"Why don't you go and see a Christian Science practitioner?" asked

Myrtle. "It won't do you any harm. You don't need to believe. Let me get

you the book and you can read it. See if you don't think there is

something in it. There you go smiling sarcastically, but, Eugene, I

can't tell you what it hasn't done for us. It's done everything--that's

just all. I'm a different person from what I was five years ago, and so

is Frank. You know how sick I was?"

"Yes, I know."

"Why don't you go and see Mrs. Johns? You needn't tell her anything

unless you want to. She has performed some perfectly wonderful cures."

"What can Mrs. Johns do for me?" asked Eugene bitterly, his lip set in

an ironic mould. "Cure me of gloom? Make my heart cease to ache? What's

the use of talking? I ought to quit the whole thing." He stared at the

floor.

"She can't, but God can. Oh, Eugene, I know how you feel! Please go. It

can't do you any harm. I'll bring you the book tomorrow. Will you read

it if I bring it to you?"

"No."

"Oh, Eugene, please for my sake."

"What good will it do? I don't believe in it. I can't. I'm too

intelligent to take any stock in that rot."

"Eugene, how you talk! You'll change your mind some time. I know how you

think. But read it anyhow. Will you please? Promise me you will. I

shouldn't ask. It isn't the way, but I want you to look into it. Go and

see Mrs. Johns."

Eugene refused. Of asinine things this seemed the silliest. Christian

Science! Christian rot! He knew what to do. His conscience was dictating

that he give up Suzanne and return to Angela in her hour of need--to his

coming child, for the time being anyhow, but this awful lure of beauty,

of personality, of love--how it tugged at his soul! Oh, those days with

Suzanne in the pretty watering and dining places about New York, those

hours of bliss when she looked so beautiful! How could he get over that?

How give up the memory? She was so sweet. Her beauty so rare. Every

thought of her hurt. It hurt so badly that most of the time he dared not

think--must, perforce, walk or work or stir restlessly about agonized

for fear he should think too much. Oh, life; oh, hell!

The intrusion of Christian Science into his purview just now was due, of

course, to the belief in and enthusiasm for that religious idea on the

part of Myrtle and her husband. As at Lourdes and St. Anne de Beau Pre

and other miracle-working centres, where hope and desire and religious

enthusiasm for the efficacious intervention of a superior and

non-malicious force intervenes, there had occurred in her case an actual

cure from a very difficult and complicated physical ailment. She had

been suffering from a tumor, nervous insomnia, indigestion, constipation

and a host of allied ills, which had apparently refused to yield to

ordinary medical treatment. She was in a very bad way mentally and

physically at the time the Christian Science textbook, "Science and

Health, with Key to the Scriptures," by Mrs. Eddy, was put into her

hands. While attempting to read it in a hopeless, helpless spirit, she

was instantly cured--that is, the idea that she was well took possession

of her, and not long after she really was so. She threw all her

medicines, of which there was quite a store, into the garbage pail,

eschewed doctors, began to read the Christian Science literature, and

attend the Christian Science church nearest her apartment, and was soon

involved in its subtle metaphysical interpretation of mortal life. Into

this faith, her husband, who loved her very much, had followed, for what

was good enough for her and would cure her was good enough for him. He

soon seized on its spiritual significance with great vigor and became,

if anything, a better exponent and interpreter of the significant

thought than was she herself.

Those who know anything of Christian Science know that its main tenet is

that God is a principle, not a personality understandable or conceivable

from the mortal or sensory side of life (which latter is an illusion),

and that man (spiritually speaking) in His image and likeness. Man is

not God or any part of Him. He is an idea in God, and, as such, as

perfect and indestructible and undisturbably harmonious as an idea in

God or principle must be. To those not metaphysically inclined, this is

usually dark and without significance, but to those spiritually or

metaphysically minded it comes as a great light. Matter becomes a

built-up set or combination of illusions, which may have evolved or not

as one chooses, but which unquestionably have been built up from nothing

or an invisible, intangible idea, and have no significance beyond the

faith or credence, which those who are at base spiritual give them. Deny

them--know them to be what they are--and they are gone.

To Eugene, who at this time was in a great state of mental

doldrums--blue, dispirited, disheartened, inclined to see only evil and

destructive forces--this might well come with peculiar significance, if

it came at all. He was one of those men who from their birth are

metaphysically inclined. All his life he had been speculating on the

subtleties of mortal existence, reading Spencer, Kant, Spinoza, at odd

moments, and particularly such men as Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, Lord

Avebury, Alfred Russel Wallace, and latterly Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir

William Crookes, trying to find out by the inductive, naturalistic

method just what life was. He had secured inklings at times, he thought,

by reading such things as Emerson's "Oversoul," "The Meditations of

Marcus Aurelius," and Plato. God was a spirit, he thought, as Christ had

said to the woman at the well in Samaria, but whether this spirit

concerned itself with mortal affairs, where was so much suffering and

contention, was another matter. Personally he had never believed so--or

been at all sure. He had always been moved by the Sermon on the Mount;

the beauty of Christ's attitude toward the troubles of the world, the

wonder of the faith of the old prophets in insisting that God is God,

that there are no other Gods before him, and that he would repay

iniquity with disfavor. Whether he did or not was an open question with

him. This question of sin had always puzzled him--original sin. Were

there laws which ante-dated human experience, which were in God--The

Word--before it was made flesh? If so, what were these laws? Did they

concern matrimony--some spiritual union which was older than life

itself? Did they concern stealing? What was stealing outside of life?

Where was it before man began? Or did it only begin with man?

Ridiculous! It must relate to something in chemistry and physics, which

had worked out in life. A sociologist--a great professor in one of the

colleges had once told him that he did not believe in success or

failure, sin, or a sense of self-righteousness except as they were

related to built-up instincts in the race--instincts related solely to

the self-preservation and the evolution of the race. Beyond that was

nothing. Spiritual morality? Bah! He knew nothing about it.

Such rank agnosticism could not but have had its weight with Eugene. He

was a doubter ever. All life, as I have said before, went to pieces

under his scalpel, and he could not put it together again logically,

once he had it cut up. People talked about the sanctity of marriage,

but, heavens, marriage was an evolution! He knew that. Someone had

written a two-volume treatise on it--"The History of Human Marriage," or

something like that and in it animals were shown to have mated only for

so long as it took to rear the young, to get them to the point at which

they could take care of themselves. And wasn't this really what was at

the basis of modern marriage? He had read in this history, if he

recalled aright, that the only reason marriage had come to be looked

upon as sacred, and for life, was the length of time it took to rear the

human young. It took so long that the parents were old, safely so,

before the children were launched into the world. Then why separate?

But it was the duty of everybody to raise children.

Ah! there had been the trouble. He had been bothered by that. The home

centered around that. Children! Race reproduction! Pulling this wagon of

evolution! Was every man who did not inevitably damned? Was the race

spirit against him? Look at the men and women who didn't--who couldn't.

Thousands and thousands. And those who did always thought those who

didn't were wrong. The whole American spirit he had always felt to be

intensely set in this direction--the idea of having children and rearing

them, a conservative work-a-day spirit. Look at his father. And yet

other men were so shrewd that they preyed on this spirit, moving

factories to where this race spirit was the most active, so that they

could hire the children cheaply, and nothing happened to them, or did

something happen?

However, Myrtle continued to plead with him to look into this new

interpretation of the Scriptures, claiming that it was true, that it

would bring him into an understanding of spirit which would

drive away all these mortal ills, that it was above all mortal

conception--spiritual over all, and so he thought about that. She told

him that if it was right that he should cease to live with Angela, it

would come to pass, and that if it was not, it would not; but anyhow and

in any event in this truth there would be peace and happiness to him. He

should do what was right ("seek ye first the Kingdom of God"), and then

all these things would be added unto him.

And it seemed terribly silly at first to Eugene for him to be listening

at all to any such talk, but later it was not so much so. There were

long arguments and appeals, breakfast and dinner, or Sunday dinners at

Myrtle's apartment, arguments with Bangs and Myrtle concerning every

phase of the Science teaching, some visits to the Wednesday experience

and testimony meetings of their church, at which Eugene heard statements

concerning marvelous cures which he could scarcely believe, and so on.

So long as the testimonies confined themselves to complaints which might

be due to nervous imagination, he was satisfied that their cures were

possibly due to religious enthusiasm, which dispelled their belief in

something which they did not have, but when they were cured of cancer,

consumption, locomotor-ataxia, goitres, shortened limbs, hernia--he did

not wish to say they were liars, they seemed too sincere to do that, but

he fancied they were simply mistaken. How could they, or this belief, or

whatever it was, cure cancer? Good Lord! He went on disbelieving in this

way, and refusing also to read the book until one Wednesday evening when

he happened to be at the Fourth Church of Christ Scientist in New York

that a man stood up beside him in his own pew and said:

"I wish to testify to the love and mercy of God in my case, for I was

hopelessly afflicted not so very long ago and one of the vilest men I

think it is possible to be. I was raised in a family where the Bible was

read night and morning--my father was a hidebound Presbyterian--and I

was so sickened by the manner in which it was forced down my throat and

the inconsistencies which I thought I saw existing between Christian

principle and practice, even in my own home, that I said to myself I

would conform as long as I was in my father's house and eating his

bread, but when I got out I would do as I pleased. I was in my father's

house after that a number of years, until I was seventeen, and then I

went to a large city, Cincinnati, but the moment I was away and free I

threw aside all my so-called religious training and set out to do what I

thought was the most pleasant and gratifying thing for me to do. I

wanted to drink, and I did, though I was really never a very successful

drinker." Eugene smiled. "I wanted to gamble, and I did, but I was never

a very clever gambler. Still I did gamble a bit. My great weakness was

women, and here I hope none will be offended, I know they will not be,

for there may be others who need my testimony badly. I pursued women as

I would any other lure. They were really all that I desired--their

bodies. My lust was terrible. It was such a dominant thought with me

that I could not look at any good-looking woman except, as the Bible

says, to lust after her. I was vile. I became diseased. I was carried

into the First Church of Christ Scientist in Chicago, after I had spent

all my money and five years of my time on physicians and specialists,

suffering from locomotor ataxia, dropsy and kidney disease. I had

previously been healed of some other things by ordinary medicine.

"If there is anyone within the sound of my voice who is afflicted as I

was, I want him to listen to me.

"I want to say to you tonight that I am a well man--not well physically

only, but well mentally, and, what is better yet, in so far as I can see

the truth, spiritually. I was healed after six months' treatment by a

Christian Science practitioner in Chicago, who took my case on my

appealing to her, and I stand before you absolutely sound and whole. God

is good."

He sat down.

While he had been talking Eugene had been studying him closely,

observing every line of his features. He was tall, lean, sandy-haired

and sandy-bearded. He was not bad-looking, with long straight nose,

clear blue eyes, a light pinkish color to his complexion, and a sense of

vigor and health about him. The thing that Eugene noted most was that he

was calm, cool, serene, vital. He said exactly what he wanted to say,

and he said it vigorously. His voice was clear and with good carrying

power. His clothes were shapely, new, well made. He was no beggar or

tramp, but a man of some profession--an engineer, very likely. Eugene

wished that he might talk to him, and yet he felt ashamed. Somehow this

man's case paralleled his own; not exactly, but closely. He personally

was never diseased, but how often he had looked after a perfectly

charming woman to lust after her! Was the thing that this man was saying

really true? Could he be lying? How ridiculous! Could he be mistaken?

_This man?_ Impossible! He was too strong, too keen, too sincere, too

earnest, to be either of these things. Still--But this testimony might

have been given for his benefit, some strange helpful power--that kindly

fate that had always pursued him might be trying to reach him here.

Could it be? He felt a little strange about it, as he had when he saw

the black-bearded man entering the train that took him to Three Rivers,

the time he went at the call of Suzanne, as he did when horseshoes were

laid before him by supernatural forces to warn him of coming prosperity.

He went home thinking, and that night he seriously tried to read

"Science and Health" for the first time.

CHAPTER XXV

Those who have ever tried to read that very peculiar and, to many, very

significant document know what an apparent jumble of contradictions and

metaphysical balderdash it appears to be. The statement concerning the

rapid multiplication and increased violence of diseases since the flood,

which appears in the introduction is enough to shock any believer in

definite, material, established natural science, and when Eugene came

upon this in the outset, it irritated him, of course, greatly. Why

should anybody make such a silly statement as this? Everybody knew that

there had never been a flood. Why quote a myth as a fact? It irritated

and from a critical point of view amused him. Then he came upon what he

deemed to be a jumble of confusion in regard to matter and spirit. The

author talked of the evidences of the five physical senses as being

worthless, and yet was constantly referring to and using similes based

upon those evidences to illustrate her spiritual meanings. He threw the

book down a number of times, for the Biblical references irritated him.

He did not believe in the Bible. The very word Christianity was a

sickening jest, as sickening as it had been to the man in the church. To

say that the miracles of Christ could be repeated today could not be

serious. Still the man had testified. Wasn't that so? A certain vein of

sincerity running through it all--that profound evidence of

faith and sympathy which are the characteristics of all sincere

reformers--appealed to him. Some little thoughts here and there--a

profound acceptance of the spiritual understanding of Jesus, which he

himself accepted, stayed with him. One sentence or paragraph somehow

stuck in his mind, because he himself was of a metaphysical turn----

"Become conscious for a single moment that life and intelligence are

purely spiritual, neither in nor of matter, and the body will then utter

no complaints. If suffering from a belief in sickness, you will find

yourself suddenly well. Sorrow is turned into joy when the body is

controlled by spiritual life and love."

"God is a spirit," he recalled Jesus as saying. "They that worship Him

must worship in spirit and in truth."

"You will find yourself suddenly well," thought Eugene. "Sorrow is

turned into joy."

"Sorrow. What kind of sorrow? Love sorrow? This probably meant the end

of earthly love; that that too was mortal."

He read on, discovering that Scientists believed in the immaculate

conception of the Virgin Mary, which struck him as silly; also that they

believed in the ultimate abolition of marriage as representing a mortal

illusion of self-creation and perpetuation, and of course the having of

children through the agency of the sexes, also the dematerialization of

the body--its chemicalization into its native spirituality, wherein

there can be neither sin, sickness, disease, decay nor death, were a

part of their belief or understanding. It seemed to him to be a wild

claim, and yet at the time, because of his natural metaphysical turn, it

accorded with his sense of the mystery of life.

It should be remembered as a factor in this reading that Eugene was

particularly fitted by temperament--introspective, imaginative,

psychical--and by a momentarily despairing attitude, in which any straw

was worth grasping at which promised relief from sorrow, despair and

defeat, to make a study of this apparently radical theory of human

existence. He had heard a great deal of Christian Science, seeing its

churches built, its adherents multiplying, particularly in New York, and

enthusiastically claiming freedom from every human ill. Idle, without

entertainment or diversion and intensely introspective, it was natural

that these curious statements should arrest him.

He was not unaware, also, from past reading and scientific speculation,

that Carlyle had once said that "matter itself--the outer world of

matter, was either nothing, or else a product due to man's mind"

(Carlyle's Journal, from Froude's Life of Carlyle), and that Kant had

held the whole universe to be something in the eye or mind--neither more

nor less than a thought. Marcus Aurelius, he recalled, had said

somewhere in his meditations that the soul of the universe was kind and

merciful; that it had no evil in it, and was not harmed by evil. This

latter thought stuck in his mind as peculiar because it was so

diametrically opposed to his own feelings that the universe, the spirit

of it that is, was subtle, cruel, crafty, and malicious. He wondered how

a man who could come to be Emperor of Rome could have thought otherwise.

Christ's Sermon on the Mount had always appealed to him as the lovely

speculations of an idealist who had no real knowledge of life. Yet he

had always wondered why "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth,

where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and

steal" had thrilled him as something so beautiful that it must be true

"For where your treasure is there will your heart be also." Keats had

said "beauty is truth--truth beauty," and still another "truth is what

is."

"And what is?" he had asked himself in answer to that.

"Beauty," was his reply to himself, for life at bottom, in spite of all

its teeming terrors, was beautiful.

Only those of a metaphysical or natural religious turn of mind would

care to follow the slow process of attempted alteration, which took

place during the series of months which followed Angela's departure for

Racine, her return to New York at Myrtle's solicitation, the time she

spent in the maternity hospital, whither she was escorted on her arrival

by Eugene and after. These are the deeps of being which only the more

able intellectually essay, but Eugene wandered in them far and wide.

There were long talks with Myrtle and Bangs--arguments upon all phases

of mortal thought, real and unreal, with which Angela's situation had

nothing to do. Eugene frankly confessed that he did not love her--that

he did not want to live with her. He insisted that he could scarcely

live without Suzanne. There was the taking up and reading or re-reading

of odd philosophic and religious volumes, for he had nothing else to do.

He did not care at first to go and sit with Angela, sorry as he was for

her. He read or re-read Kent's "History of the Hebrews"; Weiniger's "Sex

and Character"; Carl Snyder's "The World Machine"; Muzzey's "Spiritual

Heroes"; Johnston's translation of "Bhagavad Ghita"; Emerson's essay on

the Oversoul, and Huxley's "Science and Hebrew Tradition" and "Science

and Christian Tradition." He learned from these things some curious

facts which relate to religion, which he had either not known before or

forgotten, i.e., that the Jews were almost the only race or nation which

developed a consecutive line of religious thinkers or prophets; that

their ideal was first and last a single God or Divinity, tribal at

first, but later on universal, whose scope and significance were widened

until He embraced the whole universe--was, in fact, the Universe--a

governing principle--one God, however, belief in whom, His power to

heal, to build up and overthrow had never been relinquished.

The Old Testament was full of that. Was that. The old prophets, he

learned to his astonishment, were little more than whirling dervishes

when they are first encountered historically, working themselves up into

wild transports and frenzies, lying on the ground and writhing, cutting

themselves as the Persian zealots do to this day in their feast of the

tenth month and resorting to the most curious devices for nurturing

their fanatic spirit, but always setting forth something that was

astonishingly spiritual and great. They usually frequented the holy

places and were to be distinguished by their wild looks and queer

clothing. Isaiah eschewed clothing for three years (Is. 22, 21);

Jeremiah appeared in the streets of the capital (according to Muzzey)

with a wooden yoke on his neck, saying, "Thus shalt Juda's neck be bent

under bondage to the Babylonian" (Jer. 27; 2 ff); Zedekiah came to King

Ahab, wearing horns of iron like a steer, and saying, "Thus shalt thou

push the Syrians" (1 Kings 22, 11). The prophet was called mad because

he acted like a madman. Elisha dashed in on the gruff captain, Jehu, in

his camp and broke a vial of oil on his head, saying, "Thus saith the

Lord God of Israel, I have made thee king over the people of the Lord";

then he opened the door and fled. Somehow, though these things seemed

wild, yet they accorded with Eugene's sense of prophecy. They were not

cheap but great--wildly dramatic, like the word of a Lord God might be.

Another thing that fascinated him was to find that the evolutionary

hypothesis did not after all shut out a conception of a ruling,

ordaining Divinity, as he had supposed, for he came across several

things in the papers which, now that he was thinking about this so

keenly, held him spellbound. One was quoted from a biological work by a

man named George M. Gould, and read:

"Life reaches control of physical forces by the cell-mechanism, and, so

far as we know, by it solely." From reading Mrs. Eddy and arguing with

Bangs, Eugene was not prepared to admit this, but he was fascinated to

see how it led ultimately to an acknowledgment of an active Divinity

which shapes our ends. "No organic molecule shows any evidence of

intellect, design or purpose. It is the product solely of mathematically

determinate and invariable physical forces. Life becomes conscious of

itself through specialized cellular activity, and human personality,

therefore, can only be a unity of greater differentiations of function,

a higher and fuller incarnation than the single cell incarnation. Life,

or God, is in the cell.... (And everywhere outside of it, quite as

active and more so, perhaps, Eugene reserved mentally.) The cell's

intelligence is His. (From reading Mrs. Eddy, Eugene could not quite

agree with this. According to her, it was an illusion.) The human

personality is also at last Himself and only Himself.... If you wish to

say 'Biologos' or God instead of Life, I heartily agree, and we are face

to face with the sublime fact of biology. The cell is God's instrument

and mediator in materiality; it is the mechanism of incarnation, the

word made flesh and dwelling among us."

The other was a quotation in a Sunday newspaper from some man who

appeared to be a working physicist of the time--Edgar Lucien Larkin:

"With the discovery and recent perfection of the new ultra-violet light

microscope and the companion apparatus, the microphotographic camera,

with rapidly moving, sensitive films, it seems that the extreme limit of

vision of the human eye has been reached. Inorganic and organic

particles have been seen, and these so minute that (the smallest)

objects visible in the most powerful old-style instruments are as huge

chunks in comparison. An active microscopic universe as wonderful as the

sidereal universe, the stellar structure, has been revealed. This

complexity actually exists; but exploration has scarcely commenced.

Within a hundred years, devoted to this research, the micro-universe may

be partially understood. Laws of micro-movements may be detected and

published in textbooks like those of the gigantic universe suns and

their concentric planets and moons. I cannot look into these minute

moving and living deeps without instantly believing that they are

mental--every motion is controlled by mind. The longer I look at the

amazing things, the deeper is this conviction. This micro-universe is

rooted and grounded in a mental base. Positively and without hope of

overthrow, this assertion is made--the flying particles know where to

go. Coarse particles, those visible in old-time microscopes, when

suspended in liquids, were observed to be in rapid motion, darting to

all geometrical directions with high speed. But the ultra-violet

microscope reveals moving trillions of far smaller bodies, and these

rush on geometric lines and cutout angles with the most incredible

speed, specific for each kind and type."

What were the angles? Eugene asked himself. Who made them? Who or what

arranged the geometric lines? The "Divine Mind" of Mrs. Eddy? Had this

woman really found the truth? He pondered this, reading on, and then one

day in a paper he came upon this reflection in regard to the universe

and its government by Alfred Russel Wallace, which interested him as a

proof that there might be, as Jesus said and as Mrs. Eddy contended, a

Divine Mind or central thought in which there was no evil intent, but

only good. The quotation was: "Life is that power which, from air and

water and the substances dissolved therein, builds up organized and

highly complex structures possessing definite forms and functions; these

are presented in a continuous state of decay and repair by internal

circulation of fluids and gases; they reproduce their like, go through

various phases of youth, maturity and age, die and quickly decompose

into their constituent elements. They thus form continuous series of

similar individuals and so long as external conditions render their

existence possible seem to possess a potential immortality.

"It is very necessary to presuppose some vast intelligence, some

pervading spirit, to explain the guidance of the lower forces in

accordance with the preordained system of evolution we see prevailing.

Nothing less will do....

"If, however, we go as far as this, we must go further.... We have a

perfect right, on logical and scientific grounds, to see in all the

infinitely varied products of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, which

we alone can make use of, a preparation for ourselves, to assist in our

mental development, and to fit us for a progressively higher state of

existence as spiritual beings.

" ... It seems only logical to assume that the vast, the infinite chasm

between ourselves and the Deity, is to some extent occupied by an almost

infinite series of grades of beings, each successive grade having higher

and higher powers in regard to the origination, the development and the

control of the universe.

" ... There may have been a vast system of co-operation of such grades

of beings, from a very high grade of power and intelligence down to

those unconscious or almost unconscious cell souls posited by

Haeckel....

"I can imagine the ... Infinite Being, foreseeing and determining the

broad outlines of a universe....

"He might, for instance, impress a sufficient number of his highest

angels to create by their will power the primal universe of ether, with

all those inherent properties and forces necessary for what was to

follow. Using this as a vehicle, the next subordinate association of

angels would so act upon the ether as to develop from it, in suitable

masses and at suitable distances, the various elements of matter, which,

under the influence of such laws and forces as gravitation, heat, and

electricity, would thenceforth begin to form those vast systems of

nebulae and suns which constitute our stellar universe.

"Then we may imagine these hosts of angels, to whom a thousand years are

as one day, watching the development of this vast system of suns and

planets until some one or more of them combined in itself all those

conditions of size, of elementary constitution, of atmosphere, of mass

of water and requisite distance from its source of heat as to insure a

stability of constitution and uniformity of temperature for a given

minimum of millions of years, or of ages, as would be required for the

full development of a life world from amoeba to man, with a surplus

of a few hundreds of millions for his adequate development.

"We are led, therefore, to postulate a body of what we may term

organizing spirits, who would be charged with the duty of so influencing

the myriads of cell souls as to carry out their part of the work with

accuracy and certainty....

"At successive stages of the development of the life world, more and

perhaps higher intelligences might be required to direct the main lines

of variation in definite directions, in accordance with the general

design to be worked out, and to guard against a break in the particular

line, which alone could lead ultimately to the production of the human

form.

"This speculative suggestion, I venture to hope, will appeal to some of

my readers as the very best approximation we are now able to formulate

as to the deeper, the most fundamental causes of matter and force of

life and consciousness, and of man himself, at his best, already a

little lower than the angels, and, like them, destined to a permanent

progressive existence in a world of spirit."

This very peculiar and apparently progressive statement in regard to the

conclusion which naturalistic science had revealed in regard to the

universe struck Eugene as pretty fair confirmation of Mrs. Eddy's

contention that all was mind and its infinite variety and that the only

difference between her and the British scientific naturalists was that

they contended for an ordered hierarchy which could only rule and

manifest itself according to its own ordered or self-imposed laws, which

they could perceive or detect, whereas, she contended for a governing

spirit which was everywhere and would act through ordered laws and

powers of its own arrangement. God was a principle like a rule in

mathematics--two times two is four, for instance--and was as manifest

daily and hourly and momentarily in a hall bedroom as in the circling

motions of suns and systems. God was a principle. He grasped that now. A

principle could be and was of course anywhere and everywhere at one and

the same time. One could not imagine a place for instance where two

times two would not be four, or where that rule would not be. So,

likewise with the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent mind of God.

CHAPTER XXVI

The most dangerous thing to possess a man to the extent of dominating

him is an idea. It can and does ride him to destruction. Eugene's idea

of the perfection of eighteen was one of the most dangerous things in

his nature. In a way, combined with the inability of Angela to command

his interest and loyalty, it had been his undoing up to this date. A

religious idea followed in a narrow sense would have diverted this

other, but it also might have destroyed him, if he had been able to

follow it. Fortunately the theory he was now interesting himself in was

not a narrow dogmatic one in any sense, but religion in its large

aspects, a comprehensive resume and spiritual co-ordination of the

metaphysical speculation of the time, which was worthy of anyone's

intelligent inquiry. Christian Science as a cult or religion was shunned

by current religions and religionists as something outre, impossible,

uncanny--as necromancy, imagination, hypnotism, mesmerism,

spiritism--everything, in short, that it was not, and little, if

anything, that it really was. Mrs. Eddy had formulated or rather

restated a fact that was to be found in the sacred writings of India; in

the Hebrew testaments, old and new; in Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, St.

Augustine, Emerson, and Carlyle. The one variation notable between her

and the moderns was that her _ruling unity_ was not malicious, as Eugene

and many others fancied, but helpful. Her _unity_ was a _unity_ of love.

God was everything but the father of evil, which according to her was an

illusion--neither fact nor substance--sound and fury, signifying

nothing.

It must be remembered that during all the time Eugene was doing this

painful and religious speculation he was living in the extreme northern

portion of the city, working desultorily at some paintings which he

thought he might sell, visiting Angela occasionally, safely hidden away

in the maternity hospital at One Hundred and Tenth Street, thinking

hourly and momentarily of Suzanne, and wondering if, by any chance, he

should ever see her any more. His mind had been so inflamed by the

beauty and the disposition of this girl that he was really not normal

any longer. He needed some shock, some catastrophe greater than any he

had previously experienced to bring him to his senses. The loss of his

position had done something. The loss of Suzanne had only heightened his

affection for her. The condition of Angela had given him pause, for it

was an interesting question what would become of her. "If she would only

die!" he said to himself, for we have the happy faculty of hating most

joyously on this earth the thing we have wronged the most. He could

scarcely go and see her, so obsessed was he with the idea that she was a

handicap to his career. The idea of her introducing a child into his

life only made him savage. Now, if she should die, he would have the

child to care for and Suzanne, because of it, might never come to him.

His one idea at this time was not to be observed too much, or rather not

at all, for he considered himself to be in great disfavor, and only

likely to do himself injury by a public appearance--a fact which was

more in his own mind than anywhere else. If he had not believed it, it

would not have been true. For this reason he had selected this quiet

neighborhood where the line of current city traffic was as nothing, for

here he could brood in peace. The family that he lived with knew nothing

about him. Winter was setting in. Because of the cold and snow and high

winds, he was not likely to see many people hereabouts--particularly

those celebrities who had known him in the past. There was a great deal

of correspondence that followed him from his old address, for his name

had been used on many committees, he was in "Who's Who," and he had many

friends less distinguished than those whose companionship would have

required the expenditure of much money who would have been glad to look

him up. He ignored all invitations, however; refused to indicate by

return mail where he was for the present; walked largely at night; read,

painted, or sat and brooded during the day. He was thinking all the time

of Suzanne and how disastrously fate had trapped him apparently through

her. He was thinking that she might come back, that she ought. Lovely,

hurtful pictures came to him of re-encounters with her in which she

would rush into his arms, never to part, from him any more. Angela, in

her room at the hospital, received little thought from him. She was

there. She was receiving expert medical attention. He was paying all the

bills. Her serious time had not yet really come. Myrtle was seeing her.

He caught glimpses of himself at times as a cruel, hard intellect

driving the most serviceable thing his life had known from him with

blows, but somehow it seemed justifiable. Angela was not suited to him.

Why could she not live away from him? Christian Science set aside

marriage entirely as a human illusion, conflicting with the

indestructible unity of the individual with God. Why shouldn't she let

him go?

He wrote poems to Suzanne, and read much poetry that he found in an old

trunkful of books in the house where he was living. He would read again

and again the sonnet beginning, "When in disgrace with fortune and men's

eyes"--that cry out of a darkness that seemed to be like his own. He

bought a book of verse by Yeats, and seemed to hear his own voice saying

of Suzanne,

"Why should I blame her that she filled my days

With misery ...

He was not quite as bad as he was when he had broken down eight years

before, but he was very bad. His mind was once more riveted upon the

uncertainty of life, its changes, its follies. He was studying those

things only which deal with the abstrusities of nature, and this began

to breed again a morbid fear of life itself. Myrtle was greatly

distressed about him. She worried lest he might lose his mind.

"Why don't you go to see a practitioner, Eugene?" she begged of him one

day. "You will get help--really you will. You think you won't, but you

will. There is something about them--I don't know what. They are

spiritually at rest. You will feel better. Do go."

"Oh, why do you bother me, Myrtle? Please don't. I don't want to go. I

think there is something in the idea metaphysically speaking, but why

should I go to a practitioner? God is as near me as He is anyone, if

there is a God."

Myrtle wrung her hands, and because she felt so badly more than anything

else, he finally decided to go. There might be something hypnotic or

physically contagious about these people--some old alchemy of the mortal

body, which could reach and soothe him. He believed in hypnotism,

hypnotic suggestion, etc. He finally called up one practitioner, an old

lady highly recommended by Myrtle and others, who lived farther south on

Broadway, somewhere in the neighborhood of Myrtle's home. Mrs. Althea

Johns was her name--a woman who had performed wonderful cures. Why

should he, Eugene Witla, he asked himself as he took up the receiver,

why should he, Eugene Witla, ex-managing publisher of the United

Magazines Corporation, ex-artist (in a way, he felt that he was no

longer an artist in the best sense) be going to a woman in Christian

Science to be healed of what? Gloom? Yes. Failure? Yes. Heartache? Yes.

His evil tendencies in regard to women, such as the stranger who had sat

beside him had testified to? Yes. How strange! And yet he was curious.

It interested him a little to speculate as to whether this could really

be done. Could he be healed of failure? Could this pain of longing be

made to cease? Did he want it to cease? No; certainly not! He wanted

Suzanne. Myrtle's idea, he knew, was that somehow this treatment would

reunite him and Angela and make him forget Suzanne, but he knew that

could not be. He was going, but he was going because he was unhappy and

idle and aimless. He was going because he really did not know what else

to do.

The apartment of Mrs. Johns--Mrs. Althea Johns--was in an apartment

house of conventional design, of which there were in New York hundreds

upon hundreds at the time. There was a spacious areaway between two

wings of cream-colored pressed brick leading back to an entrance way

which was protected by a handsome wrought-iron door on either side of

which was placed an electric lamp support of handsome design, holding

lovely cream-colored globes, shedding a soft lustre. Inside was the

usual lobby, elevator, uniformed negro elevator man, indifferent and

impertinent, and the telephone switchboard. The building was seven

storeys high. Eugene went one snowy, blustery January night. The great

wet flakes were spinning in huge whirls and the streets were covered

with a soft, slushy carpet of snow. He was interested, as usual, in

spite of his gloom, in the picture of beauty the world presented--the

city wrapped in a handsome mantle of white. Here were cars rumbling,

people hunched in great coats facing the driving wind. He liked the

snow, the flakes, this wonder of material living. It eased his mind of

his misery and made him think of painting again. Mrs. Johns was on the

seventh floor. Eugene knocked and was admitted by a maid. He was shown

to a waiting room, for he was a little ahead of his time, and there were

others--healthy-looking men and women, who did not appear to have an

ache or pain--ahead of him. Was not this a sign, he thought as he sat

down, that this was something which dealt with imaginary ills? Then why

had the man he had heard in the church beside him testified so forcibly

and sincerely to his healing? Well, he would wait and see. He did not

see what it could do for him now. He had to work. He sat there in one

corner, his hands folded and braced under his chin, thinking. The room

was not artistic but rather nondescript, the furniture cheap or rather

tasteless in design. Didn't Divine Mind know any better than to present

its representatives in such a guise as this? Could a person called to

assist in representing the majesty of God on earth be left so

unintelligent artistically as to live in a house like this? Surely this

was a poor manifestation of Divinity, but----

Mrs. Johns came--a short, stout, homely woman, gray, wrinkled, dowdy in

her clothing, a small wen on one side of her mouth, a nose slightly too

big to be pleasing--all mortal deficiencies as to appearance highly

emphasized, and looking like an old print of Mrs. Micawber that he had

seen somewhere. She had on a black skirt good as to material, but

shapeless, commonplace, and a dark blue-gray waist. Her eye was clear

and gray though, he noticed, and she had a pleasing smile.

"This is Mr. Witla, I believe," she said, coming across the room to him,

for he had got into a corner near the window, and speaking with an

accent which sounded a little Scotch. "I'm so glad to see you. Won't you

come in?" she said, giving him precedence over some others because of

his appointment, and re-crossed the room preceding him down the hall to

her practice room. She stood to one side to take his hand as he passed.

He touched it gingerly.

So this was Mrs. Johns, he thought, as he entered, looking about him.

Bangs and Myrtle had insisted that she had performed wonderful cures--or

rather that Divine Mind had, through her. Her hands were wrinkled, her

face old. Why didn't she make herself young if she could perform these

wonderful cures? Why was this room so mussy? It was actually stuffy with

chromos and etchings of the Christ and Bible scenes on the walls, a

cheap red carpet or rug on the floor, inartistic leather-covered chairs,

a table or desk too full of books, a pale picture of Mrs. Eddy and silly

mottoes of which he was sick and tired hung here and there. People were

such hacks when it came to the art of living. How could they pretend to

a sense of Divinity who knew nothing of life? He was weary and the room

here offended him. Mrs. Johns did. Besides, her voice was slightly

falsetto. Could _she_ cure cancer? and consumption? and all other

horrible human ills, as Myrtle insisted she had? He didn't believe it.

He sat down wearily and yet contentiously in the chair she pointed out

to him and stared at her while she quietly seated herself opposite him

looking at him with kindly, smiling eyes.

"And now," she said easily, "what does God's child think is the matter

with him?"

Eugene stirred irritably.

"God's child," he thought; "what cant!" What right had he to claim to be

a child of God? What was the use of beginning that way? It was silly, so

asinine. Why not ask plainly what was the matter with him? Still he

answered:

"Oh, a number of things. So many that I am pretty sure they can never be

remedied."

"As bad as that? Surely not. It is good to know, anyhow, that nothing is

impossible to God. We can believe that, anyhow, can't we?" she replied,

smiling. "You believe in God, or a ruling power, don't you?"

"I don't know whether I do or not. In the main, I guess I do. I'm sure I

ought to. Yes, I guess I do."

"Is He a malicious God to you?"

"I have always thought so," he replied, thinking of Angela.

"Mortal mind! Mortal mind!" she asseverated to herself. "What delusions

will it not harbor!"

And then to him:

"One has to be cured almost against one's will to know that God is a God

of love. So you believe you are sinful, do you, and that He is

malicious? It is not necessary that you should tell me how. We are all

alike in the mortal state. I would like to call your attention to

Isaiah's words, 'Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white

as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.'"

Eugene had not heard this quotation for years. It was only a dim thing

in his memory. It flashed out simply now and appealed, as had all these

Hebraic bursts of prophetic imagery in the past. Mrs. Johns, for all her

wen and her big nose and dowdy clothes, was a little better for having

been able to quote this so aptly. It raised her in his estimation. It

showed a vigorous mind, at least a tactful mind.

"Can you cure sorrow?" he asked grimly and with a touch of sarcasm in

his voice. "Can you cure heartache or fear?"

"I can do nothing of myself," she said, perceiving his mood. "All things

are possible to God, however. If you believe in a Supreme Intelligence,

He will cure you. St. Paul says 'I can do all things through Christ

which strengtheneth me.' Have you read Mrs. Eddy's book?"

"Most of it. I'm still reading it."

"Do you understand it?"

"No, not quite. It seems a bundle of contradictions to me."

"To those who are first coming into Science it nearly always seems so.

But don't let that worry you. You would like to be cured of your

troubles. St. Paul says, 'For the wisdom of this world is foolishness

with God.' 'The Lord knoweth the thoughts of the wise--that they are

vain.' Do not think of me as a woman, or as having had anything to do

with this. I would rather have you think of me as St. Paul describes

anyone who works for truth--'Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as

though God did beseech you by us, we pray you in Christ's stead, be ye

reconciled to God.'"

"You know your Bible, don't you?" said Eugene.

"It is the only knowledge I have," she replied.

There followed one of those peculiar religious demonstrations so common

in Christian Science--so peculiar to the uninitiated--in which she asked

Eugene to fix his mind in meditation on the Lord's prayer. "Never mind

if it seems pointless to you now. You have come here seeking aid. You

are God's perfect image and likeness. He will not send you away

empty-handed. Let me read you first, though, this one psalm, which I

think is always so helpful to the beginner." She opened her Bible, which

was on the table near her, and began:

"He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most high shall abide under

the shadow of the Almighty.

"I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress; my God; in him

will I trust.

"Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the

noisome pestilence.

"He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou

trust: his truth shall be thy shield and thy buckler.

"Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night, nor for the arrow

that flieth by day. Nor for the pestilence that walketh in the darkness;

nor for destruction that wasteth at noonday.

"A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand;

but it shall not come nigh thee.

"Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the

wicked.

"Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the most

High, thy habitation; There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any

plague come nigh thy dwelling.

"For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy

ways.

"They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against

a stone.

"Thou shalt tread upon the lion and the adder, the young lion and the

dragon shalt thou trample under foot.

"Because he hath set his love upon me, therefore will I deliver him. I

will set him on high, because he hath known my name.

"He shall call upon me, and I will answer him: I will be with him in

trouble. I will deliver him and honor him.

"With long life will I satisfy him, and show him my salvation."

During this most exquisite pronunciamento of Divine favor Eugene was

sitting with his eyes closed, his thoughts wandering over all his recent

ills. For the first time in years, he was trying to fix his mind upon an

all-wise, omnipresent, omnipotent generosity. It was hard and he could

not reconcile the beauty of this expression of Divine favor with the

nature of the world as he knew it. What was the use of saying, "They

shall bear thee up in their hands lest thou dash thy foot against a

stone," when he had seen Angela and himself suffering so much recently?

Wasn't he dwelling in the secret place of the Most High when he was

alive? How could one get out of it? Still---- "Because he hath set his

love on me--therefore will I deliver him." Was that the answer? Was

Angela's love set on him? Was his own? Might not all their woes have

sprung from that?

"He shall call upon me and I shall answer. I will deliver him in

trouble. I will deliver him and honor him."

Had he ever really called on _Him_? Had Angela? Hadn't they been left in

the slough of their own despond? Still Angela was not suited to him. Why

did not God straighten that out? He didn't want to live with her.

He wandered through this philosophically, critically, until Mrs. Johns

stopped. What, he asked himself, if, in spite of all his doubts, this

seeming clamor and reality and pain and care were an illusion? Angela

was suffering. So were many other people. How could this thing be true?

Did not these facts exclude the possibility of illusion? Could they

possibly be a part of it?

"Now we are going to try to realize that we are God's perfect children,"

she said, stopping and looking at him. "We think we are so big and

strong and real. We are real enough, but only as a thought in God--that

is all. No harm can happen to us there--no evil can come nigh us. For

God is infinite, all power, all life. Truth, Love, over all, and all."

She closed her eyes and began, as she said, to try to realize for him

the perfectness of his spirit in God. Eugene sat there trying to think

of the Lord's prayer, but in reality thinking of the room, the cheap

prints, the homely furniture, her ugliness, the curiousness of his being

there. He, Eugene Witla, being prayed for! What would Angela think? Why

was this woman old, if spirit could do all these other things? Why

didn't she make herself beautiful? What was it she was doing now? Was

this hypnotism, mesmerism, she was practicing? He remembered where

Mrs. Eddy had especially said that these were not to be practiced--could

not be in Science. No, she was no doubt sincere. She looked it--talked

it. She believed in this beneficent spirit. Would it aid as the psalm

said? Would it heal this ache? Would it make him not want Suzanne ever

any more? Perhaps that was evil? Yes, no doubt it was. Still---- Perhaps

he had better fix his mind on the Lord's Prayer. Divinity could aid him

if it would. Certainly it could. No doubt of it. There was nothing

impossible to this vast force ruling the universe. Look at the

telephone, wireless telegraphy. How about the stars and sun? "He shall

give his angels charge over thee."

"Now," said Mrs. Johns, after some fifteen minutes of silent meditation

had passed and she opened her eyes smilingly--"we are going to see

whether we are not going to be better. We are going to feel better,

because we are going to do better, and because we are going to realize

that nothing can hurt an idea in God. All the rest is illusions. It

cannot hold us, for it is not real. Think good--God--and you are good.

Think evil and you are evil, but it has no reality outside your own

thought. Remember that." She talked to him as though he was a little

child.

He went out into the snowy night where the wind was whirling the snow in

picturesque whirls, buttoning his coat about him. The cars were running

up Broadway as usual. Taxicabs were scuttling by. There were people

forging their way through the snow, that ever-present company of a great

city. There were arc lights burning clearly blue through the flying

flakes. He wondered as he walked whether this would do him any good.

Mrs. Eddy insisted that all these were unreal, he thought--that mortal

mind had evolved something which was not in accord with spirit--mortal

mind "a liar and the father of it," he recalled that quotation. Could it

be so? Was evil unreal? Was misery only a belief? Could he come out of

his sense of fear and shame and once more face the world? He boarded a

car to go north. At Kingsbridge he made his way thoughtfully to his

room. How could life ever be restored to him as it had been? He was

really forty years of age. He sat down in his chair near his lamp and

took up his book, "Science and Health," and opened it aimlessly. Then he

thought for curiosity's sake he would see where he had opened it--what

the particular page or paragraph his eye fell on had to say to him. He

was still intensely superstitious. He looked, and here was this

paragraph growing under his eyes:

"When mortal man blends his thoughts of existence with the spiritual,

and works only as God works, he will no longer grope in the dark and

cling to earth because he has not tasted heaven. Carnal beliefs defraud

us. They make man an involuntary hypocrite--producing evil when he would

create good, forming deformity when he would outline grace and beauty,

injuring those whom he would bless. He becomes a general mis-creator,

who believes he is a semi-God. His touch turns hope to dust, the dust we

all have trod. He might say in Bible language, 'The good that I would, I

do not, but evil, which I would not, I do.'"

He closed the book and meditated. He wished he might realize this thing

if this were so. Still he did not want to become a religionist--a

religious enthusiast. How silly they were. He picked up his daily

paper--the _Evening Post_--and there on an inside page quoted in an

obscure corner was a passage from a poem by the late Francis Thompson,

entitled "The Hound of Heaven." It began:

"I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;

I fled Him, down the arches of the years ...

The ending moved him strangely:

Still with unhurrying chase,

And unperturbed face

Deliberate speed, majestic instancy

Came on the following Feet,

And a voice above their beat--

"Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me."

Did this man really believe this? Was it so?

He turned back to his book and read on, and by degrees he came half to

believe that sin and evil and sickness might possibly be illusions--that

they could be cured by aligning one's self intellectually and

spiritually with this Divine Principle. He wasn't sure. This terrible

sense of wrong. Could he give up Suzanne? Did he want to? No!

He got up and went to the window and looked out. The snow was still

blowing.

"Give her up! Give her up!" And Angela in such a precarious condition.

What a devil of a hole he was in, anyway! Well, he would go and see her

in the morning. He would at least be kind. He would see her through this

thing. He lay down and tried to sleep, but somehow sleep never came to

him right any more. He was too wearied, too distressed, too wrought up.

[S]till he slept a little, and that was all he could hope for in these

days.

CHAPTER XXVII

It was while he was in this state, some two months later, that the great

event, so far as Angela was concerned, came about, and in it, of

necessity, he was compelled to take part. Angela was in her room, cosily

and hygienically furnished, overlooking the cathedral grounds at

Morningside Heights, and speculating hourly what her fate was to be. She

had never wholly recovered from the severe attack of rheumatism which

she had endured the preceding summer and, because of her worries since,

in her present condition was pale and weak though she was not ill. The

head visiting obstetrical surgeon, Dr. Lambert, a lean, gray man of

sixty-five years of age, with grizzled cheeks, whose curly gray hair,

wide, humped nose and keen gray eyes told of the energy and insight and

ability that had placed him where he was, took a slight passing fancy to

her, for she seemed to him one of those plain, patient little women

whose lives are laid in sacrificial lines. He liked her brisk,

practical, cheery disposition in the face of her condition, which was

serious, and which was so noticeable to strangers. Angela had naturally

a bright, cheery face, when she was not depressed or quarrelsome. It was

the outward sign of her ability to say witty and clever things, and she

had never lost the desire to have things done efficiently and

intelligently about her wherever she was. The nurse, Miss De Sale, a

solid, phlegmatic person of thirty-five, admired her spunk and courage

and took a great fancy to her also because she was lightsome, buoyant

and hopeful in the face of what was really a very serious situation. The

general impression of the head operating surgeon, the house surgeon and

the nurse was that her heart was weak and that her kidneys might be

affected by her condition. Angela had somehow concluded after talks with

Myrtle that Christian Science, as demonstrated by its practitioners,

might help her through this crisis, though she had no real faith in it.

Eugene would come round, she thought, also, for Myrtle was having

him treated absently, and he was trying to read the book, she

said. There would be a reconciliation between them when the baby

came--because--because---- Well, because children were so winning!

Eugene was really not hard-hearted--he was just infatuated. He had been

ensnared by a siren. He would get over it.

Miss De Sale let her hair down in braids, Gretchen style, and fastened

great pink bows of ribbon in them. As her condition became more

involved, only the lightest morning gowns were given her--soft,

comfortable things in which she sat about speculating practically about

the future. She had changed from a lean shapeliness to a swollen,

somewhat uncomely object, but she made the best of a bad situation.

Eugene saw her and felt sorry. It was the end of winter now, with snow

blowing gaily or fiercely about the windows, and the park grounds

opposite were snow-white. She could see the leafless line of sentinel

poplars that bordered the upper edges of Morningside. She was calm,

patient, hopeful, while the old obstetrician shook his head gravely to

the house surgeon.

"We shall have to be very careful. I shall take charge of the actual

birth myself. See if you can't build up her strength. We can only hope

that the head is small."

Angela's littleness and courage appealed to him. For once in a great

many cases he really felt sorry.

The house surgeon did as directed. Angela was given specially prepared

food and drink. She was fed frequently. She was made to keep perfectly

quiet.

"Her heart," the house surgeon reported to his superior, "I don't like

that. It's weak and irregular. I think there's a slight lesion."

"We can only hope for the best," said the other solemnly. "We'll try and

do without ether."

Eugene in his peculiar mental state was not capable of realizing the

pathos of all this. He was alienated temperamentally and emotionally.

Thinking that he cared for his wife dearly, the nurse and the house

surgeon were for not warning him. They did not want to frighten him. He

asked several times whether he could be present during the delivery, but

they stated that it would be dangerous and trying. The nurse asked

Angela if she had not better advise him to stay away. Angela did, but

Eugene felt that in spite of his alienation, she needed him. Besides, he

was curious. He thought Angela would stand it better if he were near,

and now that the ordeal was drawing nigh, he was beginning to understand

how desperate it might be and to think it was only fair that he should

assist her. Some of the old pathetic charm of her littleness was coming

back to him. She might not live. She would have to suffer much. She had

meant no real evil to him--only to hold him. Oh, the bitterness and the

pathos of this welter of earthly emotions. Why should they be so

tangled?

The time drew very near, and Angela was beginning to suffer severe

pains. Those wonderful processes of the all-mother, which bind the

coming life in a cradle of muscles and ligaments were practically

completed and were now relaxing their tendencies in one direction to

enforce them in another. Angela suffered at times severely from

straining ligaments. Her hands were clenched desperately, her face would

become deathly pale. She would cry. Eugene was with her on a number of

these occasions and it drove home to his consciousness the subtlety and

terror of this great scheme of reproduction, which took all women to the

door of the grave, in order that this mortal scheme of things might be

continued. He began to think that there might be something in the

assertion of the Christian Science leaders that it was a lie and an

illusion, a terrible fitful fever outside the rational consciousness of

God. He went to the library one day and got down a book on obstetrics,

which covered the principles and practice of surgical delivery. He saw

there scores of pictures drawn very carefully of the child in various

positions in the womb--all the strange, peculiar, flower-like positions

it could take, folded in upon itself like a little half-formed petal.

The pictures were attractive, some of them beautiful, practical as they

were. They appealed to his fancy. They showed the coming baby perfect,

but so small, its head now in one position, now in another, its little

arms twisted about in odd places, but always delightfully, suggestively

appealing. From reading here and there in the volume, he learned that

the great difficulty was the head--the delivery of that. It appeared

that no other difficulty really confronted the obstetrician. How was

that to be got out? If the head were large, the mother old, the walls of

the peritoneal cavity tight or hard, a natural delivery might be

impossible. There were whole chapters on Craniotomy, Cephalotripsy,

which in plain English means crushing the head with an instrument....

One chapter was devoted to the Caesarian operation, with a description of

its tremendous difficulties and a long disquisition on the ethics of

killing the child to save the mother, or the mother to save the child

with their relative values to society indicated. Think of it--a surgeon

sitting in the seat of judge and executioner at the critical moment! Ah,

life with its petty laws did not extend here. Here we came back to the

conscience of man which Mrs. Eddy maintained was a reflection of

immanent mind. If God were good, He would speak through that--He was

speaking through it. This surgeon referred to that inmost consciousness

of supreme moral law, which alone could guide the practitioner in this

dreadful hour.

Then he told of what implements were necessary, how many assistants

(two), how many nurses (four), the kinds of bandages, needles, silk and

catgut thread, knives, clamp dilators, rubber gloves. He showed how the

cut was to be made--when, where. Eugene closed the book, frightened. He

got up and walked out in the air, a desire to hurry up to Angela

impelling him. She was weak, he knew that. She had complained of her

heart. Her muscles were probably set. Supposing these problems, any one

of them, should come in connection with her. He did not wish her to die.

He had said he had--yes, but he did not want to be a murderer. No, no!

Angela had been good to him. She had worked for him. Why, God damn it,

she had actually suffered for him in times past. He had treated her

badly, very badly, and now in her pathetic little way she had put

herself in this terrific position. It was her fault, to be sure it was.

She had been trying as she always had to hold him against his will, but

then could he really blame her? It wasn't a crime for her to want him to

love her. They were just mis-mated. He had tried to be kind in marrying

her, and he hadn't been kind at all. It had merely produced unrest,

dissatisfaction, unhappiness for him and for her, and now this--this

danger of death through pain, a weak heart, defective kidneys, a

Caesarian operation. Why, she couldn't stand anything like that. There

was no use talking about it. She wasn't strong enough--she was too old.

He thought of Christian Science practitioners, of how they might save

her--of some eminent surgeon who would know how without the knife. How?

How? If these Christian Scientists could only _think_ her through a

thing like this--he wouldn't be sorry. He would be glad, for her sake,

if not his own. He might give up Suzanne--he might--he might. Oh, why

should that thought intrude on him now?

When he reached the hospital it was three o'clock in the afternoon, and

he had been there for a little while in the morning when she was

comparatively all right. She was much worse. The straining pains in her

side which she had complained of were worse and her face was alternately

flushed and pale, sometimes convulsed a little. Myrtle was there talking

with her, and Eugene stood about nervously, wondering what he should

do--what he could do. Angela saw his worry. In spite of her own

condition she was sorry for him. She knew that this would cause him

pain, for he was not hard-hearted, and it was his first sign of

relenting. She smiled at him, thinking that maybe he would come round

and change his attitude entirely. Myrtle kept reassuring her that all

would be well with her. The nurse said to her and to the house doctor

who came in, a young man of twenty-eight, with keen, quizzical eyes,

whose sandy hair and ruddy complexion bespoke a fighting disposition,

that she was doing nicely.

"No bearing down pains?" he asked, smiling at Angela, his even white

teeth showing in two gleaming rows.

"I don't know what kind they are, doctor," she replied. "I've had all

kinds."

"You'll know them fast enough," he replied, mock cheerfully. "They're

not like any other kind."

He went away and Eugene followed him.

"How is she doing?" he asked, when they were out in the hall.

"Well enough, considering. She's not very strong, you know. I have an

idea she is going to be all right. Dr. Lambert will be here in a little

while. You had better talk to him."

The house surgeon did not want to lie. He thought Eugene ought to be

told. Dr. Lambert was of the same opinion, but he wanted to wait until

the last, until he could judge approximately correctly.

He came at five, when it was already dark outside, and looked at Angela

with his grave, kindly eyes. He felt her pulse, listened to her heart

with his stethoscope.

"Do you think I shall be all right, doctor?" asked Angela faintly.

"To be sure, to be sure," he replied softly. "Little woman, big

courage." He smoothed her hand.

He walked out and Eugene followed him.

"Well, doctor," he said. For the first time for months Eugene was

thinking of something besides his lost fortune and Suzanne.

"I think it advisable to tell you, Mr. Witla," said the old surgeon,

"that your wife is in a serious condition. I don't want to alarm you

unnecessarily--it may all come out very satisfactorily. I have no

positive reason to be sure that it will not. She is pretty old to have a

child. Her muscles are set. The principal thing we have to fear in her

case is some untoward complication with her kidneys. There is always

difficulty in the delivery of the head in women of her age. It may be

necessary to sacrifice the child. I can't be sure. The Caesarian

operation is something I never care to think about. It is rarely used,

and it isn't always successful. Every care that can be taken will be

taken. I should like to have you understand the conditions. Your consent

will be asked before any serious steps are taken. Your decision will

have to be quick, however, when the time comes."

"I can tell you now, doctor, what my decision will be," said Eugene

realizing fully the gravity of the situation. For the time being, his

old force and dignity were restored. "Save her life if you can by any

means that you can. I have no other wish."

"Thanks," said the surgeon. "We will do the best we can."

There were hours after that when Eugene, sitting by Angela, saw her

endure pain which he never dreamed it was possible for any human being

to endure. He saw her draw herself up rigid time and again, the color

leaving her face, the perspiration breaking out on her forehead only to

relax and flush and groan without really crying out. He saw, strange to

relate, that she was no baby like himself, whimpering over every little

ill, but a representative of some great creative force which gave her

power at once to suffer greatly and to endure greatly. She could not

smile any more. That was not possible. She was in a welter of suffering,

unbroken, astonishing. Myrtle had gone home to her dinner, but promised

to return later. Miss De Sale came, bringing another nurse, and while

Eugene was out of the room, Angela was prepared for the final ordeal.

She was arrayed in the usual open back hospital slip and white linen

leggings. Under Doctor Lambert's orders an operating table was got ready

in the operating room on the top floor and a wheel table stationed

outside the door, ready to remove her if necessary. He had left word

that at the first evidence of the genuine childbearing pain, which the

nurse understood so well, he was to be called. The house surgeon was to

be in immediate charge of the case.

Eugene wondered in this final hour at the mechanical, practical,

business-like manner in which all these tragedies--the hospital was full

of women--were taken. Miss De Sale went about her duties calm, smiling,

changing the pillows occasionally for Angela, straightening the

disordered bedclothes, adjusting the window curtains, fixing her own

lace cap or apron before the mirror which was attached to the dresser,

or before the one that was set in the closet door, and doing other

little things without number. She took no interest in Eugene's tense

attitude, or Myrtle's when she was there, but went in and out, talking,

jesting with other nurses, doing whatever she had to do quite

undisturbed.

"Isn't there anything that can be done to relieve her of this pain?"

Eugene asked wearily at one point. His own nerves were torn. "She can't

stand anything like that. She hasn't the strength."

She shook her head placidly. "There isn't a thing that anyone can do. We

can't give her an opiate. It stops the process. She just has to bear it.

All women do."

"All women," thought Eugene. Good God! Did all women go through a siege

like this every time a child was born? There were two billion people on

the earth now. Had there been two billion such scenes? Had he come this

way?--Angela? every child? What a terrible mistake she had made--so

unnecessary, so foolish. It was too late now, though, to speculate

concerning this. She was suffering. She was agonizing.

The house surgeon came back after a time to look at her condition, but

was not at all alarmed apparently. He nodded his head rather

reassuringly to Miss De Sale, who stood beside him. "I think she's doing

all right," he said.

"I think so, too," she replied.

Eugene wondered how they could say this. She was suffering horribly.

"I'm going into Ward A for an hour," said the doctor. "If any change

comes you can get me there."

"What change could come," asked Eugene of himself, "any worse than had

already appeared?" He was thinking of the drawings, though, he had seen

in the book--wondering if Angela would have to be assisted in some of

the grim, mechanical ways indicated there. They illustrated to him the

deadly possibilities of what might follow.

About midnight the expected change, which Eugene in agonized sympathy

was awaiting, arrived. Myrtle had not returned. She had been waiting to

hear from Eugene. Although Angela had been groaning before, pulling

herself tense at times, twisting in an aimless, unhappy fashion, now she

seemed to spring up and fall as though she had fainted. A shriek

accompanied the movement, and then another and another. He rushed to the

door, but the nurse was there to meet him.

"It's here," she said quietly. She went to a phone outside and called

for Dr. Willets. A second nurse from some other room came in and stood

beside her. In spite of the knotted cords on Angela's face, the swollen

veins, the purple hue, they were calm. Eugene could scarcely believe it,

but he made an intense effort to appear calm himself. So this was

childbirth!

In a few moments Dr. Willets came in. He also was calm, business like,

energetic. He was dressed in a black suit and white linen jacket, but

took that off, leaving the room as he did so, and returned with his

sleeves rolled up and his body incased in a long white apron, such as

Eugene had seen butchers wear. He went over to Angela and began working

with her, saying something to the nurse beside him which Eugene did not

hear. He could not look--he dared not at first.

At the fourth or fifth convulsive shriek, a second doctor came in, a

young man of Willets' age, and dressed as he was, who also took his

place beside him. Eugene had never seen him before. "Is it a case of

forceps?" he asked.

"I can't tell," said the other. "Dr. Lambert is handling this

personally. He ought to be here by now."

There was a step in the hall and the senior physician or obstetrician

had entered. In the lower hall he had removed his great coat and fur

gloves. He was dressed in his street clothes, but after looking at

Angela, feeling her heart and temples, he went out and changed his coat

for an apron, like the others. His sleeves were rolled up, but he did

not immediately do anything but watch the house surgeon, whose hands

were bloody.

"Can't they give her chloroform?" asked Eugene, to whom no one was

paying any attention, of Miss De Sale.

She scarcely heard, but shook her head. She was busy dancing attendance

on her very far removed superiors, the physicians.

"I would advise you to leave the room," said Dr. Lambert to Eugene,

coming over near him. "You can do nothing here. You will be of no

assistance whatsoever. You may be in the way."

Eugene left, but it was only to pace agonizedly up and down the hall. He

thought of all the things that had passed between him and Angela--the

years--the struggles. All at once he thought of Myrtle, and decided to

call her up--she wanted to be there. Then he decided for the moment he

would not. She could do nothing. Then he thought of the Christian

Science practitioner. Myrtle could get her to give Angela absent

treatment. Anything, anything--it was a shame that she should suffer so.

"Myrtle," he said nervously over the phone, when he reached her, "this

is Eugene. Angela is suffering terribly. The birth is on. Can't you get

Mrs. Johns to help her? It's terrible!"

"Certainly, Eugene. I'll come right down. Don't worry."

He hung up the receiver and walked up and down the hall again. He could

hear mumbled voices--he could hear muffled screams. A nurse, not Miss De

Sale, came out and wheeled in the operating table.

"Are they going to operate?" he asked feverishly. "I'm Mr. Witla."

"I don't think so. I don't know. Dr. Lambert wants her to be taken to

the operating room in case it is necessary."

They wheeled her out after a few moments and on to the elevator which

led to the floor above. Her face was slightly covered while she was

being so transferred, and those who were around prevented him from

seeing just how it was with her, but because of her stillness, he

wondered, and the nurse said that a very slight temporary opiate had

been administered--not enough to affect the operation, if it were found

necessary. Eugene stood by dumbly, terrified. He stood in the hall,

outside the operating room, half afraid to enter. The head surgeon's

warning came back to him, and, anyhow, what good could he do? He walked

far down the dim-lit length of the hall before him, wondering, and

looked out on a space where was nothing but snow. In the distance a long

lighted train was winding about a high trestle like a golden serpent.

There were automobiles honking and pedestrians laboring along in the

snow. What a tangle life was, he thought. What a pity. Here a little

while ago, he wanted Angela to die, and now,--God Almighty, that was her

voice groaning! He would be punished for his evil thoughts--yes, he

would. His sins, all these terrible deeds would be coming home to him.

They were coming home to him now. What a tragedy his career was! What a

failure! Hot tears welled up into his eyes, his lower lip trembled, not

for himself, but for Angela. He was so sorry all at once. He shut it all

back. No, by God, he wouldn't cry! What good were tears? It was for

Angela his pain was, and tears would not help her now.

Thoughts of Suzanne came to him--Mrs. Dale, Colfax, but he shut them

out. If they could see him now! Then another muffled scream and he

walked quickly back. He couldn't stand this.

He didn't go in, however. Instead he listened intently, hearing

something which sounded like gurgling, choking breathing. Was that

Angela?

"The low forceps"--it was Dr. Lambert's voice.

"The high forceps." It was his voice again. Something clinked like metal

in a bowl.

"It can't be done this way, I'm afraid," it was Dr. Lambert's voice

again. "We'll have to operate. I hate to do it, too."

A nurse came out to see if Eugene were near. "You had better go down

into the waiting room, Mr. Witla," she cautioned. "They'll be bringing

her out pretty soon. It won't be long now."

"No," he said all at once, "I want to see for myself." He walked into

the room where Angela was now lying on the operating table in the centre

of the room. A six-globed electrolier blazed close overhead. At her head

was Dr. Willets, administering the anaesthetic. On the right side was Dr.

Lambert, his hands encased in rubber gloves, bloody, totally unconscious

of Eugene, holding a scalpel. One of the two nurses was near Angela's

feet, officiating at a little table of knives, bowls, water, sponges,

bandages. On the left of the table was Miss De Sale. Her hands were

arranging some cloths at the side of Angela's body. At her side,

opposite Dr. Lambert, was another surgeon whom Eugene did not know.

Angela was breathing stertorously. She appeared to be unconscious. Her

face was covered with cloths and a rubber mouth piece or cone. Eugene

cut his palms with his nails.

So they have to operate, after all, he thought. She is as bad as that.

The Caesarian operation. Then they couldn't even get the child from her

by killing it. Seventy-five per cent. of the cases recorded were

successful, so the book said, but how many cases were not recorded. Was

Dr. Lambert a great surgeon? Could Angela stand ether--with her weak

heart?

He stood there looking at this wonderful picture while Dr. Lambert

quickly washed his hands. He saw him take a small gleaming steel

knife--bright as polished silver. The old man's hands were encased in

rubber gloves, which looked bluish white under the light. Angela's

exposed flesh was the color of a candle. He bent over her.

"Keep her breathing normal if you can," he said to the young doctor. "If

she wakes give her ether. Doctor, you'd better look after the arteries."

He cut softly a little cut just below the centre of the abdomen

apparently, and Eugene saw little trickling streams of blood spring

where his blade touched. It did not seem a great cut. A nurse was

sponging away the blood as fast as it flowed. As he cut again, the

membrane that underlies the muscles of the abdomen and protects the

intestines seemed to spring into view.

"I don't want to cut too much," said the surgeon calmly--almost as

though he were talking to himself. "These intestines are apt to become

unmanageable. If you just lift up the ends, doctor. That's right. The

sponge, Miss Wood. Now, if we can just cut here enough"--he was cutting

again like an honest carpenter or cabinet worker.

He dropped the knife he held into Miss Wood's bowl of water. He reached

into the bleeding, wound, constantly sponged by the nurse, exposing

something. What was that? Eugene's heart jerked. He was reaching down

now in there with his middle finger--his fore and middle fingers

afterwards, and saying, "I don't find the leg. Let's see. Ah, yes. Here

we have it!"

"Can I move the head a little for you, doctor?" It was the young doctor

at his left talking.

"Careful! Careful! It's bent under in the region of the coccyx. I have

it now, though. Slowly, doctor, look out for the placenta."

Something was coming up out of this horrible cavity, which was trickling

with blood from the cut. It was queer a little foot, a leg, a body, a

head.

"As God is my judge," said Eugene to himself, his eyes brimming again.

"The placenta, doctor. Look after the peritoneum, Miss Wood. It's alive,

all right. How is her pulse, Miss De Sale?"

"A little weak, doctor."

"Use less ether. There, now we have it! We'll put that back. Sponge.

We'll have to sew this afterwards, Willets. I won't trust this to heal

alone. Some surgeons think it will, but I mistrust her recuperative

power. Three or four stitches, anyhow."

They were working like carpenters, cabinet workers, electricians. Angela

might have been a lay figure for all they seemed to care. And yet there

was a tenseness here, a great hurry through slow sure motion. "The less

haste, the more speed," popped into Eugene's mind--the old saw. He

stared as if this were all a dream--a nightmare. It might have been a

great picture like Rembrandt's "The Night Watch." One young doctor, the

one he did not know, was holding aloft a purple object by the foot. It

might have been a skinned rabbit, but Eugene's horrified eyes realized

that it was his child--Angela's child--the thing all this horrible

struggle and suffering was about. It was discolored, impossible, a myth,

a monster. He could scarcely believe his eyes, and yet the doctor was

striking it on the back with his hand, looking at it curiously. At the

same moment came a faint cry--not a cry, either--only a faint, queer

sound.

"She's awfully little, but I guess she'll make out." It was Dr. Willets

talking of the baby. Angela's baby. Now the nurse had it. That was

Angela's flesh they had been cutting. That was Angela's wound they were

sewing. This wasn't life. It was a nightmare. He was insane and being

bedeviled by spirits.

"Now, doctor, I guess that will keep. The blankets, Miss De Sale. You

can take her away."

They were doing lots of things to Angela, fastening bandages about her,

removing the cone from her mouth, changing her position back to one of

lying flat, preparing to bathe her, moving her to the rolling table,

wheeling her out while she moaned unconscious under ether.

Eugene could scarcely stand the sickening, stertorous breathing. It was

such a strange sound to come from her--as if her unconscious soul were

crying. And the child was crying, too, healthily.

"Oh, God, what a life, what a life!" he thought. To think that things

should have to come this way. Death, incisions! unconsciousness! pain!

Could she live? Would she? And now he was a father.

He turned and there was the nurse holding this littlest girl on a white

gauze blanket or cushion. She was doing something to it--rubbing oil on

it. It was a pink child now, like any other baby.

"That isn't so bad, is it?" she asked consolingly. She wanted to restore

Eugene to a sense of the commonplace. He was so distracted looking.

Eugene stared at it. A strange feeling came over him. Something went up

and down his body from head to toe, doing something to him. It was a

nervous, titillating, pinching feeling. He touched the child. He looked

at its hands, its face. It looked like Angela. Yes, it did. It was his

child. It was hers. Would she live? Would he do better? Oh, God, to have

this thrust at him now, and yet it was his child. How could he? Poor

little thing. If Angela died--if Angela died, he would have this and

nothing else, this little girl out of all her long, dramatic struggle.

If she died, came this. To do what to him? To guide? To strengthen? To

change? He could not say. Only, somehow, in spite of himself, it was

beginning to appeal to him. It was the child of a storm. And Angela, so

near him now--would she ever live to see it? There she was unconscious,

numb, horribly cut. Dr. Lambert was taking a last look at her before

leaving.

"Do you think she will live, doctor?" he asked the great surgeon

feverishly. The latter looked grave.

"I can't say. I can't say. Her strength isn't all that it ought to be.

Her heart and kidneys make a bad combination. However, it was a last

chance. We had to take it. I'm sorry. I'm glad we were able to save the

child. The nurse will give her the best of care."

He went out into his practical world as a laborer leaves his work. So

may we all. Eugene went over and stood by Angela. He was tremendously

sorry for the long years of mistrust that had brought this about. He was

ashamed of himself, of life--of its strange tangles. She was so little,

so pale, so worn. Yes, he had done this. He had brought her here by his

lying, his instability, his uncertain temperament. It was fairly murder

from one point of view, and up to this last hour he had scarcely

relented. But life had done things to him, too. Now, now---- Oh, hell,

Oh, God damn! If she would only recover, he would try and do better.

Yes, he would. It sounded so silly coming from him, but he would try.

Love wasn't worth the agony it cost. Let it go. Let it go. He could

live. Truly there were hierarchies and powers, as Alfred Russel Wallace

pointed out. There was a God somewhere. He was on His throne. These

large, dark, immutable forces, they were not for nothing. If she would

only not die, he would try--he would behave. He would! he would!

He gazed at her, but she looked so weak, so pale now he did not think

she could come round.

"Don't you want to come home with me, Eugene?" said Myrtle, who had come

back some time before, at his elbow. "We can't do anything here now! The

nurse says she may not become conscious for several hours. The baby is

all right in their care."

The baby! the baby! He had forgotten it, forgotten Myrtle. He was

thinking of the long dark tragedy of his life--the miasma of it.

"Yes," he said wearily. It was nearly morning. He went out and got into

a taxi and went to his sister's home, but in spite of his weariness, he

could scarcely sleep. He rolled feverishly.

In the morning he was up again, early, anxious to go back and see how

Angela was--and the child.

CHAPTER XXVIII

The trouble with Angela's system, in addition to a weak heart, was that

it was complicated at the time of her delivery by that peculiar

manifestation of nervous distortion or convulsions known as eclampsia.

Once in every five hundred cases (or at least such was the statistical

calculation at the time), some such malady occurred to reduce the number

of the newborn. In every two such terminations one mother also died, no

matter what the anticipatory preparations were on the part of the most

skilled surgeons. Though not caused by, it was diagnosed by, certain

kidney changes. What Eugene had been spared while he was out in the hall

was the sight of Angela staring, her mouth pulled to one side in a

horrible grimace, her body bent back, canoe shape, the arms flexed, the

fingers and thumbs bending over each other to and fro, in and out,

slowly, not unlike a mechanical figure that is running down. Stupor and

unconsciousness had immediately followed, and unless the child had been

immediately brought into the world and the womb emptied, she and it

would have died a horrible death. As it was she had no real strength to

fight her way back to life and health. A Christian Science practitioner

was trying to "realize her identity with good" for her, but she had no

faith before and no consciousness now. She came to long enough to vomit

terribly, and then sank into a fever. In it she talked of Eugene. She

was in Blackwood, evidently, and wanted him to come back to her. He held

her hand and cried, for he knew that there was never any recompense for

that pain. What a dog he had been! He bit his lip and stared out of the

window.

Once he said: "Oh, I'm no damned good! I should have died!"

That whole day passed without consciousness, and most of the night. At

two in the morning Angela woke and asked to see the baby. The nurse

brought it. Eugene held her hand. It was put down beside her, and she

cried for joy, but it was a weak, soundless cry. Eugene cried also.

"It's a girl, isn't it?" she asked.

"Yes," said Eugene, and then, after a pause, "Angela, I want to tell you

something. I'm so sorry, I'm ashamed. I want you to get well. I'll do

better. Really I will." At the same time he was wondering, almost

subconsciously, whether he would or no. Wouldn't it be all the same if

she were really well--or worse?

She caressed his hand. "Don't cry," she said, "I'll be all right. I'm

going to get well. We'll both do better. It's as much my fault as yours.

I've been too hard." She worked at his fingers, but he only choked. His

vocal cords hurt him.

"I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry," he finally managed to say.

The child was taken away after a little while and Angela was feverish

again. She grew very weak, so weak that although she was conscious

later, she could not speak. She tried to make some signs. Eugene, the

nurse, Myrtle, understood. The baby. It was brought and held up before

her. She smiled a weak, yearning smile and looked at Eugene. "I'll take

care of her," he said, bending over her. He swore a great oath to

himself. He would be decent--he would be clean henceforth and for ever.

The child was put beside her for a little while, but she could not move.

She sank steadily and died.

Eugene sat by the bed holding his head in his hands. So, he had his

wish. She was really dead. Now he had been taught what it was to fly in

the face of conscience, instinct, immutable law. He sat there an hour

while Myrtle begged him to come away.

"Please, Eugene!" she said. "Please!"

"No, no," he replied. "Where shall I go? I am well enough here."

After a time he did go, however, wondering how he would adjust his life

from now on. Who would take care of of----

"Angela" came the name to his mind. Yes, he would call her "Angela." He

had heard someone say she was going to have pale yellow hair.

******

The rest of this story is a record of philosophic doubt and speculation

and a gradual return to normality, his kind of normality--the artistic

normality of which he was capable. He would--he thought--never again be

the maundering sentimentalist and enthusiast, imagining perfection in

every beautiful woman that he saw. Yet there was a period when, had

Suzanne returned suddenly, all would have been as before between them,

and even more so, despite his tremulousness of spirit, his speculative

interest in Christian Science as a way out possibly, his sense of

brutality, almost murder, in the case of Angela--for, the old attraction

still gnawed at his vitals. Although he had Angela, junior, now to look

after, and in a way to divert him,--a child whom he came speedily to

delight in--his fortune to restore, and a sense of responsibility to

that abstract thing, society or public opinion as represented by those

he knew or who knew him, still there was this ache and this

non-controllable sense of adventure which freedom to contract a new

matrimonial alliance or build his life on the plan he schemed with

Suzanne gave him. Suzanne! Suzanne!--how her face, her gestures, her

voice, haunted him. Not Angela, for all the pathos of her tragic ending,

but Suzanne. He thought of Angela often--those last hours in the

hospital, her last commanding look which meant "please look after our

child," and whenever he did so his vocal cords tightened as under the

grip of a hand and his eyes threatened to overflow, but even so, and

even then, that undertow, that mystic cord that seemed to pull from his

solar plexus outward, was to Suzanne and to her only. Suzanne! Suzanne!

Around her hair, the thought of her smile, her indescribable presence,

was built all that substance of romance which he had hoped to enjoy and

which now, in absence and probably final separation, glowed with a

radiance which no doubt the reality could never have had.

"We are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little life is rounded

with a sleep." We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and only of

dreams are our keen, stinging realities compounded. Nothing else is so

moving, so vital, so painful as a dream.

For a time that first spring and summer, while Myrtle looked after

little Angela and Eugene went to live with her and her husband, he

visited his old Christian Science practitioner, Mrs. Johns. He had not

been much impressed with the result in Angela's case, but Myrtle

explained the difficulty of the situation in a plausible way. He was in

a terrific state of depression, and it was while he was so that Myrtle

persuaded him to go again. She insisted that Mrs. Johns would overcome

his morbid gloom, anyhow, and make him feel better. "You want to come

out of this, Eugene," she pleaded. "You will never do anything until you

do. You are a big man. Life isn't over. It's just begun. You're going to

get well and strong again. Don't worry. Everything that is is for the

best."

He went once, quarreling with himself for doing so, for in spite of his

great shocks, or rather because of them, he had no faith in religious

conclusions of any kind. Angela had not been saved. Why should he?

Still the metaphysical urge was something--it was so hard to suffer

spiritually and not believe there was some way out. At times he hated

Suzanne for her indifference. If ever she came back he would show her.

There would be no feeble urgings and pleadings the next time. She had

led him into this trap, knowing well what she was doing--for she was

wise enough--and then had lightly deserted him. Was that the action of a

large spirit? he asked himself. Would the wonderful something he thought

he saw there be capable of that? Ah, those hours at Daleview--that one

stinging encounter in Canada!--the night she danced with him so

wonderfully!

During a period of nearly three years all the vagaries and alterations

which can possibly afflict a groping and morbid mind were his. He went

from what might be described as _almost_ a belief in Christian Science

to almost a belief that a devil ruled the world, a Gargantuan

Brobdingnagian Mountebank, who plotted tragedy for all ideals and

rejoiced in swine and dullards and a grunting, sweating, beefy

immorality. By degrees his God, if he could have been said to have had

one in his consciousness, sank back into a dual personality or a

compound of good and evil--the most ideal and ascetic good, as well as

the most fantastic and swinish evil. His God, for a time at least, was a

God of storms and horrors as well as of serenities and perfections. He

then reached a state not of abnegation, but of philosophic

open-mindedness or agnosticism. He came to know that he did not know

what to believe. All apparently was permitted, nothing fixed. Perhaps

life loved only change, equation, drama, laughter. When in moments of

private speculation or social argument he was prone to condemn it

loudest, he realized that at worst and at best it was beautiful,

artistic, gay, that, however, he might age, groan, complain, withdraw,

wither, still, in spite of him, this large thing which he at once loved

and detested was sparkling on. He might quarrel, but it did not care; he

might fail or die, but it could not. He was negligible--but, oh, the

sting and delight of its inner shrines and favorable illusions.

And curiously, for a time, even while he was changing in this way, he

went back to see Mrs. Johns, principally because he liked her. She

seemed to be a motherly soul to him, contributing some of the old

atmosphere he had enjoyed in his own home in Alexandria. This woman,

from working constantly in the esoteric depths, which Mrs. Eddy's book

suggests, demonstrating for herself, as she thought, through her belief

in or understanding of, the oneness of the universe (its non-malicious,

affectionate control, the non-existence of fear, pain, disease, and

death itself), had become so grounded in her faith that evil positively

did not exist save in the belief of mortals, that at times she almost

convinced Eugene that it was so. He speculated long and deeply along

these lines with her. He had come to lean on her in his misery quite as

a boy might on his mother.

The universe to her was, as Mrs. Eddy said, spiritual, not material, and

no wretched condition, however seemingly powerful, could hold against

the truth--could gainsay divine harmony. God was good. All that is, is

God. Hence all that is, is good or it is an illusion. It could not be

otherwise. She looked at Eugene's case, as she had at many a similar

one, being sure, in her earnest way, that she, by realizing his ultimate

fundamental spirituality, could bring him out of his illusions, and make

him see the real spirituality of things, in which the world of flesh and

desire had no part.

"Beloved," she loved to quote to him, "now are we the sons of God, and

it doth not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he shall

appear"--(and she explained that _he_ was this universal spirit of

perfection of which we are a part)--"we shall be like him; for we shall

see him as He is."

"And every man that has this hope in him purifieth himself even as He is

pure."

She once explained to him that this did not mean that the man must

purify himself by some hopeless moral struggle, or emaciating

abstinance, but rather that the fact that he had this hope of something

better in him, would fortify him in spite of himself.

"You laugh at me," she said to him one day, "but I tell you you are a

child of God. There is a divine spark in you. It must come out. I know

it will. All this other thing will fall away as a bad dream. It has no

reality."

She even went so far in a sweet motherly way as to sing hymns to him,

and now, strange to relate, her thin voice was no longer irritating to

him, and her spirit made her seemingly beautiful in his eyes. He did not

try to adjust the curiosities and anomalies of material defects in so

far as she was concerned. The fact that her rooms were anything but

artistically perfect; that her body was shapeless, or comparatively so,

when contrasted with that standard of which he had always been so

conscious; the fact that whales were accounted by her in some weird way

as spiritual, and bugs and torturesome insects of all kinds as

emanations of mortal mind, did not trouble him at all. There was

something in this thought of a spiritual universe--of a kindly universe,

if you sought to make it so, which pleased him. The five senses

certainly could not indicate the totality of things; beyond them must

lie depths upon depths of wonder and power. Why might not this act? Why

might it not be good? That book that he had once read--"The World

Machine"--had indicated this planetary life as being infinitesimally

small; that from the point of view of infinity it was not even

thinkable--and yet here it appeared to be so large. Why might it not be,

as Carlyle had said, a state of mind, and as such, so easily

dissolvable. These thoughts grew by degrees, in force, in power.

At the same time he was beginning to go out again a little. A chance

meeting with M. Charles, who grasped his hand warmly and wanted to know

where he was and what he was doing, revived his old art fever. M.

Charles suggested, with an air of extreme interest, that he should get

up another exhibition along whatever line he chose.

"You!" he said, with a touch of heartening sympathy, and yet with a glow

of fine corrective scorn, for he considered Eugene as an artist only,

and a very great one at that. "You,--Eugene Witla--an editor--a

publisher! Pah! You--who could have all the art lovers of the world at

your feet in a few years if you chose--you who could do more for

American art in your life time than anyone I know, wasting your time art

directing, art editing--publishing! Pouf! Aren't you really ashamed of

yourself? But it isn't too late. Come now--a fine exhibition! What do

you say to an exhibition of some kind next January or February, in the

full swing of the season? Everybody's interested then. I will give you

our largest gallery. How is that? What do you say?" he glowed in a

peculiarly Frenchy way,--half commanding, half inspiring or exhorting.

"If I can," said Eugene quietly, with a deprecating wave of the hand,

and a faint line of self-scorn about the corners of his mouth. "It may

be too late."

"'Too late! Too late!' What nonsense! Do you say that to me? If you can!

If you can! Well, I give you up! You with your velvet textures and sure

lines. It is too much. It is unbelievable!"

He raised his hands, eyes, and eye-brows in Gallic despair. He shrugged

his shoulders, waiting to see a change of expression in Eugene.

"Very good!" said Eugene, when he heard this. "Only I can't promise

anything. We will see." And he wrote out his address.

This started him once more. The Frenchman, who had often heard him

spoken of and had sold all his earlier pictures, was convinced that

there was money in him--if not here then abroad--money and some repute

for himself as his sponsor. Some American artists must be

encouraged--some _must_ rise. Why not Eugene? Here was one who really

deserved it.

So Eugene worked, painting swiftly, feverishly, brilliantly--with a

feeling half the time that his old art force had deserted him for

ever--everything that came into his mind. Taking a north lighted room

near Myrtle he essayed portraits of her and her husband, of her and baby

Angela, making arrangements which were classically simple. Then he chose

models from the streets,--laborers, washerwomen, drunkards--characters

all, destroying canvases frequently, but, on the whole, making steady

progress. He had a strange fever for painting life as he saw it, for

indicating it with exact portraits of itself, strange, grim

presentations of its vagaries, futilities, commonplaces, drolleries,

brutalities. The mental, fuzzy-wuzzy maunderings and meanderings of the

mob fascinated him. The paradox of a decaying drunkard placed against

the vivid persistence of life gripped his fancy. Somehow it suggested

himself hanging on, fighting on, accusing nature, and it gave him great

courage to do it. This picture eventually sold for eighteen thousand

dollars, a record price.

In the meantime his lost dream in the shape of Suzanne was traveling

abroad with her mother--in England, Scotland, France, Egypt, Italy,

Greece. Aroused by the astonishing storm which her sudden and uncertain

fascination had brought on, she was now so shaken and troubled by the

disasters which had seemed to flow to Eugene in her wake, that she

really did not know what to do or think. She was still too young, too

nebulous. She was strong enough in body and mind, but very uncertain

philosophically and morally--a dreamer and opportunist. Her mother,

fearful of some headstrong, destructive outburst in which her shrewdest

calculations would prove of no avail, was most anxious to be civil,

loving, courteous, politic anything to avoid a disturbing re-encounter

with the facts of the past, or a sudden departure on the part of

Suzanne, which she hourly feared. What was she to do? Anything Suzanne

wanted--her least whim, her moods in dress, pleasure, travel,

friendship, were most assiduously catered to. Would she like to go here?

would she like to see that? would this amuse her? would that be

pleasant? And Suzanne, seeing always what her mother's motives were, and

troubled by the pain and disgrace she had brought on Eugene, was

uncertain now as to whether her conduct had been right or not. She

puzzled over it continually.

More terrifying, however, was the thought which came to her occasionally

as to whether she had really loved Eugene at all or not. Was this not a

passing fancy? Had there not been some chemistry of the blood, causing

her to make a fool of herself, without having any real basis in

intellectual rapprochement. Was Eugene truly the one man with whom she

could have been happy? Was he not too adoring, too headstrong, too

foolish and mistaken in his calculations? Was he the able person she had

really fancied him to be? Would she not have come to dislike him--to

hate him even--in a short space of time? Could they have been truly,

permanently happy? Would she not be more interested in one who was

sharp, defiant, indifferent--one whom she could be compelled to adore

and fight for rather than one who was constantly adoring her and needing

her sympathy? A strong, solid, courageous man--was not such a one her

ideal, after all? And could Eugene be said to be that? These and other

questions tormented her constantly.

It is strange, but life is constantly presenting these pathetic

paradoxes--these astounding blunders which temperament and blood moods

bring about and reason and circumstance and convention condemn. The

dreams of man are one thing--his capacity to realize them another. At

either pole are the accidents of supreme failure and supreme

success--the supreme failure of an Abelard for instance, the supreme

success of a Napoleon, enthroned at Paris. But, oh, the endless failures

for one success.

But in this instance it cannot be said that Suzanne had definitely

concluded that she did not love him. Far from it. Although the cleverest

devices were resorted to by Mrs. Dale to bring her into contact with

younger and to her--now--more interesting personalities, Suzanne--very

much of an introspective dreamer and quiet spectator herself, was not to

be swiftly deluded by love again--if she had been deluded. She had half

decided to study men from now on, and use them, if need be, waiting for

the time when some act, of Eugene's, perhaps, or some other personality,

might decide for her. The strange, destructive spell of her beauty began

to interest her, for now she knew that she really was beautiful. She

looked in her mirror very frequently now--at the artistry of a curl, the

curve of her chin, her cheek, her arm. If ever she went back to Eugene

how well she would repay him for his agony. But would she? Could she?

Would he have not recovered his sanity and be able to snap his fingers

in her face and smile superciliously? For, after all, no doubt he was a

wonderful man and would shine as something somewhere soon again. And

when he did--what would he think of her--her silence, her desertion, her

moral cowardice?

"After all, I am not of much account," she said to herself. "But what he

thought of me!--that wild fever--that was wonderful! Really he was

wonderful!"

CHAPTER XXIX

The denouement of all this, as much as ever could be, was still two

years off. By that time Suzanne was considerably more sobered, somewhat

more intellectually cultivated, a little cooler--not colder exactly--and

somewhat more critical. Men, when it came to her type of beauty, were a

little too suggestive of their amorousness. After Eugene their proffers

of passion, adoration, undying love, were not so significant.

But one day in New York on Fifth Avenue, there was a re-encounter. She

was shopping with her mother, but their ways, for a moment, were

divided. By now Eugene was once more in complete possession of his

faculties. The old ache had subsided to a dim but colorful mirage of

beauty that was always in his eye. Often he had thought what he would do

if he saw Suzanne again--what say, if anything. Would he smile, bow--and

if there were an answering light in her eye, begin his old courtship all

over, or would he find her changed, cold, indifferent? Would he be

indifferent, sneering? It would be hard on him, perhaps, afterwards, but

it would pay her out and serve her right. If she really cared, she ought

to be made to suffer for being a waxy fool and tool in the hands of her

mother. He did not know that she had heard of his wife's death--the

birth of his child--and that she had composed and destroyed five

different letters, being afraid of reprisal, indifference, scorn.

She had heard of his rise to fame as an artist once more, for the

exhibition had finally come about, and with it great praise, generous

acknowledgments of his ability--artists admired him most of all.

They thought him strange, eccentric, but great. M. Charles had

suggested to a great bank director that his new bank in the

financial district be decorated by Eugene alone, which was

eventually done--nine great panels in which he expressed deeply some of

his feeling for life. At Washington, in two of the great public

buildings and in three state capitols were tall, glowing panels also of

his energetic dreaming,--a brooding suggestion of beauty that never was

on land or sea. Here and there in them you might have been struck by a

face--an arm, a cheek, an eye. If you had ever known Suzanne as she was

you would have known the basis--the fugitive spirit at the bottom of all

these things.

But in spite of that he now hated her--or told himself that he did.

Under the heel of his intellectuality was the face, the beauty that he

adored. He despised and yet loved it. Life had played him a vile

trick--love--thus to frenzy his reason and then to turn him out as mad.

Now, never again, should love affect him, and yet the beauty of woman

was still his great lure--only he was the master.

And then one day Suzanne appeared.

He scarcely recognized her, so sudden it was and so quickly ended. She

was crossing Fifth Avenue at Forty-second Street. He was coming out of a

jeweler's, with a birthday ring for little Angela. Then the eyes of this

girl, a pale look--a flash of something wonderful that he remembered and

then----

He stared curiously--not quite sure.

"He does not even recognize me," thought Suzanne, "or he hates me now.

Oh!--all in five years!"

"It is she, I believe," he said to himself, "though I am not quite sure.

Well, if it is she can go to the devil!" His mouth hardened. "I will cut

her as she deserves to be cut," he thought. "She shall never know that I

care."

And so they passed,--never to meet in this world--each always wishing,

each defying, each folding a wraith of beauty to the heart.

L'ENVOI

There appears to be in metaphysics a basis, or no basis, according as

the temperament and the experience of each shall incline him, for

ethical or spiritual ease or peace. Life sinks into the unknowable at

every turn and only the temporary or historical scene remains as a

guide,--and that passes also. It may seem rather beside the mark that

Eugene in his moral and physical depression should have inclined to

various religious abstrusities for a time, but life does such things in

a storm. They constituted a refuge from himself, from his doubts and

despairs as religious thought always does.

If I were personally to define religion I would say that it is a bandage

that man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circumstance; an

envelope to pocket him from the unescapable and unstable illimitable. We

seek to think of things as permanent and see them so. Religion gives

life a habitation and a name apparently--though it is an illusion. So we

are brought back to time and space and illimitable mind--as what? And we

shall always stand before them attributing to them all those things

which we cannot know.

Yet the need for religion is impermanent, like all else in life. As the

soul regains its health, it becomes prone to the old illusions. Again

women entered his life--never believe otherwise--drawn, perhaps, by a

certain wistfulness and loneliness in Eugene, who though quieted by

tragedy for a little while was once more moving in the world. He saw

their approach with more skepticism, and yet not unmoved--women who came

through the drawing rooms to which he was invited, wives and daughters

who sought to interest him in themselves and would scarcely take no for

an answer; women of the stage--women artists, poetasters, "varietists,"

critics, dreamers. From the many approaches, letters and meetings, some

few relationships resulted, ending as others had ended. Was he not

changed, then? Not much--no. Only hardened intellectually and

emotionally--tempered for life and work. There were scenes, too, violent

ones, tears, separations, renouncements, cold meetings--with little

Angela always to one side in Myrtle's care as a stay and consolation.

In Eugene one saw an artist who, pagan to the core, enjoyed reading the

Bible for its artistry of expression, and Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,

Spinoza and James for the mystery of things which they suggested. In his

child he found a charming personality and a study as well--one whom he

could brood over with affectionate interest at times, seeing already

something of himself and something of Angela, and wondering at the

outcome. What would she be like? Would art have any interest for her?

She was so daring, gay, self-willed, he thought.

"You've a Tartar on your hands," Myrtle once said to him, and he smiled

as he replied:

"Just the same I'll see if I can't keep up with her."

One of his occasional thoughts was that if he and Angela, junior, came

to understand each other thoroughly, and she did not marry too soon, he

could build a charming home around her. Perhaps her husband might not

object to living with them.

The last scene of all may be taken from his studio in Montclair, where

with Myrtle and her husband as resident housekeepers and Angela as his

diversion he was living and working. He was sitting in front of his

fireplace one night reading, when a thought in some history recalled to

his mind a paragraph somewhere in Spencer's astonishing chapters on "the

unknowable" in his "Facts and Comments," and he arose to see if he could

find it. Rummaging around in his books he extracted the volume and

reread it, with a kind of smack of intellectual agreement, for it suited

his mood in regard to life and his own mental state in particular.

Because it was so peculiarly related to his own viewpoint I quote it:

"Beyond the reach of our intelligence as are the mysteries of the

objects known by our senses, those presented in this universal matrix

are, if we may say so, still further beyond the reach of our

intelligence, for whereas, those of the one kind may be, and are,

thought of by many as explicable on the hypothesis of creation, and by

the rest on the hypothesis of evolution, those of the other kind cannot

by either be regarded as thus explicable. Theist and Agnostic must agree

in recognizing the properties of Space as inherent, eternal,

uncreated--as anteceding all creation, if creation has taken place.

Hence, could we penetrate the mysteries of existence, there would still

remain more transcendent mysteries. That which can be thought of as

neither made nor evolved presents us with facts the origin of which is

even more remote from conceivability than is the origin of the facts

presented by visible and tangible things.... The thought of this blank

form of existence which, explored in all directions as far as eye can

reach, has, beyond that, an unexplored region compared with which the

part imagination has traversed is but infinitesimal--the thought of a

space, compared with which our immeasurable sidereal system dwindles to

a point, is a thought too overwhelming to be dwelt upon. Of late years

the consciousness that without origin or cause, infinite space has ever

existed and must ever exist produces in me a feeling from which I

shrink."

"Well," said Eugene, turning as he thought he heard a slight noise,

"that is certainly the sanest interpretation of the limitations of human

thought I have ever read"--and then seeing the tiny Angela enter, clad

in a baggy little sleeping suit which was not unrelated to a Harlequin

costume, he smiled, for he knew her wheedling, shifty moods and tricks.

"Now what are you coming in here for?" he asked, with mock severity.

"You know you oughn't to be up so late. If Auntie Myrtle catches you!"

"But I can't sleep, Daddy," she replied trickily, anxious to be with him

a little while longer before the fire, and tripping coaxingly across the

floor. "Won't you take me?"

"Yes, I know all about your not being able to sleep, you scamp. You're

coming in here to be cuddled. You beat it!"

"Oh, no, Daddy!"

"All right, then, come here." And he gathered her up in his arms and

reseated himself by the fire. "Now you go to sleep or back you go to

bed."

She snuggled down, her yellow head in his crook'd elbow while he looked

at her cheek, recalling the storm in which she had arrived.

"Little flower girl," he said. "Sweet little kiddie."

His offspring made no reply. Presently he carried her asleep to her

couch, tucked her in, and, coming back, went out on the brown lawn,

where a late November wind rustled in the still clinging brown leaves.

Overhead were the star--Orion's majestic belt and those mystic

constellations that make Dippers, Bears, and that remote cloudy

formation known as the Milky Way.

"Where in all this--in substance," he thought, rubbing his hand through

his hair, "is Angela? Where in substance will be that which is me? What

a sweet welter life is--how rich, how tender, how grim, how like a

colorful symphony."

Great art dreams welled up into his soul as he viewed the sparkling

deeps of space.

"The sound of the wind--how fine it is tonight," he thought.

Then he went quietly in and closed the door.

THE END