For a time they busied themselves with different things about their
little home, worked in the garden, and held a round-up of their stock
that they might know the extent of their wealth; and because, in a
life quite apart from human beings, animals come to take their place
to a greater extent than might seem possible.
It was a very pleasant time. Everything seemed so gentle, so willing
to be friends, and so certain of their good-will.
"You used to be a Kipling fiend," said Adam, one morning, when they
had been salting the cattle, and were resting before going home.
"Didn't he write a Jungle tale about 'How Fear Came'? He ought to be
here now to write another to show how Fear might go."
"It seems to me he did," Robin answered, running her fingers through
the short, curly forelock of a colt that stood placidly licking her
hand. "I wonder that they don't remember longer, or perhaps they know
that we think they are folks. Really, I think we ought to hold a
reception, a kind of salon, once a week, so as to keep acquainted with
our neighbors."
"You are an absurd child," he said, laughing; "but does that mean that
you have really decided to go on living?"
"I don't know," she said. "What did we determine? By the way, which
side of this question are you on?"
"Both," he said decidedly.
"Oh! then we can't do like those men Cooper told about, in 'The
Pioneers,' wasn't it? who argued and argued every night until at last
they convinced each other, and then started in to argue it out again."
"No," he answered, "I rather think that we are answering ourselves
rather than each other, anyhow. Robin, where was 'the land of Nod'?"
"That is one of the questions that I was sent to bed for asking a
preacher who was visiting at our house, when I was about seven years
old. They hurried me hence before he had a chance to answer, so I
never found out. But I know what you are thinking of, and I have
thought of it too. Perhaps there isn't any land of Nod, or any land at
all. And I have thought, also, how it would be if one of us died and
left the other with little children. You might take my body and jump
off the rock, but you couldn't take them too, and still less could you
leave them."
"I have thought of the risk to you," he said, "and felt that not even
for the sake of a child would I let you come so near death."
She laughed a little. "That is really funny," she said. "You must have
been reading Michelet; I never thought of that at all. I am very well
and strong, and my habits and my clothes are not such as to hamper my
life nor endanger that of another. There is next to no risk, so far as
that is concerned, certainly none I would not gladly take. But I have
dreaded afterwards, when the child might fall ill and need help that
we could not give it."
"Because there are no doctors in the world?" said Adam, with a touch
of cynicism. "I don't know that we are not better off without them.
The greatest of them confessed that it was guess-work. The best
doctors I ever knew were always trying to make their patients live
more simply, take more exercise, and give nature a chance; they never
resorted to medicine until there was nothing else to do. If all the
germs and microbes have gone with them, the earth can stand the loss.
The main thing is to be well born, and when the body is healthy and
leads a natural life, while it may know pain, it need not be a prey to
disease. Very few children had a heritage worth having. It had been
bartered away. No wonder we were taught to say, 'There is no health in
us.'"
"Do you remember Gannett's 'Not All There'?" she asked soberly. "I am
not sure I can recall it, but it began this way:--
"Something short in the making, Something lost on the way,
As the little soul was taking Its path to the break of day.
"Only his mood or passion,
But it twitched an atom back,
And she for her gods of fashion
Filched from the pilgrim's pack.
"The father did not mean it,
The mother did not know,
No human eye had seen it,
But the little soul needed it so.
"Thro' the street there passed a cripple
Maimed from before its birth;
On the strange face gleamed a ripple
Like a half dawn on the earth.
"It passed, and it awed the city
As one not alive nor dead;
Eyes looked and burned with pity.
'He is not all there,' they said.
"Not all! for part is behind it,
Lying dropped on the way;
That part--could two but find it,
How welcome the end of day!"
For a long while neither spoke, then Robin went on. The colt had
wandered back to its mother, and she sat with her hands clasped, and
her eyes looking far out to sea.
"I don't blame people for dreading the responsibility, nor even for
shirking it, when I think of all the conditions we had to face. Men
who thought they had hedged their trades about with so much skill that
they had banished competition, found that they had only succeeded in
bringing into the field the machine that banished them. And everywhere
there was such ghastly poverty,--poverty of body and brain and soul.
We had gone back to patrons and patronesses. Men or women did not do
anything of themselves any more,--they did not sing or play, or give a
reading, or exhibit a painting. They starved, or they performed or
exhibited 'under the auspices of.' It has always been the same. Given
a pure democracy, and demos reigns sooner or later. The shiftless go
to the bottom, the thrifty to the top, and then like the upper and
nether millstones, they grind everything between them. That which is
below cries, 'Alms!' and that which is above responds, 'Largesse,' and
the voice that cries, 'Justice,' is stifled between. The stone that
crushed from above and the rock that ground from below were very near,
and men dreaded them, for when the grist is ground, and flint strikes
upon flint, the conflagration is at hand. Do you think I am talking
like a Populist campaign book? I only know what I saw, and what the
poets have said. I wouldn't dare to be as radical as Lowell, nor as
bitter as Tennyson, nor as savage as Carlyle, or Ruskin, or Hugo. We
had overcome the sharpness of death, but whence could we hope for
deliverance from the sharpness of living?"
"We have been delivered," said Adam, slowly, "but you don't seem
disposed to be the Miriam of this Israel--limited."
"Well, no," answered Robin. "I should like to believe that you and I
were rewarded for our superhuman excellence by being saved when
Pharaoh and his multitudes went under, but a somewhat wide
acquaintance with other people forbids. On the other hand, we can't
have been left on account of our superlative badness. Truly, Adam,
don't you feel sometimes as if you would rather have died with the
rest?"
He hesitated. The question was so unexpected, and so fraught with
possibilities. She watched the struggle in his face and honored him
for it. He put back a stray lock of hair and kissed her forehead
before he answered.
"The streak of cowardice that we all of us have in us," he said
finally, "the distrust of myself, and the doubt of all systems of life
of which I know anything, prompts me to answer yes; for I think even
if we had died, you and I would still be together. I think sometimes
we have been, in the past, but whether we have or not, I know we shall
be in the future. So while the mental part of me,--which it seems to
me is the weakest and most contemptible part of man, because it is
always reasoning him out of what his soul tells him is true,--while
the mental part of me might find it easier to be dead than to know
what we ought to do, everything else in me rejoices. I know that in
the great plan we have a part, it seems to me a very happy and
beautiful part. In all our world there is no cause for anger or hatred
or sin. There is friendliness and content and gentleness and love all
around us; look up, dear, and see how near heaven seems."
But though she looked up, she saw only the light in his eyes.