"But so much that is said is nonsense," I persisted. "Here Mrs. Weston
has been in Tuskamuck for four or five months, and she is already
credited with running into extravagance, and bringing her husband into
all sorts of things. We might at least give her time to get settled
before we talk about her so much."
"She hadn't been here four or five weeks before she made it plain enough
what she is," was the uncompromising retort. "She set out to astonish us
as soon as she came. That's her Western spirit, I suppose."
I did not go on with the talk, but secretly the thing troubles me.
Speculation is a large word, and it is nonsense to suppose George to be
speculating in any way which could come to much, or that Aunt Naomi
would know it if he were. I do wish people would either stop talking
about George, or talk to somebody besides me.
August 6. Mrs. Tracy came in to call to-day. She makes a round of calls
about once in two years, and I have not seen her for a long time. She
had her usual string of questions, and asked about me and baby and Tom
and the girls and the summer preserving until I felt as if I had been
through the longest kind of a cross-examination. Just before she left
she inquired if Mrs. Weston had told me that her husband was going to
make a lot of money in stocks. I said at once that I seldom saw Mrs.
Weston, and that I knew nothing about her husband's business affairs;
but this shows where Aunt Naomi got her information. Mrs. Weston must
have been talking indiscreetly. I wonder--But it seems to me I am always
wondering!
August 7. Kathie has not been near me since she left the house the other
evening. It seemed better to let her work out things in her own way than
to go after her. I hoped that if I took no notice she might forget her
foolishness, and behave in a more natural way. I met her in the street
this afternoon, and stopped to speak with her. I said nothing of her
having run away, but talked as usual. At last I asked her if she would
not come home with me, and she turned and came to the gate. Then I asked
her to come in, but she stopped short.
"Is the baby gone?" she demanded.
"No," I answered.
"You know I shall never come into your house again while that baby is
there," she declared in an odd, quiet sort of way. "I hate that baby,
and he that hates is just like a murderer."
She said it with a certain relish, as if she were proud of it. I begin
to suspect that there may be a good deal of the theatrical mixed with
her abnormal feeling.
"Kathie," I said, "you may be as silly as you like, but you can't make
me believe anything so absurd as that you hate Thomasine. As for being a
murderer in your heart, you wouldn't hurt a fly."
She looked at me queerly. I half thought there was a little
disappointment in her first glance; then a strange expression as if she
unconsciously took herself for audience, since I would not serve, and
went on with her play of abnormal wickedness.
"You don't know how wicked I am," she responded. "I am a murderer in my
heart."
A strangely intense look came into her eyes, as if a realization of what
she was saying took hold of her, and as if she became really frightened
by her own assumption. She clutched my arm with a grasp which must have
been at least half genuine.
"Oh, Miss Ruth," she said. "I don't know what I shall do. I know I am
lost!"
I wanted to shake the child, so completely for the moment did I feel
that a lot of her emotion was make-believe, even if unconscious; but on
the other hand she was actually beginning to turn pale and tremble with
the nervous excitement she had raised by her fear or her theatricals.
"Kathie," I said, almost severely, "you know you are talking nonsense.
Come into the house, and have a glass of milk and a slice of cake.
You'll feel better after you've had something to eat."
She looked at me with eyes really wild, and without a word turned
quickly and ran down the street at full speed, leaving me utterly
confounded. I am sure she acts to herself, and that her religious mania
is partly theatrical; but then I suppose religious mania always is. Yet
it has a basis in what she believes, and with her imaginative,
hysterical temperament she has the power of taking up her ideas so
completely that she gets to be almost beside herself. When she is so
much in earnest she must be treated, I suppose, as if all her
self-accusations and agony of mind were entirely real.
August 8. I have been to lay a bunch of sweet-peas on Mother's grave. I
wonder and wonder again if she knows when I am so near the place where
we left her, the place where it always seems to me some life must yet
linger. I have all my life been familiar with the doubt whether any
consciousness, any personality survives death; and yet it is as natural
to assume that life goes on as it is to suppose the sun will rise
to-morrow. I know that my feeling proves nothing; but still
instinctively I cling to it.
In any case there is the chance the dead are alive and alert somewhere
in the shadows, and if they are they must be glad not to be forgotten. I
should not be willing to take the chance, and neglect the grave of one
who had been fond of me. Mother loved me as I loved her; and this
decides I shall run no risk of her being unhappy after death in the
thought that I have forgotten.
I suppose I cling to a feeling that there must be some sort of
immortality largely from the loneliness I feel. The idea of never seeing
Father or Mother again is more than I could endure. Father used to say
that after all each of us is always really alone in this world, and even
our best friends can no more come close to us than if they did not
exist; but this always seemed to me a sort of cold, forlorn theory. The
warmth of human companionship somehow makes it impossible for me to feel
anything like this. When I said so to Father, I remember he smiled, and
said he was glad I did find it impossible.
One thing I am sure of to the very bottom of my heart: that things are
somehow completely right, so that whatever death means it must be part
of a whole which is as it should be.
August 10. To-day Tom brought me a bunch of cardinal-flowers. He had
been up to the Lake Meadows, he said, and thought I might like them. The
whole parlor is alive with the wonderful crimson--no, scarlet, of the
great flaming armful of blossoms. Tom used to get them for me when I was
a girl, but since those days I have had only a stray spike now and then.
They bring back the past, and the life-long friendship I have had with
Tom. I wonder sometimes why I have never been in love with Tom. Life
never seemed complete without him. In the years he kept away on account
of George I missed him sorely, and more than once I have thought of all
sorts of ways to bring things back to the former footing; only I knew
all the time it was of no use. It is the greatest comfort to have the
old friendship back, and now Tom must understand that I have no more
than friendship to give him. It would be vexing if he should
misunderstand, but I must take care he does not.
August 11. I have been at the Town Hall helping to make ready for a
raspberry festival, to raise money for the church. Miss Charlotte came
after me, and of course I had to go. She said all that was wanted was my
taste to direct about decorating the hall, but I have been told so
before, and I knew from experience that taste is expected to work out
its own salvation. To be really fair I suppose I should say I cannot
stand by and give directions, but have to take hold with my own hands,
so it is nobody's fault but my own if I do things. Besides, it is really
good fun among the neighbors, with the air full of the smell of cedar,
with all the pretty young girls making wreaths and laughing while they
work, and with your feet tangled in evergreens and laurel whenever you
cross the floor. Miss Charlotte is in her element at such a time. Her
great-throated laugh, as strong as a man's, rings out, and she seems for
the time quite happy and jolly with excitement.
It came over me to-day almost with a sense of dismay how old I seem to
the young girls. They treated me with a sort of respect which couldn't
be put into words exactly, I suppose, but which I felt. Somehow I
believe the breaking of my engagement has made me seem older to them.
Perhaps it is my foolish fancy, but I seem to see that while I was
engaged I had still for them a hold on youth which I have now lost. I
suppose they never thought it out, but I know they feel now that I am
very much their senior.
At a time like this, too, I realize how true it is that I am somehow a
little outside of the life of the village. I have lived here almost all
my life. Except for the years I was at school, and a winter or two in
Boston or abroad I have been generally at home. I know almost everybody
in town, by sight at least. Yet I always find when I am among Tuskamuck
people in this way that I am looking at them as if I were a spectator. I
wonder if this means that I am egotistical or queer, or only that my
life has been so much more among books and intellectual things than the
life of most of them. I am sure I love the town and my neighbors.
The thing I wish to put down, however, has nothing to do with my
feelings toward the town. It is that I am ashamed of the way I wrote the
other day about Mr. Saychase. He entered the hall this afternoon just as
old Mrs. Oliver came limping in to see the decorations; and the lovely
way in which he helped the poor old lame creature made me blush for
myself. I almost wanted to go to him and apologize then and there. It
would have been awkward, however, first to explain that I had made fun
of him in my diary, and then apologize! But he is a good soul, even if
he did think I was a sort of nineteenth century Zorahida, to give up
Mohammedanism for the sake of wedding a Christian chief.--And here I go
again!
August 15. I have been reading to-night a book about the East, and it
has stirred me a good deal. The speculations of strange peoples on the
great mystery of life and death bring them so close to us. They show how
alike all mankind is, and how we all grope about after some clue to
existence. On the whole it is better, I think, not to give much thought
to what may come after death,--no more thought, that is, than we cannot
help. We can never know, and we must either raise vague hopes to make us
less alive to the importance of life, the reality of life--I do not know
how to say it. Of course all religion insists on the importance of life,
but rather as a preparation for another existence. I think we need to
have it always before us that what is important is not what will happen
after we are dead and gone, but what is happening now because we are
alive and have a hand in things. I see this is not very clear, but I am
sure the great thing is to live as if life were of value in itself. To
live rightly, to make the most out of the life we can see and feel, is
all that humanity is equal to, and it is certainly worth doing for its
own sake.
The idea which has struck me most in what I have been reading to-night
is the theory that each individual is made up of the fragments of other
lives; that just as the body is composed of material once part of other
bodies, so is the spirit built up of feelings, and passions, and
tendencies, and traits of temperament formerly in other individuals dead
and gone. At first thought it does not seem to me a comfortable theory.
I should not seem to belong to myself any more, if I believed it. To
have the temper of some bygone woman, and the affections of another, and
the tastes of a third,--it is too much like wearing false hair! It does
not seem to me possible, but it may be true. At least it is a theory
which may easily be made to seem plausible by the use of facts we all
know. If it is the true solution of our characters here, it is pleasant
to think that perhaps we may modify what for the present is our very own
self so it shall be better stuff for the fashioning of another
generation. I should like to feel that when this bunch of ideas and
emotions goes to pieces, the bits would make sweet spots in the
individuals they go to make part of. I suppose this is what George Eliot
meant in the "Choir Invisible," or something like this. As one thinks of
the doctrine it is not so cold and unattractive as it struck me in the
reading. One could bear to lose a conscious future if the alternative
was happiness to lives not yet in being. I should like, though, to know
it. But if there weren't any me to know, I should not be troubled, as
the old philosophers were fond of saying, and the important thing would
be not for me to know but for the world to be better. I begin to see how
the doctrine might be a fine incentive to do the best with life that is
in any way possible; and what more could be asked of any doctrine?
August 17. Baby was ill night before last, and we three women were
smitten to the heart. Hannah went for Dr. Wentworth, and when he came he
laughed at our panic, and assured me nothing serious was the matter. It
was only a little indigestion caused by the excessive heat. I do not
know how I should have behaved if it had not been that Rosa was in such
a panic I had to give all my spare attention to keeping her in order. It
came to me then what an advantage an officer must have in a battle; he
cannot break down because he has to look to his men. Last night I wished
greatly Tom were in reach; it would have been dreadful if anything
really serious had happened to baby, and he not to know it until it was
too late. Yet he could have done nothing if the worst had been true and
he had been here. It would have been no comfort to poor little sick
Tomine to have one person by her more than another, so long as her
nurses were not strangers. A father is nothing to her yet. I wonder when
he will be.
Yesterday Tomine was better, and to-night she seems as well as ever; but
it will take time for me to be rid entirely of fear. I wonder if she had
gone whether her little bunch of vitality would have been scattered
through new lives. She can hardly have much personality or individuality
yet. Sometimes the universe, the power that keeps going on and on, and
which is so unmoved by human pain, strikes me as too terrible for
thought; but I cling desperately to Father's idea that nature is too
great to be unkind, and that what looks to us like cruelty is only the
size of things too big for us to grasp. It is a riddle, and the way I
put it is neither so clear nor wise, I suppose, as the theories of
countless religious teachers, they and I alike guessing at things human
insight is not equal to. I doubt much if it is profitable to speculate
in this vein. "Think all you can about life as a good and glorious
thing," Father wrote to me once when I had expressed in a school-letter
some trouble or other about what comes after death, "but keep in mind
that of what came before we were born or will happen after we are dead
we shall never in this life know anything, no matter how much we
speculate, so dreaming about it or fretting about it is simply building
air-castles." I have said over to myself ever since I began to be
perplexed that to speculate about another life is to build air-castles.
Baby is well again and I will not fret or dream of what it would mean if
she had slipped away from us.
August 20. I must settle myself a little by writing, or I shall be like
old Mrs. Tuell, who said that for years she never slept a wink because
her nerves wiggled like angleworms all over her inside. I have certainly
been through an experience which might make anybody's nerves wiggle.