A BURST OF SUNLIGHT.
June 8.
They say the darkest hour comes just before the dawn. It was so with
me. My troubles grew too great to bear, then vanished in an hour.
Fate couldn't forever frown. I knew there must be help; some hand
outstretched in a pitiless world.
Really I am almost happy, for in the most unexpected and yet the most
natural fashion, my perplexities have vanished; and I believe that my
life will not be, after all, a failure.
The hour before the dawn was more than dark. It was dreary. In the
morning I did not care to go out, and no one came except one strange
man who besieged the door--there have been many such here recently,
dunning and dunning and dunning, until my patience was worn to shreds.
This was a decent-looking fellow with a thin face, a mustache dyed
black and a carefully unkeen expression that noticed everything.
"Miss Winship?" he said, and upon my acknowledging the name, he placed
a paper in my hands and went away. I was so relieved because he said
nothing about wanting "a little money on account;" he wasn't even
coarsely insolent, like so many of them. He did look surprised at my
appearance; so surprised that his explanation of his errand died away
into an unintelligible murmur. But I wasn't curious about it.
I tried to read a newspaper, only to gather from some headlines that
Strathay and his cousin were passengers by an out-going steamship. I
wonder if it was all money, money, that kept him from me--or was it
more than half the fear of beauty?
I couldn't read anything else, not even a note from Mrs. Marmaduke; it
was dated from her country place; she hoped to see me--"in the autumn!"
Peggy is in Europe; the General's going if she's not gone already. "May
see you at the wedding of that odd Miss Bryant," ran her last brusque
message. "I begged an invitation; really I like her. But the chances
are against my being here."
All gone, I thought; my last hope, all my friends.
There was a note from Mrs. Baker; I compelled myself to glance at that,
and when I had done so, seized my hat and veil. She would call, it
said, that afternoon!
With no thought but of escape, I left the house; I cared not where I
went, nor what I did. I knew the Judge had sent Aunt Frank to pry into
my troubles; I walked with feverish haste, I would have liked to fly to
avoid her. My hands shook.
Oh, I was wretched!
As I passed the Park, I saw that spring had leaped to summer and the
trees waved fresh, green branches in the air--just such trees as John
and I walked under, less than a year ago, making great plans for a
golden future; and a golden future there must be, but I had then no
hope of it, no joy in life, no happiness even in my beauty. One only
thought spurred me on, to forget past, present and future; to buy
forgetfulness by any caprice; to win diversion by any adventure.
After some time I saw that I was in a side street whose number seemed
familiar; self-searching at last recalled to me that on this street
lived two rival faith healers, about whose lively competition for
clients Cadge had once told us girls a funny story.
Could there have come to my thought some hope of finding rest from
sorrow in the leading of another mind? Impossible to say. I was near
insanity, I think. I chose the nearer practitioner and rang the bell.
I can smile now at memory of the stuffy little parlour into which I was
ushered, but I did not smile then at it, nor at the middle-aged woman
who received me with a set smile of stereotyped placidity. Her name, I
think, was Mallard.
"Have you a conviction of disease, my daughter?" she asked, in a low
voice with a caressing overtone gurgling in its cadences. "You look as
radiant as the morn. You should not think ill."
"I am not ill," I replied; "but the world is harsh."
"The world is the expression of our sense life to the spirit," she
cooed. "We do not live or die, but we pass through the phenomena.
Through the purifying of our thoughts we will gradually become more and
more ethereal until we are translated."
I felt that momentary shiver that folk tales tells us is caused by some
one walking over our graves.
"I'm in no haste to be translated," I said.
"No one need be translated until she is ready--unless she has enemies.
Are you suffering from the errors of others? Has any one felt fear for
you? That would account for what the world calls unhappiness. Is some
one trying to influence your subjective state?"
"I am convinced of it," I said with wasted sarcasm. "But you can do
nothing for me; you can't--can you work on unbelievers?"
"Most assuredly. We are channels through which truth must flow to our
patients. I need not tell you what I myself have done."--Mrs. Mallard
modestly cast down her eyes.--"Mrs. Eddy has healed carous bones and
cancers. I--some of our healers can dissuade the conviction of decayed
teeth. The 'filling,' as the world calls it, is, in such cases, pink
and very durable. If these marvels can be wrought upon the body, why
may not the mind be led toward healing? Confide; confide."
"Heal the world of its hate of me," I cried out. "What you say is all
so vague. Does the mind exist?"
"It Is the only thing that does exist. Without mind man and the
universe would collapse; the winds would weary and the world stand
still. Sin-tossed humanity, expressed in tempest and flood, the divine
mind calms and limits with a word."
I rose hastily to go. Chance alone and weariness of life had led me to
enter the woman's parlor, but there was no forgetfulness in it.
Impatience spurred me to be moving, and I turned to the door, with the
polite fiction that I was leaving town but might soon consult the
healer.
"That makes no difference," she persisted, getting between me and the
door. "We treat many cases, of belief in unhappiness by the absent
method. From 9 to 10 A. M. we go into the Silence for our Eastern
patients. Our ten o'clock is nine o'clock for those living in the
central time belt. At 11 A. M. it is nine for those in Denver or Rocky
Mountain time region. Thus we are in the Silence during the entire
forenoon, but it is always nine for the patient. Will you not arrange
for treatment; you really look very badly?"
"Not today." I pushed past her.
To my astonishment the woman followed me to the outer door, abruptly
changing her tone.
"I know very well why you don't get healed," she said. "You fill your
mind with antagonistic thoughts by reading papers that are fighting
some one on every page. You want to get into some kind of society where
you can pay $15 or $20 a week and get free healing, and you are
disappointed because I won't give you my time and strength for nothing,
so that you can have the money to go somewhere and have a good time.
Oh, I know you society people!"
By degrees her voice had lost its cooing tone and had risen to a
shriek. I was amazed--until I remembered the rival across the street,
who was probably watching me from behind closed blinds.
As I walked away with the woman's angry words ringing after me from the
doorstep, I was divided between amusement and despair; I cannot express
it by any other phrase. And that cynical mingling of feelings was the
nearest approach to contentment that I had known for days.
The feeling died away; reaction came. It was the worst hour of my life.
The thought of suicide--the respite I had always held in reserve
against a day too evil to be borne--pressed upon my mind.
I wandered to a ferry and crossed the East River to some unfamiliar
suburb where saloons were thicker than I had ever before seen them; and
all the way over I looked at the turbid water and knew in my heart that
I should never have the courage to throw my beautiful body into that
foul tide.
From the ferry I presently reached a vast, forbidding cemetery, and as
I went among the crowded graves there came floating out from a little
chapel the sound of prayers intoned for the dead. I almost envied them;
almost wished that I, too, might be laid to rest in the little
churchyard at home.
Then I lay down flat upon the turf in a lonely place, and tried to
think of myself as dead. Never had the pulse beat stronger in my veins
then at that moment. There were little living things all around me,
joying in the warm sun; tiny insects that crawled, unrebuked, over my
gown, so busy, so happy in their way, with their petty affairs all
prospering, that I wondered why I should be so out of tune with the
world. And then a rain of tears gushed from my eyes. I do not think
that any one who should have seen me there could have guessed that the
prone and weeping woman was the most beautiful of created things; I do
not think I have an enemy so bitter that she would not have pitied me.
I tried to think, but I was too tired. I had a vision of myself
returning to the narrow round of farm life, to Ma's reproaches, to
dreary, grinding toil that I might win back dollar by dollar the money
I had squandered--my back bent, my face seamed, my hands marred, like
Aunt Emily's; and I shuddered and wept and grovelled before fate.
Then I saw myself remaining in the city, seeking work and finding
nothing. Teach I could not; every door was barred except--I saw myself
before the footlights, coarsened, swallowing greedily the applause of a
music hall audience, taking a husband from that audience perhaps--a
brute like Bellmer! Better die!
But as the vision passed, a great desire of life grew upon me. It
seemed monstrous, hideous, that I should ever die or be unhappy; the
fighting instinct sent the blood galloping. I sat erect.
Then I noticed that the sun was gone, and the evening cool was rapidly
falling. The little people of the grass whose affairs I had idly
watched I could no longer see--gone to their homes maybe; and I turned
to mine, desolate as it was, hungry and chilled and alone.
And that evening John Burke brought the sunshine.