They had been sitting by the fire in silence for a long time. Robin
had been sewing, but the blaze had sunk too low to see by it, and her
hands were folded idly upon her mending. She put it by, and went to
the window. It was a very dark night, and the stars shone brilliantly.
The stars had come to mean a great deal to them both, howbeit neither
had ever said so. The stars only were unchanged. "The thoughts of God
in the heavens" were the same, whatever might be His thought on earth.
She sighed so heavily, that Adam asked quickly, "What is it?" and she
answered, with a nervous laugh, "I was thinking of the old legend,
that the souls on other planets call ours 'the sorrowful world.' What
made it so sorrowful, Adam?"
"Ignorance would cover it all," he answered, "but to be specific,
intemperance, sensuality, avarice, and poverty. I don't mean
drunkenness only, when I say intemperance. I have known a few
prohibitionists in my time who were as intemperate in their eating as
any one could be in the matter of drink. I think intemperance in its
widest sense was the great curse of our time anyway; drink and tobacco
and tea and coffee; and as to our eating, there was too much, of
almost everything on earth that was not food, but which could be
over-salted and over-peppered, and treated with tabasco sauce. We
over-stimulated every activity of the body, and spent our lives doing
all kinds of things in which there was no sense. Think of reading one
or two morning and evening papers every day. To be sure we said there
was nothing in them, but we used up our eyesight over them, and let a
stream of silliness and scandal dribble through our minds. As to the
things we wore--"
Robin laughed. "I know," she said. "The sewing-machine didn't save
work; it only made ruffles. A dressmaker once said to me, 'It's a good
thing for me that these women haven't sense enough to spend their time
and money on themselves, in making their bodies free and strong and
beautiful. But no; they would rather have a stylish dress than a
graceful body. They don't care to be beautiful themselves; all they
want is a handsome gown to cover their ugliness.' Isn't it strange
that we never seemed able to realize that the Greek fashions were
immortal because they were beautiful?"
"Still, I don't think the dress of the Greek women would be very
convenient for housework," ventured Adam.
Robin shook her head. "You only say that because some woman has said
it to you. The Diana of the Stag wore the first rainy-day gown. The
Greek dress was capable of ever so many modifications. If I were
making a handbook of proverbs for women, I should say, 'A good
complexion is rather to be chosen than many fine dresses, and glossy
and abundant hair turneth away wrath.' I believe in the simplification
of life. I understand just how Thoreau felt when he threw out that
specimen because it had to be dusted daily. There are very few things
beautiful enough to pay for that amount of trouble. But perhaps that
is because I don't care for specimens, and I loathe dusting."
"You ought to have been a Jap," said Adam. "There was one in college,
in my class, and one day when I was fretting over something I could
not afford he said, in that immensely polite way of theirs, 'You I
cannot understand. With all American people it so is, even as by
Ruskin said was it; whatever you have, of it you more would get, and
where you are, you would go from. You happy are only when something
you get, and never that you yourself are.' But I think the Celestial
was wrong there. When a man is self-conscious of illy-made garments, a
mean domicile, a poor kind of half education, he is uncomfortable; he
hasn't accomplished his evolution from the conscious, the
self-conscious, to the unconscious. It was this very discomfort and
inequality that used so to enrage me, for it need not have been."
"I wish," said Robin, "we knew how to make paper; of all the
fascinating things in Bellamy's 'Equality,' there was nothing I liked
so well as the idea of paper garments, to be burned when one got
through with them. Think of never having any washing and ironing, and
always having new clothes."
"I wonder whether we could invent some of those things over again,"
said Adam, reflectively.
"I couldn't spare you any of my precious rags, if you could," said
Robin.
"Most of the paper was made out of wood, anyhow," answered Adam, "and
the ash that grows here in any quantity was considered particularly
fine for that purpose."
"'God made man upright, but he hath sought out many inventions,'"
quoted Robin, "and now we are going to seek them over again. I can't
imagine how anyone could ever make a lineotype, but the type and the
hand-press are easy enough, and if you can make paper, we may yet live
to read our 'published works.' You probably do not know that I used to
have a Wegg-like facility for dropping into poetry."
"Did you? That is another of the things you never told me; but your
speaking of Thoreau," answered Adam, "recalls what he said of the
amount of work necessary to sustain life beside Walden Pond. It took
six weeks out of the year, and that was in a most forbidding country.
In such a valley as this two months ought to be sufficient to more
than feed and clothe us; but then he didn't have to make his own
clothing."
"And out of nothing particular," interrupted Robin.
Adam laughed and went on. "Did you ever hear of a man called Hertzka?
He was an eminent Austrian sociologist, and he figured it out, that if
five million men should work a little less than an hour and three
quarters a day they could produce all the necessities of life for the
twenty-two million people of Austria. By working two hours and twelve
minutes daily for two months beside, they could have all the luxuries
also. And that not for a few, not for the Court and the nobility, but
for all. There could have been music and pictures and books and
theatres, and sufficient food and clothing. Isn't it strange that when
we might have been so happy we preferred to be so wretched? For even
if we had all we wanted ourselves, we could not escape the sights and
sounds that told of abject misery."
"It was always so," Robin answered moodily. "The poor we had always
with us. History always repeated itself."
"Still, it didn't exactly repeat itself," Adam said. "Our dark age
would have done for a golden age in the past. Greece was glorious for
a little while, but her literature tells us of her ideals. The isles
of Greece, where Byron contracted his last illness, would have left
him to die among the rocks twenty-five hundred years earlier, because
he had a lame foot. We at least were kinder to animals, and that means
a great deal."
"I don't know," she answered. "Perhaps; it seems to me I have read of
a hospital for sick animals on the island of Ceylon a long sometime B.
C. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu--or was it Lady Hester Stanhope?--said
she had traveled all over the world, and had never found but two kinds
of people,--men and women. I fancy the same thing is true of all the
ages as well as all the countries."
"No," Adam said, shaking his head; "our ideals change. The scheme of
life laid down by Christ was to the Greeks foolishness and to the Jews
a stumbling-block, and there were plenty of Greeks and Jews in our
day. By Greeks I mean people whose ideals were purely intellectual,
and by Jews those who saw no good save a material good, no God but the
God of Mammon. They would not hear either Moses or the prophets, and
the statute of limitations was as near as they could come to the
Sabbatic year. The Greek and the Jew have stood ready with their cup
of hemlock, their crown of thorns for every Christ-spirit that has
ever come to earth. Yet more people read Socrates, and believed on the
Nazarene every year. I don't mean in the church; the working-man did
not go to church, but he uncovered his head at the name of Christ, the
first lawgiver who confounded the scribes and Pharisees, and ate with
publicans and sinners."
"But Moses was the first lawgiver to forbid taking the nether
millstone as a pledge," objected Robin.
"True," he admitted, "and the laws of Moses would have made the world
over. He was the greatest writer on political economy this earth has
ever seen. His absolute fiat against the alienation of the land would
have done more for the common people than all Adam Smith's theories of
free competition, and Fourier's dream of a perfected communism. But
who would have known of Moses, save for Christ? The Old Testament
would have been merely the sacred book of the Hebrews, and save as a
literary and historic work, of very uncertain historic value, would
have been unread, as the Koran and other books of a similar nature
were unread."
"And yet you do not believe in the divinity of Christ," she said
slowly.
"No," he answered. "Is that necessary before one can believe in his
teachings? The truth is always divine. What difference does it make
whether the one who utters it be human or divine, bond or slave, Æsop
or Marcus Aurelius? the truth remains the same. A fable is only
another name of a parable. We have the story of the lost sheep; that's
a parable; and that of the lamb that muddied the stream, and that's a
fable. One is sacred, the other profane, but both are fables, both
parables. When you take them away from the context it is as easy to
feel for the lamb eaten by the wolf, as for the one that was rescued,
and has been immortalized in picture and song."
"Probably you are right," she said. "I never thought of it in just
that way before," and saying "good night" she went to her room.
Adam thought he heard her humming, "Away on the mountains cold and
bare."