TOM CLARK DREAMS AGAIN.
"And now the Shadow--the terrible, monstrous Thing, that had so
strangely entered the room through the window--the little window at the
foot of the bed, whose upper sash was down--hovered no longer over the
heads of the woman and the man--the unhappy woman, the misery-laden man,
who, when the last sun had set, went to bed with Murder and Revenge--and
Hatred--this wretched couple, who had contemplated such dreadful crimes,
and who, within the past two hours, had had such strange and marvellous
dreams! Only two hours! and yet in that space had been crowded the
events of a lifetime. They say there are no miracles! What, then, is
this? What are these strange experiences of soul which we are constantly
having--fifty years compressed in an hour of ordinary Dream!--thirty
thousand ages in a moment of time, while under the accursed spells of
Hasheesh? The soul flying back over unnumbered centuries; scanning the
totality of the Present, and grasping a myriad Futurities--sweeping the
vortex of unborn epochs by the million!--and all in an instant of the
clock, while under the influence of the still more accursed Muust. What
are the frogs and bloody waves of Egypt, compared to these miracles of
the human soul--these Dream-lives that are not Dreams?
"And so the Thing took the glare of its horrible Eye from off the woman
and the man. Its mission--its temptations were over. And it floated from
off the bed, frown-smiling at Hesperina as it did so; and it passed
lazily, gloomily, scowlingly through the window at the foot of the bed,
through which it had a little previously entered; and it moved through
the starlight with a rush and a roar--a sullen rush and roar--as if each
star-beam stabbed it with a dagger of flame; and the Thing seemed
consciously angry, and it sullenly roared, as doth the wintry blast
through the tattered sails of a storm-tossed bark, toilsomely laboring
thro' the angry deep: a minute passed, and IT was gone; thank God! IT
was gone--at last--that horrible Incubus--that most fearful Thing!
"Simultaneously the sleepers evinced by their movements that their
souls, if not their senses, had been relieved by the presence of its
absence; and they were apparently on the point of waking, but were
prevented by the magic, or magnetic action of the angelic figure at that
moment leaning o'er their couch; for she gently, soothingly waved her
snowy hands, and, in a voice sweeter than the tones of love, whispered:
'Sleep on; still sleep--softly--sweetly sleep--and dream. Peace,
troubled hearts! Peace; be still!' and they slumbered on.
"Tom Clark's dream had changed. All the former troubled and exciting
scene had vanished into thin air, leaving only vague, dim memories
behind, to remind his soul of what it had been, and what it had seen and
suffered. In the former dream he had been on dry, solid land; but now
all this was strangely altered, and he found himself tossed on a rough,
tumultuous sea; his lot was cast upon the deep--upon a wild and dreary
waste of waters. In his dream the rain--great round and heavy drops of
rain--fell in torrents; the mad winds and driving sleet--for the rain
froze as it fell--raved and roared fiercely, fitfully; and the good ship
bent and bellied to the hurricane, and she groaned as if loath to give
up the ghost. And she drove before the blast, and she plunged headlong
into the foaming billows, and ever and anon shook her head--brave ship!
as if she knew that ruin was before her, and had determined to meet it
as a good ship should--bravely, fairly in the face.
"I have yet to disbelieve that every perfect work of man--ship, watch,
engine--has a semi-conscious life of its own--a life derived from the
immortal soul that gave its idea birth--for all these things--these
ships, watches, engines, are ideas, spiritual, subtle, invisible, till
man hides their nakedness with wood, iron, steel, brass--the fig-leaves
of the Ideal World. Some people cannot feel an idea, or be introduced to
one, unless it be dressed up in matter. Sometimes we lay it on paper or
canvas, and draw pencil lines around, or color it, and then it can be
seen; else we take one and plant it out of doors, and then put brick and
iron, marble and glass sides to it, rendering the spirit visible, and
then the people see the Idea's Clothing, and fancy they behold the thing
itself, just as others, when looking at a human body, imagine they
behold the man, the woman, or the child. A mistake! None but God ever
yet beheld a human Soul, and this it is, and not the body or its
accidents, that constitutes the Ego.
* * * *
"And the ship surged through the boiling seas, and her timbers strained
and cracked in the combat, and her cordage shrieked as the blast tore
through, and the tattered sails cried, almost humanly--like a man whose
heart is breaking because his wife loves him not, and all the world for
him is robed in mourning--and they cried, as if in deadly fear they were
craving mercy at the Storm-King's hands. He heard the cries, but he
laughed 'ho! ho!' and he laughed 'ha! ha!' and he tore away another sail
and hurled it in the sea, laughing madly all the while; and he blew, and
he rattled, and he roared in frightful glee; and he laughed 'ha! ha!'
and he laughed 'ho! ho!' as the bridegroom laughs in triumph.
"And still the storm came down; and the yards bent before the gale, and
then snapped asunder, like pipe-clay stems, and the billows leaped and
dashed angrily at her sides, like a trained blood-hound at the throat of
the mother, whose crime is being black--Chivalrous, well-trained
blood-hounds! And the waves swept the decks of the bark--swept them
clean, and whirled many a man into the weltering main, and sent their
souls to heaven by water, and their bodies to the coral caves of Ocean.
Poor Sailors! The Storm-King's spirit was roused, and his soul up in
arms; and the angry waves danced attendance; the lightning held high
revelry, and flashed its applause in the very face of heaven, and lit up
the night with terrible, ghastly smiles; and the sullen growl of distant
thunder was the only requiem over the dead upon that dismal deep.
"It was night. Day had long left the earth, and gone to renew his youth
in his Western bath of fire--as we all must--for death is our West--and
the gloomy eidolon had usurped Day's throne, arrayed in black garments,
streaked with flaming red, boding no good, but only ill to all that
breathed the upper air. And the turmoil woke the North, and summoned him
to the wassail; and he leaped from his couch of snow, with icebergs for
his pillow, and he stood erect upon his throne at the Pole, and he blew
a triumphant, joyous blast, and sent ten thousand icy deaths to
represent him at the grand, tempestuous revel. They came, and as the
waters leaped into the rigging, they lashed them there with
frost-fetters; and they loaded the fated ship with fantastic robes of
pearly, heavy, glittering ice--loaded her down as sin loads down the
transgressor.
"And still the noble ship wore on--still refused the bitter death.
Enshrouded with massy sheets and clumps of ice, the good craft nearly
toppled with the weight, or settled forever in the yawning deep; for
despite her grand endeavors--her almost human will and resolution--her
desperate efforts to save her precious freight of human souls--she
nearly succumbed, and seemed ready to yield them to the briny waters
below. Lashed to staunch timbers, the trembling remnant of the crew soon
found out, while terror crowned their pallid brows, that the tornado was
driving them right straight upon a rock-bound coast--foaming and
hopeless for them, notwithstanding that from the summit of the bold
cliffs, a light-house gleamed forth its eye coldly--cynically upon the
night--in mockery lighting the way to watery death and ruin. Steadily,
clearly it glimmered out upon the darkness, distinctly showing them the
white froth at the foot of the cliff--the anger-foam of the demon of the
storm. Ah, God! Have mercy! have mercy!
"Look yonder, at the stern of the ship! What frightful gorgon is that?
You know not! Well, that is Death sitting on the taffrail. See, he moves
about. Death is standing at the cabin door; he is gazing down below,
looking up aloft, glaring out over the bleak, into the farther night.
See! he is stalking about the deck--the icy deck--very slippery it is,
and where you fall you die, for he has trodden on the spot. Ah, me! ah,
me! Woe, woe, a terrible woe is here, Tom Clark! Tom Clark, don't you
hear? Death stands glamoring on you! Hark! he is whistling in the
rigging; he is swinging on the snapping ends of yonder loosened
halliards; if they strike you you are dead, for they are Whips, and
Death is snapping them! He is calling you, Tom Clark; don't you hear
him?--calling from his throne, and his throne is the Tempest, Tom
Clark--the Tempest. Now he is watching you--don't his glance trouble
you? Don't you know that he is gazing down into your eyes? How cold is
his glance! how colder his breath! It is very, very cold. Ah! I shiver
as I think--and Death is freezing you, Tom Clark;--he is freezing your
very heart, and turning your blood to ice. He is freezing you, and has
tried to freeze me, in various ways. But I bade him stand back--to stay
his breath--for, unlike you, Tom Clark, I am a Brother of the Rosie
Cross, and I have been over Egypt, and Syria, and Turkey; on the borders
of the Caspian, and Arabia's shores; over sterile steppes, and weltered
through the Deserts--and all in search of the loftier knowledge of the
Soul, that can only there be found; and I found what I sought, Tom
Clark--the nature of the Soul, its destiny, and how it may be trained to
any end or purpose. And the History and Mystery of Dream, Tom Clark,
from the lips of the Oriental Dwellers in the Temple--and Pul Ali
Beg--Tom Clark--our Persian Ramus and our lordly Chief--and I learned
the worth of Will, and how to say, and _mean_,--'I _will_ be well, and
not sick--alive, and not dead!' and achieve the purpose. How? That is
our secret--the Rosicrucians'--strange order of men; living all along
the ages, _till they are ready to die_--for Death comes only because man
will not beat him back. They DIE THROUGH FEEBLENESS OF WILL. But not so
with us, Tom Clark; we leave not until our work is done, and mine is not
yet finished. We exercise our power over others, too, but ever for their
good. Well do I remember, how, when I lived in Charlestown, there was an
old man dying, but I bade him live. He exists to-day. And long years
before that, there reached me--lightning borne, on the banks of the
Hudson, a message saying, 'Come, she is dying!' and I went, and stood
beside the bed of the sick child, and I prayed, and I invoked the Adonim
of the Upper Temple; and they came and bade her live. And she liveth
yet--but how ungrateful!
"Till our work is done! What work? you ask me, and from over the
steaming seas I answer, and I tell you through the boundless air that
separates us: Our work is to help finish that begun lang syne upon the
stony heights of Calvary; in the shade beneath the olive in Gethsemane,
where I have stood and wept--begun when Time was thousands of years
younger than to-day. Our work, Tom Clark, is to make men, by teaching
them to make themselves. We strive to impress a sense upon the world of
the priceless value of a MAN!
* * * *
"And the vessel drove before the gale straight upon the cliff. All hope
was at an end; all hope of rescue was dead. There was great sorrowing on
board that fated bark. Heads were downcast, hearts beat wildly, ears
drank in the mournful monody of the scene, and lo! the strong man lifted
up his voice and wept aloud. Did you ever see a man in tears--tears
tapped from his very soul? When they laugh at his misery, whose lives he
has saved? When he discovers that the man he has loved as a brother, and
for whom he has sacrificed his all during long years, was all the while
a traitor and a foe, a mean and conscienceless traitor, and a secret,
bitter Judas Iscariot, yet wearing a smile on his face continually? God
grant you never may.
"The strong man wept! the very man, too, who, a few brief hours before,
had heaped up curses, for trifling reasons, upon the heads of others;
but now, in this hour of agony and mortal terror, fell upon his knees in
the sublime presence of God's insulted majesty; who now, in the deadly
peril, lashed to the pump, trembling to his soul's deep centre, cried
aloud to Him for--Mercy! God's ears are never deaf! At that moment one
of His Angels--Sandalphon--the Prayer-bearer, in passing by that way,
chanced to behold the sublime and moving spectacle. And his eyes flashed
gladness, even through his tears; and he could scarcely speak for the
deep emotion that stirred his angel heart; but still he pointed with one
hand at the prostrate penitent, and with the other he placed the golden
trumpet to his lips, and blew a blast that woke the sleeping echoes
throughout the vast Infinitudes; and he cried up, cried up from his very
soul: 'Behold! he prayeth!' And the Silence of the upper courts of
Heaven started into Sound at the glad announcement, 'Behold! he
prayeth!' And the sentence was borne afar on the fleecy pinions of the
Light, from Ashtoreth to Mazaroth, star echoing to star. And still the
sound sped on, nor ceased its flight until it struck the pearly Gates of
Glory--where was an Angel standing--the Recording Angel--writing in a
Book; and, oh! _how_ eagerly he penned the sentence, right opposite Tom
Clark's name: 'Behold! he prayeth!' and the tears--great, hot, scalding
tears, such as, at this moment, I am shedding--rolled out from the
angel's eyes, so that he could scarcely see the book--mine own eyes are
very dim--but still he wrote the words. God grant that he may write
them opposite your name and mine--opposite everybody's, and everybody's
son and daughter--opposite ALL our names!
"'Behold! he prayeth!' And lo! the Angels and the Cherubim, the Seraphs
and the Antarphim, caught up the sound, and sung through the Dome; sung
it till it was echoed back from Aidenn's golden walls, from the East to
the West, and the North and South thereof; until it echoed back in low,
melodious cadence from the Veiled Throne, on which sitteth in majesty
the Adonai of Adonim, the peerless and ineffable Over Soul, the gracious
Lord of both the Living and the Dead! Are there any _Dead_? No! except
in sin and guiltiness!... And there was much joy in the Starry World
over one sinner that had in very truth repented.
"And still the ship drove on, and on, and on--great heaven! right on to
a shelving ledge of rock, where she was almost instantly dashed into a
million fragments; masts, hull, sails, freight, men, all, all swept and
whirled with relentless fury into one common gulf of waters; and yet,
despite the din and roar, there rose upon the air, high and clear, and
shrill:
"'The startling shriek--the bubbling cry
Of one strong swimmer in his agony.'
"And that swimmer was Tom Clark. Thrice had he been thrown by the surf
upon a jutting ledge of rock; thrice had he, with the strength of
despair, clung to it, and seized upon the sea-weed growing on its edges,
with all the energy of a drowning man. In vain; the relentless sea
swept him off again, broke his hold, and whirled him back into the
brine. His strength was almost gone; exhaustion was nigh at hand; and he
floated, a helpless, nerveless mass at the mercy of the tide. And yet,
so wonderful a thing is a human soul!--in that dreadful moment, when
Hope herself was dead, and he was about to quit forever and forever this
earth of sin and sorrow, and yet an earth so fair and bright, so lovely
and so full of love, teeming so with all that is heroic and true, so
friendly and so kind; his soul, even then, his precious and immortal
soul, just pluming its wings for a flight to the far-off regions of the
Living Dead--that soul for which God Himself had put forth all His
redemptive energy--had abundant time to assert its great prerogative,
and bid Death himself a haughty, stern defiance. With the speed of Light
his mental vision flashed back along and over the valley of the dead
years, and saw arrayed before it all the strange phasmaramas of the
foretime. Deeds, Thoughts, and Intuitions never die! They are as
immortal as the imperishable souls that give them life and being!
"And in that wondrous vision Tom Clark was young again; his childhood,
youth, maturity; his sins, sorrows, virtues, and his aspirations, all,
all were there, phototyped upon the walls of the mystic lane through
which his soul was gazing--a lane not ten inches long, yet stretching
away into the immeasurable deeps of a vast Infinitude. A Paradox! I am
speaking of the Soul!--a thing whereof we talk so much, and know so very
little.
"The spectres of all his hours were there, painted on the Wall of
Memory's curved lane; his joys, his weary days of grief--few of the
first, many of the latter--were there, like green and smiling oases,
standing out in quick relief against the desert of his life. His anxious
eyes became preternaturally acute, and seemed to take cognizance both of
fact and cause--effect and principle at the same glance. His marriage
life--even to its minutest circumstance--stood revealed before him. He
saw Betsey as she had been--a girl, spotless, artless, intelligent,
ambitious; beheld her married; then saw her as she was when she joined
her lot with his own. He beheld her as she had become--anything but a
true wife and woman, for only her surface had been reached by either
husband. There was a fountain they had neither tapped nor known. Her
heart had been touched, indeed; but her soul, never. He was amazed to
find that a woman can give more than a husband is supposed to seek and
find. More, did I say? My heaven! not one man in ten thousand can think
of a line and plummet long enough to fathom the vast ocean of a woman's
affection; cannot imagine the height and depths--the unfathomable riches
of a woman's Love. Not a peculiar woman's--but any, every woman's love;
your sister's, sir, or your wife's, sir, or mine, or anybody's sister or
wife--anybody's daughter.
"It appeared to Clark's vision that a vast deal of his time had been
worse than wasted, else had he devoted a portion of it to the attentive
study of the woman whom he had, in the presence of God and man, sworn to
love, honor, and protect; for no man is fit for Heaven who does not
love his wife, and no man can love his wife unless he carefully studies
her nature; and he cannot study her nature unless he renders himself
lovable, and thus calls out _her_ love; and until her love _is_ thus
called out, the office of husband is a suicidal sham. Thus saith the
canons of the Rosicrucian philosophy. Are they bad?
"And he gazed in the depths of her spirit, surprised beyond measure to
find that God had planted so many goodly flowers therein--even in virago
Betsey's soul! And he said to himself--as many another husband will,
before a hundred years roll by--'What a precious fool I've been!
spending all my time in cultivating thistles--getting pricked and
cursing them--when roses smell so very well, and are so easily raised?
fool! I wish'----and he blamed his folly for not having nurtured
roses--for not having duly cultivated the rich garden God had intrusted
him with; execrated himself for not having cherished and nursed this
garden, and availed himself of its golden, glorious fruitage. It was as
a man who had willfully left down the bars for the free entrance of his
neighbor's cattle, and then wondering that his harvest of hay was not
quite so heavy as desired.... Clark saw that it had been in his
power--as it unquestionably is in that of every married man--by a few
kind acts, a few tender, loving words, to have thawed and melted forever
the ice collected by ill-usage--and every woman is ill-used who is not
truly, purely, loyally loved! He saw that he might easily have warmed
her spirit toward himself, therefore toward the world, and consequently
toward the Giver. He might have made their life a constant
summer-time--that very life that had been by his own short-sighted
externalism, confirmed into freezing, stormy, chilling winter.
"Wheat and lentils I have seen in Egypt, taken from a mummy's hand,
where they had lain three thousand and four hundred years. Some of that
wheat I still possess; some of it I planted in a flower-pot, and it
forthwith sprung up, green and beautiful, into life and excellence. The
mummy's hand was crisp; the tombs of Beni-Hassan were not the places for
wheat to grow, for they are very dry. Do you see the point, the
place--the thing I am aiming at? It is to show that the ills of marriage
life are to be corrected not by a recourse to law-courts and referees,
but by each party resolutely trying to correct them in the heart, the
head, the home. Another thing I aim at is to seal the lips--to strike to
the earth the brawlers for Divorce--the breakers-up of families, who
preach--or prate of--what they have neither brains to comprehend, nor
manhood to appreciate--Marriage!
"Clark saw, in the soul of his wife, in an instant, that which takes me
an hour to describe; for the soul sees faster than the hand can indite,
or the lips utter. He beheld many a gem, pure and translucent as a
crystal, shut up in the caverns of her nature; shut up, and barred from
the light, all the while yearning for day. What seeds of good, what
glorious wheat was there. The milk of human kindness had been changed to
ice-froth--sour, and sugar-less, not fit to be tasted. Inestimable
qualities had been left totally unregarded, until they were covered up,
nearly choked out by noxious weeds. God plants excellent gardens, and it
is man's express business to keep them and dress them, and just as
surely as he neglects them, and leaves the bars down, or the gates open,
just so surely along comes the Tare-sower, whether his name be
'Harmonial Philosopher,' 'All-Right' preacher, Tom, Harry, Dick,
Devil--or something worse.
"Many good things, saw Tom, that might have been developed into Use and
Beauty, that had, in fact, become frightfully coarse and abnormal; and
all for want of a little Trying.
"'The saddest words of tongue or pen
Are these sad words: IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN!'
"But that he was not kind, tractable, and confiding; and that he was the
reverse of all this. Faults of his own--great and many; tremendous
faults they were. He had been curt, short, sarcastic, selfish, exacting,
petulant, _offish_, arbitrary, tyrannical, suspicious, peremptory--all
of which are contained in the one word MEAN!--and he _was_ mean. Too
late he realized that he might have brought to the surface all the
delicious, ripe sweets of her woman, and her human nature, instead of
the cruel and the bitter. He saw, what every husband ought to see--but
don't--that no woman can be truly known who is not truly loved!--and
that, too, not with mere lip-homage, nor with nervous, muscular,
demonstrative, show-love--for no female on the earth but will soon
detect all such--and reckon you up accordingly--at your proper
value--less than a straw! She demands true homage, right straight from
the heart; from the bottom of the heart--whence springs the rightful
homage due from man to woman--right straight from the heart--without
deflection. Mind this. Give her _that_, and ah, then, _then_, what a
heaven is her presence! and what a fullness she returns! compound
interest, a thousand-fold repeated!--a fullness of affection so great
that God's love only exceedeth it!--a love so rich and vast, that man's
soul can scarce contain the half thereof. _This truth I know._ This
truth I tell, because it is such. You will bless me for it by-and-by,
when I am Over the River--if not before--will bless and thank
me--despite of what 'They say.' Remember that!
"Tom Clark was drowning, yet he realized all this. He regretted that he
had treated his wife as if she were soulless, or a softer sort of man.
He could have so managed as to have been all the world to Betsey--all
the world, and something more and better, for there are leaves in
wedlock's book which only those can turn and read who truly love each
other. Marriage is, to some, a coarse brown paper volume, with rough
binding, bad ink, and worse type, poorly composed, and badly adjusted,
without a page corrected. It may be made a super-royal volume, on tinted
paper, gilt-edged, clear type, and rich and durable covers, the whole
constituting the History of two happy lives spent on Hymen Island:
Profusely illustrated, in full tints, with scenes of Joy in all its
phases. Price, The TRYING! Very cheap, don't you think so?
"He saw, as he floated there in the brine, that he had never done aught
to call out his wife's affection, in which he resembled many another
whiskered ninny, who insanely expect women to doat upon them merely
because they happen to be married. Dolts! Not one in a host comprehends
woman's nature; not one in two hosts will take the trouble to find it
out; consequently, not one man in three hosts but goes down to the grave
never having tasted life's best nectar--that of loving and being loved.
"'O Betsey, Betsey, I know you _now_! _What_ a stupid I have been, to be
sure!'
"Profound ejaculation!
"'I've been an out-and-out fool!'
"Sublime discovery!
"Thus thought the dying man, in the dreadful hour of his destiny--that
solemn hour wherein the soul refuses to be longer enslaved or deceived
by the specious warp and woof of the sophistical robe it may have
voluntarily worn through many a year, all the while believing it to be
Truth, as some people do Davis' and Joe Smith's 'Philosophy.' It is not
till a dose of Common Sense has caused us to eject from our moral
stomachs the nice philosophical sweetmeats we have indulged in for
years, until at last they have disturbed our digestion--sweets, very
pleasant to the palate--like the 'All Right-ism' of the 'Hub of the
Universe'--but which, like boarding-house hash, is very good in small
quantities--seldom presented--and not permanently desirable--that we
begin to have true and noble views of life, especially married life,
its responsibilities and its truly royal joys and pleasures. Clark had
reached this crisis, and in an instant the scales fell from his
eyes--the same that blinds so many of us during the heyday and vigor of
life.
"'If I could be spared, Betsey, I'd be a better man.'
"Bravo! Glorious Thomas Clark! Well said, even though the waters choke
thine utterance.
"'I would. O wife, I begin to see your value, and what a treasure I have
lost--lost--_lost_!'
"And the poor dying wretch struggled against the brine--struggled
bravely, fiercely to keep off the salt death--the grim, scowling Death
that had sat upon the taffrail; that had stalked about the deck, and
stood at the cabin door; the same fearful Death that had whistled
through the rigging, and ridden on the storm, and which had followed but
had not yet touched him with his cold and icy sceptre."