PEOPLE OF THE PAST.
“Here sits he, shaping wings to fly:
His heart forebodes a mystery;
He names the name eternity.”--_Tennyson._
“What birth is, that also is death; it is the same line drawn in two
directions.”--_Schopenhauer._
One evening at the house of a famous orator Mrs. Doring saw a face with
which she had been familiar since childhood, yet never before had she
seen it outside of the enchanted realm of imagination.
It was a woman’s face, strong, noble, beautiful, and the eyes, the
brown eyes of it, had in them a compassion that embraced the whole
human race.
Cartice looked upon it with an all-compelling fascination, for it was
the face of one of her own people--the very dearest one--the Helen of
her young dreams, to whom she used to tell her hopes and yearnings, and
who always understood, and gave sympathy and cheer.
How often had she pictured that face on paper, trying to make objective
what she saw clearly with her subjective sight, but how impossible it
had ever been to give the eyes the direct, comprehensive, compassionate
glow that distinguished them,--the light of the soul itself, which
went straight to other souls!
She would not ask the name lest it prove to be one below her ideal. She
hardly dared look away lest the precious vision vanish, while her eyes
were turned aside. No; it were better to hold the glad fancy as long as
possible. “Do you know Helen Gardener?” asked a voice at her side.
She turned to the speaker, dazed and scarcely understanding.
“Whom?”
“Helen Gardener, the author,--that lady you were looking at just now.
Like Huxley and some of the more humble of us she believes that the
main thing is to have done with lying.”
“Then she is my Helen,” thought Cartice. “How remarkable, too, that she
has the very same name I gave her.”
“Come, Mrs. Doring,” said her friend, “I want to have you meet her. I
fancy you two will be pleased with each other.”
When Cartice found herself talking with the incarnation of one of her
ideal people of long ago, she had a flash of knowledge of the oneness,
inseparableness and unchangeableness of all things past, present and
future.
Did her new-found, old-time friend recognize her? It would seem so, for
she was strongly attracted to Cartice from the first moment.
The question under discussion in the little group of whom she was one,
was whether art, especially the art of fiction, should exist for art’s
sake only--that is to give pleasure--or should it also aim to instruct.
“I believe,” said Helen Gardener, “and have lived up to my belief, that
fiction which merely entertains, and carefully steers clear of the deep
and often dark problems that face all thoughtful minds is pernicious
in its effect. The literature of the optimist is the literature of
shallowness and selfishness, a bid for surface appreciation, an appeal
to a light and superficial taste. Life is tragic. If it be represented
in fiction, let the picture be true to nature. The novel should be a
tonic, not an opiate. What think you, Mrs. Doring?”
“Like Goethe and Schiller I think art ‘no luxury of leisure, no mere
amusement to charm the idle nor relax the care-worn; but a mighty
influence, serious in its aims, although pleasurable in its means.’ The
advocates of art for art’s sake, say that its object is the creation
of the beautiful. What is the beautiful? Is it that which pleases the
eye only, or has it power to thrill the soul? The great novels have all
carried great messages. They have shaken the hearts of men and aroused
them to new knowledge; they have broken the bonds of prejudice, and set
the bondsmen free. They have effected a movement of the thought-world
in the direction of ‘that far-off, divine event toward which the whole
creation moves.’ They have spoken the truth as their authors beheld it.”
Helen Gardener’s brown eyes glowed and she smiled affectionately,
saying:
“You and I belong to the same ethical family, Mrs. Doring.”
* * * * *
That night as she lay down to sleep, Cartice half persuaded herself
that she was again a child, day-dreaming under the elm tree, the world
unknown and still idealized, and the years that lay between that time
and the present obliterated.
“Do I wish it were so?” she asked herself.
“No. I am glad so much of the journey has been accomplished. The future
is always better than the past. It has in it that which we are to
become, for life is endless becoming.”
Cartice and the new-found Helen became warm friends; but not till their
friendship had stood the test of time did Cartice tell her how the
creative power we call imagination had found her years before.
Quite as unexpectedly did Mrs. Doring one day meet the stranger to whom
she had confided her ambitions and dreams under the elm tree long ago.
She recognized him instantly, though of course he did not know her.
The great world knew him well. The bauble fame, and the jewel of
success were his.
It was he who had sung:
“I’d rather fail in Bohemia, than win in another land.
* * * * *
Its honors not garnered by thrift or trade,
But for beauty and truth men’s souls have made.”
When she made herself known to him, his first question was, “Have you
found your own people?”
“A few,” she answered, “a faithful few; but the search goes on forever.”
In a little while he went away--went into the silence.
Still another picture of the past came and blended with the present.
In the parlors of a friend one evening, Mrs. Doring met a number of
the most eminent women from all parts of the country, who work for
the political liberty of their sex. There had been a convention in
Washington, and many of the delegates were “doing” New York before
returning home.
A lady from what then was a territory, but is now a state, charmingly
told some of her experiences in laboring with members of her
legislature. She mentioned name after name, relating various incidents,
some humorous, and some exciting compassion on account of their
revelation of the depths of ignorance in certain legislative minds.
“After several encounters with darkened minds of the class I have just
mentioned,” said the speaker, “it was a pleasure to have a chat with
Representative Kendall. We knew well where he stood, for throughout
his career, as editor and lawmaker, he has distinguished himself as
the staunch friend of every movement that promised to help women win a
greater freedom and therefore gain a greater usefulness.
“Once I asked him how it was that he who had appreciated women
personally so little as never to have married one, was yet so loyal a
supporter of them in the aggregate that he cheerfully put his shoulder
to the wheel of every cart which carried their burdens.
“‘Now that,’ said he, with a boyish laugh and sunny smile, ‘has its
root in a bit of sentiment; but I don’t deny that it has grown into a
principle. The only woman I found indispensable to me found me very
dispensable to her. Through that experience I learned that love,
if it be genuine, can rise higher than possession. She was of your
emancipated; that is, she made a place for herself in the world, and
leaned on no one. Her life showed me that woman could grow to heroic
mental stature, if she would think, work and act for herself. The one
of whom I speak requested me to do what I could all my life to make it
easier for women to get out of their dependent condition. I have done
so and have found pleasure in it. She is in the world somewhere, still,
and I feel that everything I do for women helps her. That’s my story.
Take it and use it, if you wish, as an example of how the monster man
can be humanized and regenerated by a woman who neither loved him nor
married him.’
“‘Whatever good I may have done, whatever I have achieved in any
praiseworthy direction, I owe to that woman. But for her wholesome
encouragement, if living at all, I should be still a clerk at some more
prosperous man’s desk, withered in spirit and wasted in body, and with
no brains at all. It used to be quite the correct thing, in stories,
for good women to marry rakish fellows, and ‘make men of them,’ as the
phrase had it. I am now convinced they achieve that result far quicker,
when they don’t marry them, whether rakish or otherwise, but make them
stand on their own feet entirely.’”
Mrs. Doring listened to this story, feeling very much as might a ghost
who comes wandering back to its old haunts and hears some one talking
of its life when on earth, for this Kendall was her old lover whom
she loved not and she was the woman of whom he spoke. Turning to the
writing desk of her hostess, she wrote:
“Cartice Hill Doring sends regards to the Honorable Charles Kendall.
It is with grateful pleasure she learns that he has been faithful to
the promise made to her long ago, to do what he could to make life
broader and freer for womankind.”
The response was prompt and full. He told the story of his life from
the day of their parting to the day of writing. Then came these
paragraphs:
“I am more than glad to have found you again. Not that I ever really
lost you, for you have an eternal abiding-place in my mind and heart.
Though I have forgotten much and wish I could forget still more of
the rubbish of memory, neither you nor aught pertaining to you can
be forgotten. You are not forgettable. But I am glad to be able to
talk with you once more, although it be only on paper and across a
continent. For me the end of the drama is near. I am in the last act,
which has but few scenes. Life and death! what are they? We know as
much of one as of the other, for we understand neither. We drop the
question of whence because the imminent whither faces us and must be
met, and dark enough it looms before us as we confront it at short
range. Who can answer this cry of perplexed humanity?
“I turn to you as I did in the past, and bade you decide whether I
should go or stay. Now I have no choice but to go; yet tell me, shall I
go with peace and trust into light, or must I lie down to be wrapped
in darkness and silence forever? It is a time when my own strength is
insufficient, and I reach out for the clasp of an assuring hand.
“Is it strange that I turn to you for the help I need on this journey,
which, though lonesome, is brief? It seems a natural thing to do. In
all the years since I saw you, and have known nothing of you, when
the way was uncertain, I always turned to you for guidance. I said to
myself: ‘Would Cartice Hill wish me to do this?’ And I did that which
I thought you would sanction. So you see you have been with me all the
time. We have never been separated.
“To me you are always young--young and full of courage and hope. I
see you as I saw you last, a precious picture in my memory. The years
that have passed since then are blown like a breath away. I am sitting
beside you in the park again. I can almost touch your blue dress, and
I hear the scratching of your parasol as you wrote with its tip on the
ground.
“The disease that was incipient in me in youth has been bravely baffled
by this climate. I sometimes think it is the insidious agent that will
ultimately destroy the human race. The end must come, however, even
here, and I see that it is coming.
“So tell me what life has taught you about death, if anything. No
matter how hard and grim and fearsome the knowledge may be, I want to
know it. Strange that although we devote our lives to learning, and
many become vain of their acquirements, of this, the most important of
all subjects, nobody knows anything, and nobody cares to learn till
about to open the dread door.”
This appeal Cartice answered by telling the story of her communion with
friends called dead, and she told this with a directness and simplicity
that went straight to the mark. To her it was clear enough that, if a
man die, he shall live again,--and shall grow, his growth depending
upon his aspirations. Genius itself has been described as a “faculty
for growth.” Being a citizen of the universe, man is destined to know
the universe as his native village. The form only changes. Death is not.
To this Kendall wrote:
“You have destroyed the last enemy for me. ‘Only the form changes.’
Need we dread that? We may even be said to be used to it. We haven’t
the same bodies we began life with. They have changed in every
particular, again and again.
“How extraordinary have been your privileges of learning those things
to which most of us have been so blind. Why not write the story out
more fully and publish it? Since it has helped me, might it not help
others? But don’t put it into a newspaper. There it would take no
higher rank than the traditional, blood-curdling ghost-story. Make a
book of it. That will place it on its own feet, to stand or fall by its
merits.
“Yes, tell your experiences with those who dwell in what we call
another world; in fact, however, another condition.
“I have had an instinctive, though not unwavering belief that this life
was not the end of us--perhaps not the beginning; but I had my hours of
gloomy doubt. The old twaddle of an eternity of happiness made up of
harps and golden streets did not appeal to either my intelligence or
taste. Perhaps, it was a shade less attractive than annihilation.
“Learning to grow and to do, that is what makes an immortality worth
having.
“I have lived on good terms with my conscience, which is of an
old-fashioned cut, not from fear of hell or hope of heaven, but because
I am that sort of man. I could not do otherwise. Yet I wish I might
have learned what you tell me, earlier. I think it would have made the
ills of life here of less moment and might have enhanced its joys and
beauties.
“Who, understanding the philosophy of continued life as it has been
revealed to you, could fail to try and acquire some of the capital,
thieves cannot steal, with which to begin the larger life that opens
to us, when we pass the gates of death? It is helping me to make my
remaining time of more value.
“You have influenced me as no other person has done ever since I knew
you. Now you light the road out of the world for me. I begin to see
that there are no accidents.
“Let who will write the shallow tales that reach no farther than the
wedding-day. Write you the wonderful story of the love of God, as ’twas
told you by those who have tasted death and found it not bitter--tell
how this love encompasses and pervades everything in the universe,
conserving all and destroying nothing. Tell of the happiness destined
for the soul of man, which consists in endless unfolding. Tell all this
as simply and directly as you have told it to me, and you will inspire
the doubting and cheer the despairing.”
To which Cartice replied: “In an old book it is written, ‘Though one
returned from the dead, they would not believe.’”
Kendall wrote: “In the same book it is written, ‘Let your light shine.’”
That night she sat down to write the first chapter of the book, but
instead wrote this:
HIS MESSAGE.
He came, my dead love, at the close of the day,
Though the earth had long covered his garments of clay.
His face glowed with light and with love as he smil’d
And spoke in the voice that my heart had beguil’d--
The beautiful voice that my heart had beguil’d.
“You have wondered, my darling, what soul was the one
To first greet me with love when my dying was done--
When I woke from the slumber that stretches between
The flesh-and-blood world and the kingdom unseen--
The world that you see and the kingdom unseen.
“Know then that the spirit, earth’s veil cast away,
Sees only the true in that radiant day.
He who first o’er my spirit, newborn, bent and smiled,
Was the foe who had gone from me unreconciled--
My foe who had gone from me unreconciled.”
So spake my dead love and then vanished away,
Like the mist of the valley when riseth the day.
But I know, since that moment, that hate is a dream
From which the soul wakes when it crosses Death’s stream--
Awakes to love only, across that dark stream.
I know, too, that Death cannot change, cannot kill
E’en the person. My lover, though dead, loves me still;
For he came, as of old, and upon me he smil’d,
And spoke in the voice that my heart had beguil’d--
The beautiful voice that my heart had beguil’d.
The book was begun. The writing of it was not an easy task in spite of
the writer’s warm interest in her theme. Little snatches of time, after
the daily grind at her editorial desk was over, were all she could
devote to it. Often she was too tired to write a line until she had
rested hours. Then, perhaps, to make up for such indulgence, she wrote
far into the night--wrote as though bayonets were pressing her--wrote
with no thought of publisher or public in mind. The truth, to write
the truth, as it was revealed to her, this was her inspiration, her
strength, her reward.