The Master Knot of Human Fate
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Ellis Meredith >> The Master Knot of Human Fate
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He hesitated and did not reply at once.
"Are you sure you are not making a virtue of necessity?" she asked a
little bitterly.
"I think as much as anything," he said slowly, "I was excusing myself
for not having known all along that the real life, and the most useful
one, is the one we could have made together. Principalities and powers
and empires and republics have fallen. When God wants to regenerate
the world, He begins with the family. Now _I_," with unspeakable
scorn,--"_I_ intended to begin with a different primary law. I could
have made a good home, but I was intent on making an indifferent,
honest congressman, or senator, or perhaps president. In a way your
home always meant a good deal of what I am trying to say. You always
had some one on hand you were trying to make capable of great things
by believing in them. You made us welcome, and were ready to listen to
our troubles, our literary curiosities, our musical gems and our
aspirations. Suppose I had had sense enough to refuse the husks and
choose--"
"Don't say it," she answered. "Don't say it, even if you mean it, for
I should have sent you away, and have felt like reviling you for
putting your hand to the plow and turning back. Your ambitions were
the most attractive thing about you then. I hadn't pinned my faith on
a primary law; I think it was government ownership that I regarded as
the great regenerator. I am glad if my home seemed homelike to any
one; it never reached my ideal; and when a woman's home isn't the hub
of her universe,--well, she takes to china painting, or gossip, or
philanthropy; a man takes to poker or politics. I took to politics,
second-hand. Personally and concretely I abhorred the whole miserable
farce, but abstractly, and as a means to an end which I greatly
desired, I found it interesting. I admired you infinitely more than I
liked you in those days, but I wouldn't have married you under any
circumstances."
"Why?"
"First, because I didn't want to marry any one; I didn't want to care
that much. And, secondly, because I wanted you to devote yourself to
your country, and had you possessed a family your devotion would have
been divided. I don't see," she went on reflectively, "how you, who
know so well how empty it all was, and how hopeless the endeavor to
lift it an inch,--I don't see how you can think anything would justify
us in making it go on."
"But, on the other hand," he said, "are we justified in snuffing it
all out? There was so much that was beautiful, and the possibilities
were so glorious! Sweetheart, I shall not believe you love me if you
think the world all cold and dark. I believe now the one law it needs,
or has ever needed, is love, the fulfilling of the law."
Robin shook her head, and there was a pathetic quiver about her
sensitive mouth. "Is it so? We have sung, ''Tis love, it makes the
world turn round,' but is it so? Would you give your world that one
great principle as the whole of its code of laws?"
"Yes, I would," he answered sturdily. "I should not revive a single
law, not even the Ten Commandments, nor any of their variations. You
have to read the statutes provided for unnamable crimes to understand
just how bad mankind could be. I should not bother my world with
Draco, or Solon, or Justinian, or Coke, or Blackstone. I should give
it the code of Christ, 'Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto
you, do ye even so unto them.' To love one's neighbor as
oneself,--isn't that code enough for any world? And I should make the
neighbor include every dumb creature."
She turned to him, her face radiant with love and trust.
"There is no difference between us in reality," she said: "you would
found your political economy on the teachings of Christ, and I my
religion. If we realize the unity of life, we must make our religion
our law, and our law our religion. Sometimes I think the hand of the
Lord is in it, for surely, surely, there never was a nobler man on
earth than you."
XIX
For the race is run by one and one and never by two and two.
KIPLING.
"Do you remember the name of that man we knew," said Adam one day,
"who wrote a book to prove the immortality of the body? He did prove
that various people had lived well on to two hundred years. If we were
sure of that, we might get the earth very fairly started."
Robin laughed. "We are not apparently growing any older," she said;
"but we can hardly count on more than a hundred years each."
"There is one thing you haven't taken into consideration," said Adam.
"Our children would be several thousand years ahead of the original
children of the Garden; they would be further along than you and I in
a good many ways."
"No," she said, "I haven't forgotten, but I do not know how much of a
load they would bring with them into the world. We called it heredity,
the Hindoos called it karma, and, though that is different, educators
called it the recapitulation theory."
Adam shook his head. "I understand heredity," he said, "but karma and
recapitulation are too much for me."
"Karma is our heritage from former existences," she answered, "that
may have been lived here or elsewhere. It is the sum of our past, good
and bad. It is based on a belief in reincarnation, and it is the law
that whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap. It is justice
untempered by mercy, and it is at variance with the doctrine of
vicarious atonement, though one may believe it and worship Christ as
the highest type of love the world has ever known. Naturally, it does
not appeal to the people who are willing to let some one bear the
cross for them, and yet I have wondered whether, if we were sure we
should not gather figs from thistles, we should sow the thistles so
freely. The recapitulation theory makes the child pass through the
evolutionary stages of the nation or nations he represents. It has a
kind of seven ages of man of its own, and brings him down through all
phases,--the savage, the hunter, the explorer, the conqueror, the
builder. I don't pretend fully to understand it. I heard one of its
ablest exponents say once, 'The soul of the German nation is in the
German boy.' Heredity curses or blesses, sometimes both. Before any of
these theories prospective parents might well hesitate."
"Which do you believe?" asked Adam, curiously.
She reflected a moment. "A little of all three; not all of any of
them; one would have to be a profound student to understand fully what
their adherents claim for them. Heredity plays strange freaks now and
then. It is easier to account for Abraham Lincoln by the second theory
than by either of the others. His shiftless, untidy mother and
commonplace father do not explain such a soul as his; nor was there
any reversion in his childhood to the original savage instincts that
make children dismember grasshoppers--rather the reverse. I like
better to think that, like that other Deliverer, who was a man of
sorrows and acquainted with grief, he came to do the will of his and
our Father which art in heaven,--came gladly, freely, knowing the end
from the beginning."
Adam sat up suddenly and looked at her with startled eyes. "Then you
think--you mean--you don't believe--surely you don't believe we have
anything to do with our coming here?"
She smiled. "Surely I do. Our coming is sad enough when we do it
voluntarily. It would be quite intolerable to have existence thrust
upon us. Besides, it seems blasphemous to me to believe that God has
given to every human being the power to bestow an eternal existence.
The responsibility is great enough when it is simply a matter of so
living that noble souls may seek to be born of us, and undertaking to
give them sound minds and bodies."
Adam looked unconvinced and troubled. "Where on earth did you get all
that?" he asked.
"Well, it is to my mind only an elaboration of Descartes' 'I think,
therefore I am.' I am, presupposes that I have been, and will be. If
you can't destroy one drop of water, you can't destroy me. If you drop
the water on red-hot iron, it instantly becomes an imperceptible mist,
the mere ghost of itself, but it will ultimately become fluid again.
It seems to me that the scientific fact gives a sound basis for the
psychologic probability."
"But think of all the miserable human beings born daily. Do you think
any one would choose such surroundings?"
"You and I never wanted to go anywhere badly enough to crowd ourselves
under the cow-catcher, or upon the trucks, but there were those who
did. We didn't want to see the parade badly enough to stand on the
street corner for hours; but you worked your way through college, and
we have both sat in the top gallery to hear 'Tannhaeuser.' We were
willing to put up with the whips and scorns, which is another way of
saying the garlic and tobacco, for the sake of the music. In any event
the experiment was of brief duration. No one gets more than a fragment
in an ordinary lifetime."
"If you think that," said Adam, "I can't see that there is any
responsibility about it. We should not thrust life on any one."
"True," she assented. "Your position is unassailable, but still it
seems to me the responsibility remains. In the first place, granting
that my hypothesis is true, how can we tell whether to live is gain?
How do we know that the next generation would be better and stronger
than we are? Moreover, I only give this to you as my idea. I do not
say it is true; I believe it to be so, but I do not know anything
whatsoever about it. I can't prove it, and it may be transcendental
rubbish. I rather imagine you think it is."
"Not exactly that," he said, coloring and laughing, "but certainly it
is rather amazing when one hears it for the first time. I daresay I
shall come to believe it too. So far as I can see, you are about as
unorthodox as I am."
"I have times of relapse," she said. "Then I think we are being
tempted like the first Adam and Eve. They were commanded to multiply
and reign. You and I wouldn't ask anything better, but as a rule one's
duty is not attractive. It seems to me just as likely that we are to
prove that the lesson is learned, and a man and woman may love each
other unselfishly and nobly, foregoing their own desires to save
others. Under the old dispensation it was said, 'Greater love hath no
man than this;' is it not possible now that the greatest love is that
which lays down its life untransmitted? If Christ could pray that the
cup of suffering and death might pass from Him, dare we press the
bitter draught of being to other lips?"
"Dare we dash the full goblet of joy and opportunity from them?" asked
Adam, gravely.
"I wish I knew," she said. "I wish I knew!"
"Have you ever thought what it will mean," he said, "if we adopt the
other alternative? Have you thought of the desolation and loneliness
of growing old and helpless and finally--" He stopped, and she threw
out her hands as if to ward off the thoughts he called before her.
"Oh, yes, yes, I have thought, and it is terrible. I keep remembering
a picture I saw in the French Exhibit. It was of a man and a woman;
the woman was dead, and he had dug her grave, his broken sword lay at
his side, and he had wrapped her in his coat, and begun to cover her
over. He could not go on, and knelt, looking at her with a despair on
his face that has haunted me ever since. The name, Manon Lescaut,
meant nothing to me then, but the story of the picture was enough by
itself. All last year I kept seeing that terrible picture. Sometimes
it was you, sometimes it was I, that dug the grave and went mad
looking into it."
"I should not bury you," said Adam, grimly. "I should carry you to the
cliff and take you in my arms and jump. The sea is deep and cruel
there."
"Sometimes," she hesitated a moment, then went on,--"sometimes I think
that would be the best way for us now, I mean if we decide we have no
right to be happy in the old way; for I should be afraid we could not
always be strong."
"Very well," he answered; "when we decide, it shall be literally life
or death."
XX
The ant and the moth have cells for each of their young,
but our little ones lie in festering heaps in homes that
consume them like graves; and night by night, from the
corners of our streets, rises up the cry of the
homeless,--"I was a stranger and ye took me not in."
RUSKIN.
For a time they busied themselves with different things about their
little home, worked in the garden, and held a round-up of their stock
that they might know the extent of their wealth; and because, in a
life quite apart from human beings, animals come to take their place
to a greater extent than might seem possible.
It was a very pleasant time. Everything seemed so gentle, so willing
to be friends, and so certain of their good-will.
"You used to be a Kipling fiend," said Adam, one morning, when they
had been salting the cattle, and were resting before going home.
"Didn't he write a Jungle tale about 'How Fear Came'? He ought to be
here now to write another to show how Fear might go."
"It seems to me he did," Robin answered, running her fingers through
the short, curly forelock of a colt that stood placidly licking her
hand. "I wonder that they don't remember longer, or perhaps they know
that we think they are folks. Really, I think we ought to hold a
reception, a kind of salon, once a week, so as to keep acquainted with
our neighbors."
"You are an absurd child," he said, laughing; "but does that mean that
you have really decided to go on living?"
"I don't know," she said. "What did we determine? By the way, which
side of this question are you on?"
"Both," he said decidedly.
"Oh! then we can't do like those men Cooper told about, in 'The
Pioneers,' wasn't it? who argued and argued every night until at last
they convinced each other, and then started in to argue it out again."
"No," he answered, "I rather think that we are answering ourselves
rather than each other, anyhow. Robin, where was 'the land of Nod'?"
"That is one of the questions that I was sent to bed for asking a
preacher who was visiting at our house, when I was about seven years
old. They hurried me hence before he had a chance to answer, so I
never found out. But I know what you are thinking of, and I have
thought of it too. Perhaps there isn't any land of Nod, or any land at
all. And I have thought, also, how it would be if one of us died and
left the other with little children. You might take my body and jump
off the rock, but you couldn't take them too, and still less could you
leave them."
"I have thought of the risk to you," he said, "and felt that not even
for the sake of a child would I let you come so near death."
She laughed a little. "That is really funny," she said. "You must have
been reading Michelet; I never thought of that at all. I am very well
and strong, and my habits and my clothes are not such as to hamper my
life nor endanger that of another. There is next to no risk, so far as
that is concerned, certainly none I would not gladly take. But I have
dreaded afterwards, when the child might fall ill and need help that
we could not give it."
"Because there are no doctors in the world?" said Adam, with a touch
of cynicism. "I don't know that we are not better off without them.
The greatest of them confessed that it was guess-work. The best
doctors I ever knew were always trying to make their patients live
more simply, take more exercise, and give nature a chance; they never
resorted to medicine until there was nothing else to do. If all the
germs and microbes have gone with them, the earth can stand the loss.
The main thing is to be well born, and when the body is healthy and
leads a natural life, while it may know pain, it need not be a prey to
disease. Very few children had a heritage worth having. It had been
bartered away. No wonder we were taught to say, 'There is no health in
us.'"
"Do you remember Gannett's 'Not All There'?" she asked soberly. "I am
not sure I can recall it, but it began this way:--
"Something short in the making, Something lost on the way,
As the little soul was taking Its path to the break of day.
"Only his mood or passion,
But it twitched an atom back,
And she for her gods of fashion
Filched from the pilgrim's pack.
"The father did not mean it,
The mother did not know,
No human eye had seen it,
But the little soul needed it so.
"Thro' the street there passed a cripple
Maimed from before its birth;
On the strange face gleamed a ripple
Like a half dawn on the earth.
"It passed, and it awed the city
As one not alive nor dead;
Eyes looked and burned with pity.
'He is not all there,' they said.
"Not all! for part is behind it,
Lying dropped on the way;
That part--could two but find it,
How welcome the end of day!"
For a long while neither spoke, then Robin went on. The colt had
wandered back to its mother, and she sat with her hands clasped, and
her eyes looking far out to sea.
"I don't blame people for dreading the responsibility, nor even for
shirking it, when I think of all the conditions we had to face. Men
who thought they had hedged their trades about with so much skill that
they had banished competition, found that they had only succeeded in
bringing into the field the machine that banished them. And everywhere
there was such ghastly poverty,--poverty of body and brain and soul.
We had gone back to patrons and patronesses. Men or women did not do
anything of themselves any more,--they did not sing or play, or give a
reading, or exhibit a painting. They starved, or they performed or
exhibited 'under the auspices of.' It has always been the same. Given
a pure democracy, and demos reigns sooner or later. The shiftless go
to the bottom, the thrifty to the top, and then like the upper and
nether millstones, they grind everything between them. That which is
below cries, 'Alms!' and that which is above responds, 'Largesse,' and
the voice that cries, 'Justice,' is stifled between. The stone that
crushed from above and the rock that ground from below were very near,
and men dreaded them, for when the grist is ground, and flint strikes
upon flint, the conflagration is at hand. Do you think I am talking
like a Populist campaign book? I only know what I saw, and what the
poets have said. I wouldn't dare to be as radical as Lowell, nor as
bitter as Tennyson, nor as savage as Carlyle, or Ruskin, or Hugo. We
had overcome the sharpness of death, but whence could we hope for
deliverance from the sharpness of living?"
"We have been delivered," said Adam, slowly, "but you don't seem
disposed to be the Miriam of this Israel--limited."
"Well, no," answered Robin. "I should like to believe that you and I
were rewarded for our superhuman excellence by being saved when
Pharaoh and his multitudes went under, but a somewhat wide
acquaintance with other people forbids. On the other hand, we can't
have been left on account of our superlative badness. Truly, Adam,
don't you feel sometimes as if you would rather have died with the
rest?"
He hesitated. The question was so unexpected, and so fraught with
possibilities. She watched the struggle in his face and honored him
for it. He put back a stray lock of hair and kissed her forehead
before he answered.
"The streak of cowardice that we all of us have in us," he said
finally, "the distrust of myself, and the doubt of all systems of life
of which I know anything, prompts me to answer yes; for I think even
if we had died, you and I would still be together. I think sometimes
we have been, in the past, but whether we have or not, I know we shall
be in the future. So while the mental part of me,--which it seems to
me is the weakest and most contemptible part of man, because it is
always reasoning him out of what his soul tells him is true,--while
the mental part of me might find it easier to be dead than to know
what we ought to do, everything else in me rejoices. I know that in
the great plan we have a part, it seems to me a very happy and
beautiful part. In all our world there is no cause for anger or hatred
or sin. There is friendliness and content and gentleness and love all
around us; look up, dear, and see how near heaven seems."
But though she looked up, she saw only the light in his eyes.
XXI
"We're all for love," the violins said.
SIDNEY LANIER.
Robin's music was a source of great delight to both of them. There was
such a sense of time, infinite and unlimited, that they ceased to be
the hurrying mortals of earth. The joy of life crept into their
hearts, and they grew young with the new world.
One evening they watched the full moon come up over the mountains. She
had been playing a few desultory airs, and looking up asked,--
"Who is it says 'music is love in search of a word'?"
"If you don't know, I'm sure I don't," answered Adam, laughing. "Do
you know that you quote entirely too much?"
"Oh, yes," she said lightly. "I always knew that if I ever should
break into print, the critics, supposing they ever deigned to notice
me, would say, as they said of Lubbock's 'Beauties of Life,' that it
wasn't a book, but a compendium of useful quotations. But do you
really dislike quoting? I think it takes as much or nearly as much
originality to quote well as to invent."
"Oh, no!" he interposed.
"No? Well, it seems so to me. I think the thing first myself, that is
original so far as I am concerned, though it may be old as the hills,
and then it comes to me afterward, in a dozen ways, perhaps, as other
people have said it. I realize that in the kaleidoscope of life the
pattern before my mind's eye approximates that which others have seen.
We don't say a man knows too many synonyms or antonyms, and I don't
see much difference."
"I have a misty memory that quotation is said to be a confession of
inferiority," answered Adam.
"That's Emerson," she said, laughing; "but he also says, 'genius
borrows nobly,' and I am willing to confess inferiority to a great
many people; all that implies is that one should only quote well. If
it wasn't that I'm not sure of the words, and that I can't verify
them, I should confound you with a citation from Disraeli."
"Go on," said Adam, lazily; "I don't mind being crushed."
"It is to the effect that people think that where there is no
quotation there must be great originality. Then he says, 'the greater
part of our writers, in consequence, have become so original that no
one cares to imitate them; and those who never quote are seldom
quoted.' That's about it. Now are you answered?" She laughed
gleefully. "It is delicious to disagree with you. I had almost
forgotten that it was possible."
He echoed her laugh with the carefree heartiness of a boy. "I am going
to make a riddle," he said. "Prepare yourself; this is the first
conundrum of the new world. Why is it better to disagree than to
differ?"
She made a little grimace. "It's a wonder the Sphinx does not rise
from the other side of the world and eat you," she said with derision.
"Anybody who loved anybody could answer such a poor little excuse for
a riddle as that; besides, it sounds like an extract from somebody's
'First Easy Lessons in Rhetoric.' Don't you see that I can disagree
_with_ you, while I must differ _from_ you? That is too disgracefully
easy. Indeed, Adam, that riddle of yours brings back every doubt, for
they say--scientists and ologists and learned people, you know--that
there is hope for delinquents and defectives, but none for
degenerates, and that is an awfully degenerate joke."
"Play for me," he said, "and don't call names."
She lifted the bow and drew it across the strings in a series of
cadences so wildly mournful that he shuddered. She put the bow down,
and laid her hand upon the strings to still them. In the old days she
had been given to sudden changes of mood, but of late she had been
almost serene.
"What is it?" he asked gently.
"Oh, nothing,--everything! I was thinking of another thing which those
wise ones said," she answered, with more bitterness than she had shown
for many months. "It was that word 'degenerate' brought it back. You
know birds are a very low order of being, a branch of the reptile
family, in truth, and I have heard people say that musicians are
generally lacking in something. They either have no moral or financial
sense, and cannot be bound by ordinary rules. And I am musical to the
very tips of my fingers. It is as if I could hear the song of the
silence,--I feel its vibrations like those of a great organ."
She walked up and down, her hands back of her head, and the moonlight
shining on her upturned, troubled face.
"There is another scientific fact you forget," he said.
She stopped to listen, and he went on.
"When a race has run its course, nature cries 'habet,' and nothing can
alter its fate. It was not alone the merciless onslaughts of the white
man that exterminated the buffalo. They died, and none came to take
their places. They vanished, less on account of man's cruelty than by
reason of their own sterility. Degenerates or regenerates, can't we
leave the decision with a power that forever builds or destroys, in
accordance with a law we do not understand, a higher law that comes
from the source of all law, whatever that source may be? Don't think
any more, but play for me. In spite of my lecture, I will quote too;
my mother used to sing a hymn that went like this,--
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