To-day in the afternoon I briskly manicured my fingernails, sitting
by my gold-and-blue window, and I mused upon Lot’s Wife.
So many persons and incidents and events and adventures and episodes
there are to muse upon, in this mixed world, dating from when it
began till now. There’s something to charm any mood. Let me leave the
doors of my mind open and anything at all may float in like an errant
butterfly on a summer’s day.
It is an entertaining world, by and large: a limitless vaudeville.
Lot’s Wife is to me a fantasy from the antique, a bit of archaic
frivol to beguile me.
When first I heard of her, from an acrid aunt of caustic humor who
told me the tale tersely in explanation of a biblical print, I was
seven years old. From that day to this my meditative thoughts have
from time to time flitted backward to dwell interestedly upon Lot’s
Wife. Later when I went to an Episcopal Sunday-school I was pleased
to find this adjuration in according-to-St.-Luke: ‘Remember Lot’s
Wife.’ There seemed no special meaning attached to it. It seemed like
Remember Lot’s Wife in any way you like--as it might be with a card
on her birthday, a useless gift at Christmas, in your prayers, or in
retributive patriotism like Remember the Alamo, Remember the Maine.
But I remember her because I like her.
There’s no name given for Lot’s Wife in the brief biblical narrative,
so I long ago named her Bella as expressive of the temperament and
character that have grown around her image in my thoughts. Poor
Bella, I ruminated as I tinted and polished my nails. Her life in
Sodom was not entirely satisfying to her. Sodom was a town completely
given over to pleasure of the physical and outward sorts. The
dwellers lived in and for their physical senses alone. And Bella had
it in her to care for the foods of the spirit. Not that she longed
for them--she was not so conscious of herself--but she had it in her
to care for them had they been given her. Still, Sodom and its ways
were the best she knew and she had known them all her life. The roots
of her temperament had shot down into the Sodomesque substrata. She
fondly loved the place.
Sodom was a prototype for Babylon or Pompeii, worshiping the hotness
of the sun in moralless plaisance, with fêtes and drinkings of wine
from gold and silver cups, and bathings in warm scented marble-lined
pools, and anointings with oils of olive and palm, and dwellings
among flowers of thin bright petals and birds of vivid plumage and
fountains of crystal and rainbow, and caterings to the sparkle and
froth of human emotions, and browsings amid loves and lights o’ love.
Can Bella be wondered at for growing fond of it all, having known
nothing substantialer? And can she rightly be blamed for hating the
thought of leaving it for dry sage-brush wilds in the mountains? She
did hate and dread that thought with all her soul from the moment
it was made known to her that Sodom for its sins was booked for
destruction. She had perhaps a fortnight in which to dread it, and a
fortnight if given over to dread is long enough to damage stronger
spirits than hers.
Bella was slender and svelte, with long straight soft beautiful
silken pale red hair and white-lidded eyes of grayish green. She
was thirty-eight--a young thirty-eight. There’s an old thirty-eight
which applies to greedy school-teachers, gangrenous woman
government-clerks, fading hard-hearted stenographers, over-righteous
woman doctors; to all whose virtue is ever indecently on guard. But
there’s a glory-tinted sun-kissed young thirty-eight which applies
to sensitive high-strung generously-emotional women like Bella Lot.
She had smooth hands with supple tapering fingers, an irregular
expressive-lipped mouth like a pimpernel-bloom, firm slim feet
and the quivering suggestive white knees of a wood-nymph. From any
angle-of-view can she be blamed for hating to take that equipment
away from the city-de-luxe which was its so proper setting and hiding
it in the sage-brush?
Furthermore Bella had a lover in Sodom. It is beyond a sane effort
of the imagination that she could have loved that unpleasing old man
Lot. The best and worst that can be said of him is that he was a fit
addition to the company of the old Patriarchs who were for the most
part an exceeding craven crew. The martyrs, the sages and especially
the prophets had their splendors. But the lean old patriarchs--The
sporting blood of all of them--in the sense of merest simplest
courage--from Adam down, would hardly aggregate one drop. There are
any number of reasons--as many as Bella had charms--to account for
Lot’s having married her. But what she could have seen in him to make
her wish or even willing to be married to him is a deep mystery to
me. It may have been his family. I believe Bella lacked family: she
was just a person. And was he not nephew to Abraham? But even being
niece-in-law to Abraham himself seems insufficient compensation for
being Lot’s Wife.
The Lots had two young daughters, one fifteen and one seventeen, it
might be. I do not know their names--call them Ethel and Agnes. But
they were of a recalcitrant temper and absorbed in their own racy
pastimes among the younger youth of Sodom and they had no need of
their mother. Besides, they ‘took after’ their father. So Bella was
fain to turn outward in search of nurturing matter whereon to feed
her humanness. Had it been expected of her to play fair with the
patriarch she would have played fair. But it was not expected of her
by anyone in Sodom--far from it, and least of all by the patriarch.
She was eight-and-thirty, and Lot--_he_ was doubtless eight or nine
hundred years old, after the surprising long-lived fashion of the
period.
So Bella found a lover ready and awaiting her. She would have found
a lover in the circumstances even without caring to. But she quite
cared to, I think. Everything points that way, and when one remembers
that good old man her husband one can not censure her but only pity
her. Be it as it may she had one--one as real as anything could be in
that town of sparkling froth.
Of the lover’s identity--little is known, as the historians say. My
fancy as I filed my fingernails failed me on the point. Suffice it
to state that ever and anon as time passed in Sodom the gray-green
eyes of Bella were gazed into with fondness, affection, adoration
and desire: the white eyelids of Bella had showers of light kisses
bestowed on them, soft-falling as rose-petals shaken loose in summer
winds: the tapering white hands of Bella were caressed and caressing
with the oddly intense tenderness of physical love: the pale red hair
of Bella was ruffled and fluffed and disarrayed by the fingers of
love: the red-pimpernel mouth of Bella was touched, bruised, clung
to by the lips of love: the svelte whiteness and nymph-knees of
Bella glowed as she broached love’s arms:--and all went much merrier
than marriage bells. In short, Bella paid herself with usury for the
deadliness of being Lot’s Wife.
And there we have the crux of Bella’s dread of leaving Sodom and its
tempered sweetness for the arid sage-brush hills and the respectively
cold and hectic companionship of the good old patriarch and the
recalcitrant daughters.
It can not be claimed for Bella that any white poetic fires gleamed
across her soul, that any limning beauty shone palely from within
her. The air of Sodom was not conducive to suchlike matters and Bella
was no finer than her breeding and generation. But she was gentle and
wistful and kind of heart. She was lovely to look at and ingenuously
lovable in her clinging affection and disarming naturalness. She was
all one could want to imagine in the word charming.
Came the night set for destruction and the Lot family fled
according to schedule. They fled away in the early damps of an
autumn evening through the outer city gates and along a rough road
faintly lit by a dying moon. They had three separate reasons for
fleeing. Lot fled because he was a patriarch and was given to doing
craven Old-Testamentish things of that sort: Bella fled because
she was Lot’s Wife and obliged to act out the rôle: and Ethel and
Agnes fled because they had true patriarchal blood in their veins
and had therefore no marked inclination to remain in Sodom to be
annihilated--‘safety first’ was one of their watchwords. They fled in
the van. Lot came after them, being less swift of foot. Bella lagged
behind. She didn’t want to go. Every way she looked at it she didn’t
want to go. She hated that flight for a thousand reasons.
The ghastly moon shed a terror on her with its dim rays. The ground
was hard and rutted with frosty mud and bruised her slender feet
through her white buckskin sandals.
She wore a loose _ninon_ gown of white silk and linen with a
gold girdle around her narrow loins and a gold clasp at the left
shoulder. Binding her long hair, so palely red in the moon, was a
white-and-gold fillet. In one hand she carried a gold-and-enamel
link bracelet, a gift but that afternoon from the lover. Suddenly
she stopped and cried to herself, ‘I’m too lovely for this fate--I’m
too lovely and beloved--the cruelty of God--: I’ll not go on!’ She
thought of the gleams and colorings of Sodom. She quickly reckoned
the cost and decided to pay it. She was a rare good sport, and a
quaint. She looked back at the doomed city blazing in brimstone--‘But
his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of
salt.’--
As I put away my chamois-skin buffer and glass paste-jar through my
mind floated the pensive burden of a by-gone French song--
‘_Oh, the poor, oh, the poor, oh, the poor--dear--girl_’--
She must have made a beautiful statue, all in glistening salt.
I wish I had a glistening little salty replica of it to set on my
desk: a so unusual, a so dainty conceit, Lot’s Wife!
_My echoing footsteps_