Mrs. Ewbert heard old Hilbrook begin at once in a high senile key
without any form of response to her husband's greeting: "There was one
thing you said to-day that I've been thinkin' over, and I've come down
to talk with you about it."
"Yes?" Ewbert queried submissively, though he was aware of being quite
as fagged as his wife accused him of being, after he spoke.
"Yes," Hilbrook returned. "I guess I ha'n't been exactly up and down
with myself. I guess I've been playing fast and loose with myself. I
guess you're right about my wantin' to have enough consciousness to
enjoy my unconsciousness," and the old gentleman gave a laugh of rather
weird enjoyment. "There are things," he resumed seriously, "that are
deeper in us than anything we call ourselves. I supposed I had gone to
the bottom, but I guess I hadn't. All the while there was something down
there that I hadn't got at; but you reached it and touched it, and now I
know it's there. I don't know but it's my Soul that's been havin' its
say all the time, and me not listenin'. I guess you made your point."
Ewbert was still not so sure of that. He had thrown out that hasty
suggestion without much faith in it at the time, and his faith in it had
not grown since.
"I'm glad," he began, but Hilbrook pressed on as if he had not spoken.
"I guess we're built like an onion," he said, with a severity that
forbade Ewbert to feel anything undignified in the homely illustration.
"You can strip away layer after layer till you seem to get to nothing at
all; but when you've got to that nothing you've got to the very thing
that had the life in it, and that would have grown again if you had put
it in the ground."
"Exactly!" said Ewbert.
"You made a point that I can't get round," Hilbrook continued, and it
was here that Ewbert enjoyed a little instant of triumph. "But that
ain't the point with _me_. I see that I can't prove that we shan't live
again any more than you can prove that we shall. What I want you to do
_now_ is to convince me, or to give me the least reason to believe, that
we shan't live again on exactly the same terms that we live now. I don't
want to argue immortality any more; we'll take that for granted. But how
is it going to be any different from mortality with the hope of death
taken away?"
Hilbrook's apathy was gone, and his gentleness; he had suddenly an air
and tone of fierce challenge. As he spoke he brought a clenched fist
down on the arm of his chair; he pushed his face forward and fixed
Ewbert with the vitreous glitter of his old eyes. Ewbert found him
terrible, and he had a confused sense of responsibility for him, as if
he had spiritually constituted him, in the charnel of unbelief, out of
the spoil of death, like some new and fearfuler figment of
Frankenstein's. But if he had fortuitously reached him, through the one
insincerity of his being, and bidden him live again forever, he must not
forsake him or deny him.
"I don't know how far you accept or reject the teachings of Scripture on
this matter," he began rather vaguely, but Hilbrook stopped him.
"You didn't go to the Book for the point you made _against_ me. But if
you go to it now for the point I want you to make _for_ me, what are you
going to find? Are you going to find the promise of a life any different
from the life we have here? I accept it all,--all that the Old Testament
says, and all that the New Testament says; and what does it amount to on
this point?"
"Nothing but the assurance that if we live rightly here we shall be
happy in the keeping of the divine Love there. That assurance is
everything to me."
"It isn't to me!" cried the old man. "We are in the keeping of the
divine Love here, too, and are we happy? Are those who live rightly
happy? It's because we're not conditioned for happiness here; and how
are we going to be conditioned differently there? We are going to suffer
to all eternity through our passions, our potentialities of experience,
there just as we do here."
"There may be other passions, other potentialities of experience,"
Ewbert suggested, casting about in the void.
"Like what?" Hilbrook demanded. "I've been trying to figure it, and I
can't. I should like you to try it. You can't imagine a new passion in
the soul any more than you can imagine a new feature in the face. There
they are: eyes, ears, nose, mouth, chin; love, hate, greed, hope, fear!
You can't add to them or take away from them." The old man dropped from
his defiance in an entreaty that was even more terrible to Ewbert. "I
wish you could. I should like to have you try. Maybe I haven't been over
the whole ground. Maybe there's some principle that I've missed." He
hitched his chair closer to Ewbert's, and laid some tremulous fingers on
the minister's sleeve. "If I've got to live forever, what have I got to
live for?"
"Well," said Ewbert, meeting him fully in his humility, "let us try to
make it out together. Let us try to think. Apparently, our way has
brought us to a dead wall; but I believe there's light beyond it, if we
can only break through. Is it really necessary that we should discover
some new principle? Do we know all that love can do from our experience
of it here?"
"Have you seen a mother with her child?" Hilbrook retorted.
"Yes, I know. But even that has some alloy of selfishness. Can't we
imagine love in which there is no greed,--for greed, and not hate, is
the true antithesis of love which is all giving, while greed is all
getting,--a love that is absolutely pure?"
"_I_ can't," said the old man. "All the love I ever felt had greed in
it; I wanted to keep the thing I loved for myself."
"Yes, because you were afraid in the midst of your love. It was fear
that alloyed it, not greed. And in easily imaginable conditions in which
there is no fear of want, or harm, or death, love would be pure; for it
is these things that greed itself wants to save us from. You can imagine
conditions in which there shall be no fear, in which love casteth out
fear?"
"Well," said Hilbrook provisionally.
Ewbert had not thought of these points himself before, and he was
pleased with his discovery, though afterwards he was aware that it was
something like an intellectual juggle. "You see," he temporized, "we
have got rid of two of the passions already, fear and greed, which are
the potentialities of our unhappiest experience in this life. In fact,
we have got rid of three, for without fear and greed men cannot hate."
"But how can we exist without them?" Hilbrook urged. "Shall we be made
up of two passions,--of love and hope alone?"
"Why not?" Ewbert returned, with what he felt a specious brightness.
"Because we should not be complete beings with these two elements
alone."
"Ah, as we know ourselves here, I grant you," said the minister. "But
why should we not be far more simply constituted somewhere else? Have
you ever read Isaac Taylor's Physical Theory of another Life? He argues
that the immortal body would be a far less complex mechanism than the
mortal body. Why should not the immortal soul be simple, too? In fact,
it would necessarily be so, being one with the body. I think I can put
my hand on that book, and if I can I must make you take it with you."
He rose briskly from his chair, and went to the shelves, running his
fingers along the books with that subtlety of touch by which the student
knows a given book in the dark. He had heard Mrs. Ewbert stirring about
in the rooms beyond with an activity in which he divined a menacing
impatience; and he would have been glad to get rid of old Hilbrook
before her impatience burst in an irruption upon them. Perhaps because
of this distraction he could not find the book, but he remained on foot,
talking with an implication in his tone that they were both preparing to
part, and were now merely finishing off some odds and ends of discourse
before they said good-night.
Old Hilbrook did not stir. He was far too sincere a nature, Ewbert saw,
to conceive of such inhospitality as a hint for his departure, or he was
too deeply interested to be aware of it. The minister was obliged to sit
down again, and it was eleven o'clock before Hilbrook rose to go.