when their fellows were content with realities only. Any man who
gives his children such a heritage as that can say with more truth
than Napoleon said to his soldiers, 'Fifty centuries look down upon
you.' I wanted to make the world a little better for my life, and I
wanted my children brought up to feel that their lives belonged first
to their country, to live or die for her."
"I know," said Robin, softly; "I used to think I would drape the flag
over my baby's cradle, and embroider it on his pinning blanket."
"We are probably a pair of sentimental fools," he went on, "but I
believe in sentiment. A man could not say this out loud because
sentiment was supposed to be essentially womanish. How those old
distinctions weary one, with their scientific data to prove that men
surpass women in the senses of feeling and taste, while women have
better sight and hearing, and so on through every conceivable
maundering of the human brain, forever harping on differences and
accentuating them, forever dwelling on sex distinctions and never on a
common humanity."
"It was a dreadfully scientific age," she assented, "a generation
fearfully and wonderfully given over to statistics; and yet how many
dreamers there were!"
"Yes, but in the twentieth century a young man dreamed dreams and saw
visions at his own risk. While he dreamed of the brotherhood of man,
his classmate with the corporation practice distanced him in the
pursuit of position. While he led himself through the valley of the
shadow of temptation, and feared no evil because of the Madonna vision
in his soul, even the Madonnas preferred Lancelot and Tristram to
Galahad. It wasn't an easy world for a man who wanted to keep faith
with himself. It was a pinchbeck world, of pretence and pull,--that
world that lies drowned out there. And yet I believe it was infinitely
better than the lost Atlantis, better than the deluged planet of Noah,
nobler and finer than the best civilization of which we have any
trace. I never despaired of it, and yet as I grew older I wondered if
I was not foolish and mistaken in daring to hope and to dream."
"I know," she said again. "I think I did despair, for it seemed to me
a dreadful, a terrible world. I used to wonder how conscientious men
and women could bring other human beings into it, to be and to suffer
and to faint in the frantic struggle for the unrealities that made us
miserable or happy. Consider how paltry they were. If we built a new
house, we were infinitely more concerned to see that the contractor
used pressed brick than we were to see that the construction of our
own characters was true. When we grew wealthy we moved into houses of
more stories; but how often did we say: 'Build thee more stately
mansions, O my soul'? I had as clean and strong a heritage as you, but
a different one. It is no use to comfort oneself with nice little
aphorisms about the needle's eye, and saws about filthy lucre, and
telling God's estimate of money from the kind of people He gives it
to; I tell you biting poverty is a terrible thing, an unspeakable
thing. It is a misfortune for a child to grow up under a sense of
injustice. I used to have times of revolt against it all, when I hated
with the blind, ferocious hate of a child, and I saw what David never
saw,--the righteous forsaken, and his seed begging, not bread, but a
chance to earn his bread, and begging for it without being able to
make just terms. I saw my home sold under the sheriff's hammer, and my
parents struggle all their lives because of the lack of money, when
they had everything else, nobility, character, truth, and education.
My girlhood was a long series of going-withouts. Finally I married a
man who promised me everything. Ah, well, when has the Apple of Sodom
failed to deceive the eye and undeceive the tongue? At least he did
care for my voice, and through that I learned that all those years I
had carried in my own throat the golden notes to have altered
everything, and I sang a little gladness into my parents' lives before
they ended, thank God."
"How did you come to sing in opera? Do not tell me if the recollection
is unpleasant. I wondered then."
"Because after--after things went wrong, I could not take his money. I
knew how to sing, and I loved it; but even there it was the same story
of suspicion and jealousy, till it seemed to me that hate and fear
ruled the world. I went to so many, many cities, but there was no city
beautiful, and in all the country I found no Arcady. I had money then,
it is true; but the jingle of the guinea doesn't help the artist who
sings, or paints, or writes, or plays, because God has put it into his
soul to do this thing; at least not after the very first, when it
stands as a tangible assurance of success. The cities were 'cities of
dreadful night,' and awful days; there were places that were not
hives, but styes of human beings, fighting for what they called life,
to die, never having lived. Sometimes I went into those jungles of
civilization and sang to them. It was the only thing I could give them
all. It was there I got my lesson. I had been singing 'All Tears,'
when an old woman said in her feeble, trembling voice, 'Ye mun loe us,
young leddy, to come to sic a place an' sing o' Him wha sa loed the
warld that He sent His only begotten Son ta it, for it's only great
loe that casts out fear, and this is a fearsome spot.' Since then I
haven't hated anything, except wanton cruelty, and I know love rules
when it is fearless, but that is very seldom. We were afraid to say, I
love you, to anything more sensitive than a stray kitten, though the
world has hungered and thirsted after the love we have feared to give
even to our own children. And yet just the love a man and woman may
bear each other, unconsciously, is enough to transform the earth. We
have not been cross to each other; I do not believe we have spoken
unkindly to anything this year."
He drew her into his arms. "Is it enough to regenerate the earth?"
"And keep it regenerated?" she echoed. "Do you know?"
"Do you remember telling me, long ago, of a story in which the woman
said she had never seen but one man whose mother she would be willing
to be? And you said you felt so about me? I was very proud of it then,
but I am prouder of it now, since, feeling so, you cannot be unwilling
to be the mother of my children. You are not, are you?"
She nestled a little closer to him, and put her hand about his neck.
He stooped and kissed it, and repeated his question.
"Unwilling? No; how could I be? I never dreaded maternity except
when--and that lasted such a little while. I do not dread it now. It
seems to me it would be a blessed thing for us. But, Adam, Adam, tell
me, for I have sat here all day asking myself, whether it is a blessed
thing to be born, or a penalty that others pay."
"I think it would be a blessing to be your son," he said steadily.
"And I think it would be a benediction to be yours," she answered;
"but he would not be yours nor mine, but ours, plus everything in the
past, verily heir of all the ages, and the ages were full of pain and
sorrow. Oh," she said passionately, "could you and I who love him so,
this son who is only our wish, could you and I who know the weight of
this weary world, bind it upon the shoulders of our baby boy, and send
him staggering down the centuries, the new Atlas of this old earth?"
They sat in silence for a long time. Then Adam said slowly, "I don't
know, dearest; but I do know that you are tired and hungry, and I am
going to take you home."
They rose and disappeared through the gateway together.
XVII
Love gives us a sort of religion of our own; we respect
another life in ourselves.
BALZAC.
Robin was shelling peas. Adam was reading her the story of their
deluge. He paused, dissatisfied, and said impatiently,--
"I have not described it at all. I have said all I had to say in less
than a thousand words; one would think such a scene deserved a hundred
thousand."
Robin smiled her little inscrutable smile. "I think you have done it
very well. It isn't intended to be scientific. You haven't told all
the strata that were turned skyward for a moment when that crevasse
opened between us and the town. You will find, if you turn to the
first chapter of Genesis, that there is very little detail; but I am
sure that the one line, 'He made the stars also,' is as eloquent as a
treatise on the nebular theory. If you were learned in geology and
astronomy and so on, you would load it down with an avalanche of
scientific hypotheses, about which you would really know nothing,
except by deduction, and over which future scientists would wrangle,
part of them making you a god, and the rest proving you a fool. Be
content to 'climb where Moses stood,' and produce literature."
"'Why should an author fret about The judgment of posterity?
It is not, and it never was, And it, perhaps, may never
be,'"
quoted Adam, cynically. "I wonder what they will call us, Robin, and
who will lecture on my mistakes in seven or eight thousand years, and
show how it never could have happened. Do you suppose there is any one
else on earth? Did the Atlantis people leave any literature behind
them?"
Robin shook her head. "Who really knows? God has not left Himself
without a witness, at any time. In some way the story of creation has
gone on and on. Every nation has its Eden and flood and Saviour.
Esther was the first, I think, to have her wish granted 'even to the
half of my kingdom,' and all the fairy stories since have borrowed the
phrase. Cinderella is almost as old as Job; and the Irish, the
Fenians, claim that Cadmus, the Phoenician, was one of their
forebears. Wide as race distinctions were, there were strange and
almost unaccountable similarities."
She went indoors to see to her baking, and coming back went on with
her work. Adam watched her silently for awhile, and then said
curiously, "I wonder what you have missed most this year?"
"Pins and needles, and until Christmas, books and shoes and stockings
and sugar and a cook-stove and a piano," answered Robin, promptly. "I
can live without the opera and a telephone, but if you only knew how I
cherish my stock of pins, and with what dread I look forward to the
day when, like a poor white trash family I used to know, I shall refer
to _the_ needle. I used to think you could do anything with a pair of
pliers and a bit of wire, but I tremble lest you may not be able to
compass a needle." She looked up, and seeing Adam's troubled face said
quickly, "Forgive me for being frivolous; I am so happy, I can't help
it. What were you thinking of, Adam?"
He got up and walked away a few yards, and cut one of the long thick
yucca leaves, and stripped it down to the central spine, while he went
on speaking to her. "I was thinking," he said, "of what Mill said
about inventions, and how they hadn't helped the laboring man; that
they had neither decreased his number of working hours, nor increased
his comforts, and wondering whether it would be better for a new race
to find an electric light plant alongside their other plants, or
whether they would better work out their own salvation, a little at a
time, by main strength and awkwardness. I was thinking how strange our
books would seem to men and women who knew nothing of the--the late
earth." He held out to her what looked something like a needle
threaded with coarse white linen thread. "Will your Majesty deign to
look at this?"
She took it, and looked at it wonderingly, and then ran in and brought
back a torn towel, and began mending it. "Why, it sews very well," she
said; "who taught you that?"
"The mother of inventions generally," he answered. "If you ever had
gone on the round-up, you might have had occasion for a needle and
thread when there wasn't any nearer than a hundred miles. But you
haven't answered my question."
"About inventions and so on? It seems to me you have to consider the
_raison d'etre_ of a people before you can tell the answer. What is
the use of labor-saving inventions, if the time saved isn't of some
great value? What is to be the chief end of man in a dispensation that
has no catechism as a guide-post?"
"A very different end from the old one," answered Adam, half sternly.
"Work should not come to him as a curse, nor as his greatest boon; at
least, not hard, manual labor. There should be work enough to insure
ease and comfort, and every one should work freely and gladly. I
should educate the individual; he should be strong of body and keen of
mind, and should feel that his talents were given him for use, not for
concealment; he should use his hands, both of them, and find delight
in their work. It is a beautiful world, it always was, but I don't
know that the steam-engine brought men's souls closer together, or
that the electric light let in any more radiance upon our minds, or
that the great telescopes made heaven any nearer. It should be a
happier and a healthier world, if it was no more."
"Adam," she said abruptly, "if we had children, in what religious
faith would you bring them up?"
"I don't know; I never thought about it very much," he answered
honestly. "I have an ideal in my mind, but I can't explain it. I
believe in one source of life, and therefore a common divinity."
Robin laughed quietly. "That is like the Hindoo proverb, 'That which
exists is one; sages call it variously.' That has been called
pantheism, and for that belief the Jews expelled Baruch Benedict
Spinoza from their synagogue. In our time there was a very learned
magazine published in its behalf, and I heard David Starr Jordan say
no man could tell whether it was a mere jargon of words, meaningless
and empty, or whether monism was the profoundest philosophy the world
has ever known."
"I don't care what you call it," said Adam, stoutly. "I am not afraid
of names, and I don't know anything about any of those religions,
pantheism, Spinozaism, or monism; but I do know I would rather a child
of mine saw God in everything than that he saw God in nothing save his
own narrow creed. I would rather he was a pantheist than a Calvinist.
Spinoza never burned any one, did he, nor preached that hell was paved
with infants' skulls?"
Robin clapped her hands and laughed again. "I beg your pardon for
laughing," she said, "but the idea of Spinoza, the 'God-intoxicated
man,' presiding over an auto-da-fe is too absurd. If you only
remembered anything about his gentle, retiring spirit and melancholy
life; I think he was better known in our time than in his own, but his
philosophy does not satisfy me. I am willing to grant the identity of
life, and its divine possibilities, but I cannot worship it as life
itself, a mere manifestation of nature. I know that there is such a
thing as living rock, and that it may be killed by a bolt of lightning
as readily as a tree; but this does not make it any more worthy of
worship than I am, and that is terribly unworthy. The rock and I are
types of life, stages in the development of life, but for my child
there must be something better. For the child I must lay hold on the
everlasting life; I must find the rock that is higher than I. I do not
know of any manifestation of that life so great, so godlike, and so
lovable as His who said, 'I am the way, the truth, and the life.'"
"But surely you do not believe in the Immaculate Conception?" asked
Adam, incredulously.
"I don't care anything about it, one way or the other. It's the
immaculate life that concerns me. As you said yourself a few minutes
ago, words cannot frighten me. Am I going to stand carping, 'Can any
good come out of Nazareth?' What do I care if it comes out of Sodom
and Gomorrah, if it is good?"
"But you surely don't believe in the miracles?" he asked.
"Surely I do, in some of them at least. I have seen a miracle or so
myself. Besides, if you remember the greatest proof He gave was that
the gospel was preached to the poor. Buddha was a prince; he whom the
Jews expected was to reign as a king. What a fall was there! the
gospel of hope and joy was brought to the children of Gibeon, the
hewers of wood and drawers of water. The love of Christ has wrought
greater miracles than He did. Look at the arena in Rome. Look at the
whole countless army of martyrs. When Mrs. Booth died, the eighty
thousand women that nightly walked the streets of London rebelled, and
for once the long aisles of brick and stone were swept clean of that
awful arraignment of civilization. That was more of a miracle than
satisfying three thousand souls with food. At least, it's enough of a
miracle for me."
The tears came into her eyes, and she gathered up her pans and went
into the house.
XVIII
Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life:
So careful of the type? but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, "A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go."
TENNYSON.
They were sitting in the doorway together. Robin rested her chin in
her hands and looked down the valley, the lines of perplexity
deepening in her forehead.
"If only we had an angel with a sword, or without one, to tell us what
to do," she said. "If only we were deeply religious with the
old-fashioned orthodox religion, that would enable us to believe we
were predestined not to be drowned--"
"Or if we believed in a personal God, without whom not a sparrow
falleth, though the waters cover the face of the earth and blot out
millions of His creatures," answered Adam. "After all, can we do
better than follow the dictates of Nature?"
"Do you mean to look through Nature up to Nature's God?" answered
Robin. "How can we worship any God as pitiless as Nature? Nature is
strong, but is it our place to help her in her care for the single
type? Perhaps we are the trilobites of a new Silurian period; well,
trilobites were painfully common, but we need not be. Nature's laws
are immutable, so we have been told with wearying insistence, but
suppose you and I have wills as strong as Nature herself? Suppose we
ask what she has done for the humanity of which we are a part, that
she should demand fresh victims from us? Oh, I know; you will tell
me,--
"'What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite
in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action
how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!'
"And I should answer,--
"'What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of
man that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little
lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and
honor.'
"David or Hamlet, it comes to the same thing. Where are the crowns
now, and how can we say Solomon was not right when he said the end of
it all was vanity? What is Nature, and on what compulsion must we obey
her? The imperative mandates of our own hearts? But what if our hearts
are at war with our heads? Are we to follow no higher law than the
blind instinct that moves the house-fly? Or will we aspire to the
indomitable soul of the mocking-birds that feed their young in
captivity until they see they are prisoners for life, and then bring
them poisonous spiders that they may die rather than live under such
conditions? Shall we give hostages to Nature when she has given
nothing to us?"
She was standing now and speaking with more vehemence than was her
wont. Adam caught her hands, as she flung them out with a gesture full
of scorn.
"Do you really think we have nothing? How many million lovers have
envied Adam and Eve their paradise? This Nature against which you
bring so railing an accusation,--has she taken away more than she has
given us? We had ambitions, you and I, but the way of ambition is full
of weariness and disappointment and bitterness of spirit. We did not
expect peace and comfort and joy, but work and turmoil. Our slates
were set with a sum--"
"Yes, a sum in vulgar fractions," answered Robin.
"Perhaps; it was a sum in which the unknown and unknowable quantity
determined the result. We had seen a good deal of what is called
life,--it is a good name to distinguish it from the death it so much
resembles,--and I am half inclined to think Nature has been merciful."
"But if she was merciful to them," said Robin, quickly, "why were we
omitted?"
"She gave them oblivion, the hereafter, whatever comes hereafter. She
gave us each other. We were going to miss one another in the careers
we had mapped out. We might have lost each other forever, or for aeons
of years. Nothing but a general breaking up of everything would ever
have flung us into each other's arms. We were too much interested in
my career, my vast influence on the political situation, to consider
any existence apart from the setting we had chosen for the play. And,
after all, what was it, that career from which we hoped so much? I
stood waiting my cue, ready to act my part in the farce or tragedy,
whichever it turned out to be."
"I think it was more like a circus," said Robin.
"Very like a circus," he admitted with grim appreciation. "A circus in
which no one knew whether he was to be a ringmaster or a clown. There
were the financial tight-rope walkers, and the social lion-tamers, and
snake-charmers, and the political acrobats whose falls were unsoftened
by any kind of network. There were heat and dust and discomfort, and
weary, wretched animals looking out of cages at other weary, tortured
animals, that were sometimes scarcely less pachydermatous than
themselves. I know the program we had mapped out, the triumphal entry,
the daring leaps, the cheers,--but was it worth while? After all, does
one care to be the champion bareback rider in life's hippodrome?
Nature swept away my sawdust ring, but she gave me heaven for a
canopy, earth for an arena, you for a queen. At times I am disposed to
take a fatalist view of the case, and think that God, or Nature, knew
there was no more to be done with the earth, not so much because of
its wickedness, as on account of its stupidity and cruelty. All my
plans had centered in a political career, and yet how could a man
touch politics and remain undefiled? Yes, I know there were honorable
men in politics, but they were lonely, and they hated with an
unspeakable hatred all the means that were used to keep them there.
And there were any number of men who had been honorable once. When a
man becomes possessed by the desire of place, his backbone becomes
elastic, and he stoops to things of which he had believed himself
incapable. I don't know what it is, but it weakens a man's moral
fibre, and breaks down the tissues of his will, and gives him mental
astigmatism. How dare I say I should have been any better than the
rest?"
"Do you remember your address, a year ago Flag Day, and the old man
with the little bronze button of the Civil War veteran, who stood in
front, and shook hands with you afterwards, with tears running down
his face? And the applause? Can you honestly say that you find 'to
utter love more sweet than praise'? You have told me of your dream of
a home, but Emerson said, 'not even a home in the heart of one we love
can satisfy the awful soul that dwells in clay.' Can it satisfy you,
who hoped and expected so much?"
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