One evening after Judge Elkhorn’s arrival in the family when many guests
were present, he opened up his warfare with Robert against credulity.
Robert with a glance laid the discussion in Ethel’s hands, and then she
said: “But if you should succeed in annihilating the reverence which
people have for their different forms of religion, and should get them
to believe they have nothing to do but eat, drink and die and decay,
would they not so eat, drink and be merry as to decay before they died,
and yet live long enough to multiply what you call ‘dangerous classes’?”
“O!” said the judge, “I would enforce temperance, because I believe
people get more happiness out of life by being decent.”
“But suppose others think they get more happiness by being indecent,
what then? What more has your belief to do with their affairs than the
belief of religious people has to do with your affairs?”
“Well, of course, as to that,” said the judge, with honest hesitation,
“freedom given to the ignorant and passionate would annihilate society,
and reduce countries to conditions of carnage. The problem is difficult,
because ignorance is so brutish that brute force has to be used to
repress it.”
“Don’t repress it, enlighten it,” said one Paul Palmer, swiftly.
But Elkhorn, lifting his voice a little, swung on: “And so it comes
about that we have to control brutishness by brute force, or we have to
make a compromise with it, by regulating it through license laws so as
to repress its encroachments on law-abiding people.”
“Where do you get your law-abiding people?” said Palmer; for Elkhorn
spoke with the high air of one who has uttered that “last word” which so
many are struggling to put forth in these last days; and had turned a
crushing gaze on flippant Paul Palmer.
“What!” said Ethel, “license evil so as to gain freedom from it? A
liberty league man must know that liberty granted to all women and men
is based on such freedom for each, that no one is accountable to any
other, and therefore no one is empowered to either forbid or grant any
act to anyone. Therefore, liberty is inherent only in—”
“Oh, you’re getting on fast,” the judge interrupted. “On such grounds as
that we should have anarchy. Besides, leave out all religion when you
talk to me.”
“——inherent only in the real individual. Therefore we want to secure
that simple form of education to all, which will create a citizenship of
real individuals,” said Ethel, with an amiable but marked imitation of
Elkhorn’s manner of riding on serenely to the end of his subject;—a bit
of _esprit_ which amiably amused him and them all, without distracting
attention from the argument. And she continued:
“Judge Elkhorn, if you believe in granting license, you believe in
stultifying liberty. For liberty to all leaves no man to grant or forbid
anything to anyone. License is the antagonist of liberty. For liberty is
the use of law, and license is the abuse of law.
“Briefly then, in this country, where everything consistent with the
right of others is already constitutionally conceded to each one, the
attempt to give anything more to anyone, is an encroachment on liberty.
For it is plain that if among ten people everything is granted to each
one which is consistent with the liberty of the other nine, then to
grant more to five of the ten is to encroach on the other five, and at
once converts the favored five into masters, and fixes the status of the
other five as slaves. This has been done. The result is, liberty has
been dethroned, and licentiousness is set up in her place.”
“But,” said Elkhorn, “if it were agreed to all around, for the sake of
peace?”
“It would be an agreement to dethrone liberty, and the compactors would
be traitors and self-made slaves; and war, not peace, would be the
result. But it has never been agreed to all around. I never agreed to
it. It was done by trickery and the feebleness of the enslaved, with the
result that for the lack of courage to stand by the law of liberty, we
have all become the slaves of license, and not peace, but war prevails
concerning every question which is before the country, yes, before the
world,—Europe, Asia, Africa, America and the islands of the sea.”
“Miss Daksha,” said Palmer, “according to your opinion, how did all this
muss creep in?”
“In this era it practically was never out,” said Ethel. “Liberty, as
formulated in the preamble of our Constitution, has failed of
practicalization, because people were not, and are not, up to the level,
requisite to even mentally grasp the idea. It is God-like, and far
beyond the popular ideal of what God is like. And what makes matters
worse, it is beyond what the average pulpit now claims God is like. But
shall we feel badly about all this? No; let us rather say, that as yet
we have not had time, conveniences nor methods adequate to the evolution
of the ideal commonwealth of the United States, into which individual
intelligence will be presently annealed.”
The power of her thought reached every mind there, poorly as these words
convey it on paper. But to invite fuller explanations, Mrs. Daksha said:
“Ethel, what precisely do you mean by commonwealth? Anything in the
ordinary communistic line, or on the Bellamy idea?”
“Please take from my words the simplest dictionary sense of them, quite
unrelated to any elaborated theory,” said Ethel, with that comfortable
assurance which comes to each of us, that anyone ought to know what _we_
are talking about, however misapprehended other theorists have chosen to
make themselves to be, by their play upon words.
“According to my idea,” said Ethel, “commonwealth consists in the common
services which each can perform to others, in releasing and distributing
those natural commodities which earth, water, air and the spiritual
substance-of-the-universe put potentially into the possession of each
individual.”
“Ye Goths!” ejaculated Judge Elkhorn. “You are going into things deep
and high.”
“Things deep and high have gone into the question. That’s what makes an
intelligent handling of it so difficult on the part of the
gold-worshiping, materialistic class of irreligious-religionists who are
trying to annihilate our present _real_ constitutional Theodicy, a
_natural_ Theodicy in which ‘the voice of the people’ (might it be
really but heard) is the voice of God, the Holy Spirit; that spirit
which Churchianity declares before our judiciary ‘has not relations to
nations’; and which that set of people apparently intend shall not have,
if that _vox populi_, which is ‘the voice of God,’ can be silenced,”
said Daniel Daksha.
“It must be gone into deep, broad and high, if we are going to handle it
on the square,” said Palmer, who was a most intelligent freemason.
“In politely giving the masses possession of the universe,” said Elkhorn
satirically, “how would you regulate people’s way of taking possession
and working and sharing?”
“If once we rightly got hold of the principle at stake, that matter
would regulate itself. I accept the natural distinctions which now
actually exist, and which really will eventually control everything, in
spite of all our artificial attempts to the contrary.”
“For instance,” said Elkhorn.
“Will you admit that as we go on now, it takes much of our time to make
and enforce laws for building up and hedging in artificial distinctions?
And the rest of it to crush out those real distinctions that inhere in
the nature of things?”
“For instance,” said Elkhorn again.
“I see Mr. Palmer has made a note of my definition of commonwealth,”
said Ethel. “So instead of giving instances of what I mean by artificial
distinctions, I will repeat my definition of commonwealth, and go on.
Commonwealth consists of the common-sense service which each can perform
to the other, by releasing and distributing those natural commodities,
which earth, air, water and the spiritual substance of the universe put
potentially into the possession of each individual. This commonwealth,
then, is divisible into three classes of valuables; namely, personal
common-sense services; secondly, the natural ‘commodities’ of earth,
water and air, and the spiritual substance-of-the-universe, and for the
third class of values—‘_credits_.’
“Now my happy philosophy of the matter points to the fact, that one’s
natural (not his artificial) desires are in the line of his ability,
duty and destiny. So that if each man and woman is left free to follow
intelligently his and her desires, each will attain the true development
and best use of self, for self and others. Thus, a real civil service
will come about, not by expending millions of dollars and days in
arbitrarily dictating ways and measures by which individuals shall
civilly be serviceable, but by leaving each individual intelligently and
blithely free to use self-inherent possessions in a way which will
occasion a self-adjusting supply of everything to the demands of
everybody. This will naturally release and distribute first, personal
services; second, the commodities which fill earth, air, water and the
spiritual substance-of-the-universe, and will bring into play the third
element in the class of values, recognized in the system of social
economics; namely, credits.”
“But what will be your medium,” said Elkhorn dubiously, “of exchange?”
“Time,” said Ethel simply. “For of course to meet the orderly demands of
each and all, with an orderly supply, will take a great deal of time.
But then we each have _all the time there is_; and this, at the start,
equalizes the distribution _of that_ medium of exchange. And our bank
can never fail us, for when our drafts on it are _very_ large, we will
still have reserves of it in eternity. So time is the medium of exchange
for the common-sense services which will release and keep in
distributive-circulation the commonwealth-commodities of which earth,
water, air and the spiritual-substance-of-the-universe make each of us
possessed. (Silence invited her to go on.) Time is a commodity, for as
we all know, ‘commodities are a class of valuables organic and
inorganic, which may be fitted by human effort to satisfy human
desires.’
“Franklin used to say ‘Time is money,’ but the point I make is, that
time is _value per se_; so intrinsic in quality, so invariable in
quantitative supply, that it is the natural medium of exchange for all
the valuables precious to a morally sustained government of people, by
and for people. But, though time is value, it is difficult to place an
exact valuation on time without asking, Whose time? And that would seem
like asking, Whose rain, whose air, and whose sunshine? Yet it is
impossible to place an exact valuation on time without first getting an
answer to the question, _Whose_ time, whose services? For the value of a
person’s services depends on the use which the servitor has theretofore
made of his or her time. So here comes in the matter of personal
‘credits.’ So, in coming toward your question, Judge Elkhorn, concerning
distinctions as to the way of ‘working and sharing,’ we might take it as
an axiom in the morals of social economics, that the value of personal
services, broadly considered, is measurable by the _use_ which the
servitor has heretofore made of his or her time. And as time is the
medium of exchange, a person who has not theretofore made skilled use of
his time, might wish to contribute more of it to help out the works of a
person who has made great use of his time. This would only include that
one day from many people would have to be given to execute the plans
which another person might have potentially worked out in the hours of a
vision-filled night, as these plans thus led the way into that which
would advance the interests of all concerned. All this, American
economists of two hundred years ago must have known; judging by the zeal
with which, in the midst of their straightened circumstances, they held
themselves to the business of developing the capacity of children (the
born citizens of their ideal on-coming Republic). These true
human-economists bound themselves to cultivate in humanity a capacity to
utilize _time_. For the development in each little citizen of the
capacity to _well-use-time_, enabled each such well-developed person to
hold the other in well-poised personal liberty; while each chose for
self such an order (or such orders) of personal service as makes each
one to be of most value to himself and others.”
“Oh, oh, oh!” ejaculated the judge. “Who are the fellows who really did
this? Name them, do, Miss Daksha.”
Ethel halted at this onslaught from the man who claimed to believe of
everybody and everything only what his external senses revealed to him
concerning them. Everybody laughed good-naturedly; and Ethel laughed
with them at herself. For she knew there was a line between things,
perceivable only to the inner senses and those perceptible to the outer
senses. But she, like her father Daniel, was a dreamer who worked; and
therefore took care to protect herself from seeming like a dreamer who
_lied_, as she saw Elkhorn thought and meant to hint to her that she
was. She felt what she said was truth, as to the interior aspirational
thoughts which were held by many women and men, who, like Hawthorne,
Emerson and others of earlier date, had philosophized, romanced and
poetized over common-sense facts, and had thus enthroned them; till they
now, at least, were lodged in the memories of men like Elkhorn, as
entertaining fictions.
Luckily for Ethel she had a merry soul, as well as a philosophically
religious one. And, too, she had the faculty of standing off at a
distance from herself in a way that enabled her to see herself as others
saw her. She was not self-conceited, though to others she seemed so. If
she had been, her gift of seeing herself as others often saw her (so
frequently was she misunderstood), would have many times a day taken
down her self-conceit.
She saw the confusion in Elkhorn’s mind concerning her. She knew he was
a stoical man, and had no power of imaging the unseen. He was like the
men of that class which long ago sprung up and outlawed the poets, and
repressed everything of that sort (music included, I believe); because
these things, according to these realists (?) led to lies, and were
lies. All this was in Ethel’s mind as she caught Daniel’s eye, and they
both laughed out cheerily. For Daniel had often been called a —— (that
name you know) and, too, he had been quite outlawed long ago by deacons,
who called him a “rationalist.” And then when he patiently inquired if
they would rather he should become “irrational,” he was churched for it.
So when Ethel and Daniel had rung forth that swift chime of laughter, it
had rung up memories of these things to the ears of all who heard it.
Her pleasantness and just estimate of others seemed to have cleared the
atmosphere. And Judge Elkhorn said cordially, but a little quizzically,
“Well, we’ll take all that on the strength of our faith in you, Miss
Daksha. But go on, and take your time.”
“Yes, take your time,” said Robert, accenting significantly. “This is
not half bad that you are saying, Ethel, but it is quite a fairy tale to
everybody who is listening to you, you know.”
“On, on with the fairy story,” said Paul Palmer.
“I am talking to you about the realness of these men’s ideals; men like
William Ellery Channing, Warren, Emerson, Thoreau and men of earlier and
later date than either of these; men some of them who had the serious
scholasticism which was held in the college of ‘Mary and William,’ of
Baltimore. And I receive from them proofs that they had hold of the fact
that the _spiritual essence_ of the social economics of a self-governed
people, was their goal; and that their idea of real social economics
included a full,—a supernal evolution of national moral-power.
“These men and women of early and later date steadily put forth
teachings which impressed the fact that, to the faithfulness of the
individual conscience, the liberties of the race were committed. And so
I legitimately conclude that national moral-power must now be evolved by
persons who, with leisurely intelligence, apply themselves to dealing
with the commodities of earth, air, sea and _the spiritual substance of
the universe_ as they engage themselves in graciously exchanging mutual
services. America has such men and women, and needs many.
“There is time; there are personal services. What hinders us that we are
not baptized in the water of life, flowing out from the throne of
supernal power? A social waste hinders us, and that waste results from a
fallacy which seeks to sustain the relation of supply and demand, on the
basis of the legal tender of a money token; as if to say: “I know that
man is hungry, the money in his hand shows it.”
“But, Miss Daksha, we can’t keep brutes in order with these elusive,
transcendental theories,” said Elkhorn.
“Yes,” said Palmer, “the question is, How can we keep brutes in order
without throwing license as a ‘sop to Cerberus’?”
“To keep brutes in order is not this nation’s problem, as woman, the
mother of man, understands it,” she answered swiftly. “We are not
dealing with a menagerie. We are dealing with a nation of immortals
whose native air is liberty. And as to raising the question as to
whether all people shall be allowed to breathe their native air of
liberty, that would be but insolence on my part, if I should name it.
These, ‘_the people_,’ are endowed with certain inalienable rights,
among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. How, then,
can any two or three people talk of keeping the rest in bounds?”
“But, Mr. Palmer, the simile is fortunate which compares license to a
sop thrown to Cerberus, that hundred-brained-monster. For you remember
in the Greek story, that sop was flung _up_ to Cerberus, by those who
dwelt _down_ in Pluto’s regions, and who wished to keep Cerberus down
there to guard the mouth of Pluto’s regions, and who wished to keep him
content with being chained there.”
“Do you see? It is in exact correspondence with the doings of modern
Pluto-crats who toss the sop of license up to the enchained masses, to
keep them content with conditions which are hell-on-earth to us all.”
Such angelic tones filled her voice, such angelic pity illumined her
paling countenance, as she said these hard-sounding words, that that
hell-on-earth appeared at once to be what it is, a hideous intrusion on
a fair realm. And two men sprang to their feet, as if to smite the thing
back to the under world, and deliver Cerberus from his chains.
Ethel stood beside them, one with them in the purpose; saying, swiftly,
with the flame of a white-light-spreading through the very pores of her
fine face:
“Hold to your present thought! And take home now the part of the story
popularly forgotten: Pluto promised Cerberus, as a gift to whomsoever
could release and bring him to the upper air _without the use of
weapons_.
“The promise holds good today. But—but among the Greeks there was a
man—Hercules. He did it.
“There are such men among Americans. Hercules did it. How? Certainly not
by licensing Cerberus to remain chained down in Pluto’s regions. What
Hercules did do, was this: he brought Cerberus a morsel fresh from the
feast of the ‘gods of Olympus’; and Cerberus, at the taste, aflame for
more, burst his chains, and willingly he went away with Hercules to the
upper air, where such feasts awaited him.
“Men of America, the trouble with our nation is, there is a dearth of
deities at our Capitol! There is still a lack of Herculean power! We
want more there at the moral-feasts of our Olympus, the flavor of which
would be new to our desiring, fighting, frenzied Cerberi! It is not that
our ‘masses’ are so greatly degraded. It is that our superiors are so
little superior; are, in fact, so much at one quality with the chained
Cerberi, that, for the gift of Cerberus, no man has yet been able to
bring him to the upper air. Worse than that, faith is nearly gone, that
there _is_ any upper air, or that there are at our Olympus any
Capitolian gods.”
“No. The smoke of hades and the ‘sop’ flung up by Pluto are there; and
the snapping of the jaws of the Cerberi-congress, as they jump this way
and that to catch ‘the sop.’ These things are there,” said Elkhorn.
“Plus—some men who are to be honored,” said Paul Palmer. “Still, that is
only partly the fashion of that place,” continued he; “the smoke of the
torment still ascends. But the question there honestly today is, What is
to be done about it? There is an upper air somewhere, and there are men
in the Congress of the United States, and in the parliament of Britain,
and in the legislative bodies among the peoples of every country in the
world, who are seeking for these heights.” He halted, then looking out
from under his deep brows, in intensity of upflaming hope, he said with
ferocious directness:
“Ethel Daksha, I ask you, what _can_ be kept restrainingly before the
masses, if (according to your idea of liberty) we take away from them
fear of punishment? If no man or woman is amenable to any other, will it
not be grab, tear and carnage, by the hundred-headed-monster?”
“What is it now?” said Ethel, “when everyone is presuming to frighten
and to dictate to everyone else? But I will ask a better question than
that. I will ask if _you_ are kept up to duty by fear of punishment? If
not, by what?”
It was long before he spoke, and no one thought of breaking the silence,
for it was a solemn one.
“Whatever rectitude there is in me,” he said, “comes from an inherent
repugnance to making chains for myself by forming habits that would fit
me to dwell in Pluto’s region. Yes, it is a repugnance to the smoke,
stench and torment of the Pluto-cratical domain, which was graphically
and practically explained to me in earliest childhood, by my most
vigorous mother. It is this deep-seated repugnance to moral smoke,
stench and torment, which keeps me up to my idea of duty. And then, Miss
Ethel, I certainly am not better than other men, but I surmise I was
vastly better taught than some men are, from babyhood, and before birth.
For, like thousands of men everywhere today, there comes to me a sort of
homesick, perplexed feeling, at having to sojourn amid such
‘hell-let-loose’ conditions as (so-called) _society_ today represents.
But we all seem to be chained, paralyzed, hypnotized,—heaven knows what,
and unable to break up the influence, which has its grip on the church,
and which the church wants to clamp on to the state.”
“Paul Palmer,” said Ethel, with Quaker-like simplicity, “if thy mother
had been at the Capitol, those who now conduct like Cerberi would have
long since known themselves for what they are—not brutes, but interiorly
pure spirits—perplexed and homesick at having ever to breathe the miasma
of the Plutonic shores.
“Look at this picture.” Ethel showed one of Flaxman’s engravings of
Psyche in the lower regions: a fair spirit, standing in a dark defile,
gazing upward in a maze of wonder, as with hope astrain. “Believe me,
brothers, that is the spirit of the new age. A beautiful thing,
intelligently expectant of soon being _itself_. We are all immortal men,
and those whom Pluto seems to have chained, are not chained except by
the fetters of one delusion—they deludedly think themselves beasts. But
they are inherently of the so-called Dios Kouroi. And the Dios Kouroi
know there is food in the upper air, and place and pleasures there
convenient for the hundred-brained Cerberi who are but undeveloped gods.
“Believe me,” she said slowly, a look of infinite joy glorifying her
upraised countenance, “the Herculean power of the _Dios Kouroi_ can,
when ordered, bring from the upper air a morsel to the Cerberi, and
without weapons win them away to the heights.”
Then to her it was as if down-reaching mighty arms, with clasped hands
passed under her feet, lifted her with blissful enswathement to an
electric oneness with delight-in-right.
Elkhorn felt as if he were walking on a wave of light, whose warmth
filled the marrow of his bones. Feeling, too, he was one of the very
gods for whom Ethel had asked, he opened his mouth to boast: “I have
tasted, I can give,” when it all passed, and he dared not boast of what
he now doubted having for the moment received.
Paul Palmer had covered his eyes, and stood trembling, white, radiant
and reverently assured forever, that there was an “upper air,” and that
there was a goddess there; and that for him life held but one
purpose,—and that was to do Herculean work for the hundred-headed masses
who all hated their chains as heartily as did he. Masses all of whom
would win away to the heights, to go no more down forever, could they
but be fed with such morsels as these there, in that moment of
transfiguration had tasted.
“There will be no more working against nature when in the near future
the mountain of the house of Yod He-Vaw shall be established in the top
of the mountain,” said Daniel, “for the center of gravitation will be
established in the upper air when woman, released from bondage to
brutality, bounds up and stands at her post. Then all men will scale
Alpine heights of purity, wisdom and wealth, for the love of the
womanhood there, the eternal feminine in Deity.”
“Alpine heights! Woman there!”
It was a cry of rapture from beyond the portière, in the added suite of
rooms which had been built on for Reginald Grove’s use.
Ethel heard it, and explaining it as if she were double-brained, said:
“He is in the garden of Eden, the place of innocence where spirits in
liberty live, as live the lilies of God; neither fearing, fighting, nor
desiring desires; but where, welcoming the will-of-wisdom, they become
like the self-unioned One. See?”
With a swift impulse, turning on one toe-poised limb, winding so, her
clinging gown about her svelt figure, with arms extended, head thrown
back and face upraised, she stood, a radiant image of dual being,
unified in cruciform.
* * * * *
What had come to her? Had the ecstasy of the “real cross” drawn her up
into itself? Had she for a finality won away into the company of those
who unintermittingly do the will-of-wisdom?
Free and far through Emperean space on wings of vision fleetly she fled,
gleaming from the gladness of the star-filled air the truth (known to
the intelligences) of the meaning of that victory won over Semiramis,
when defeated on the banks of the Indus she flew away in the form of a
dove. For the starry hosts were showing them the meaning of the
“whirling wheel of Ixion,” on which the spirit of the world will still
be crucified until the coming-woman, by self-use, shall have expressed
to the race her relation to the world’s work, and worship; and so shall
have healed it of its woes.
And the two men to whom Ethel was giving participance in all she was
sharing with the angels, heard jubilates in the upper air, pitifully
tremulant, yet glad, which revealed that the cries of the world are but
the growing pains which all endure while getting the growths that bring
forth new forms of life, of knowledge and beauty.
To Paul Palmer’s entranced uplook, it seemed as if the bounding moon,
shining through the great window back of where Ethel stood, could hardly
wait for gladness in going through the blue; where the sparkling stars
were the dust of the wisdom of the ages, transmuted into the gold of
those supernal heights.
And lovingly laughing together, the moon and earth and they seemed
bounding through realms where old beyond compare had grown that
seed-thought, which now, falling to earth, is sowing itself and
springing up daily in the electrical doings of those who, inwardly
yearning for it, put forth the deeds which the reception of this seed
enables.
On, on, through spheres where the inhabitants know full well that the
crassness of selfhood is but the undeveloped manner of the creature, as
it struggles toward the real humanity, whose spirit is a form of WILL
refined to WISDOM.
On and on—till—oh, ecstasy—next—
“Ethel, my daughter.”
It was to the three as if those words had buffeted their way to them
across ages of absence and realms of peace. Then, somewhere in the
star-garden it seemed Daniel must have met them. As friendlily near,
with swiftness indescribable, they shot earthward together (or thus it
seemed) lighting so, as a thistle-down alights upon the earth.
Ethel’s eyes met Daniel’s as he stood beside her; and with the memory of
how the star-seed was sowing the earth with thoughts for this new age,
she cried out ringingly: “Was such bravery of beauty ever before seen by
you, Daniel?” Then—“oh, I understand,” she whispered hushedly, steadying
herself and them all.
For she perceived what had befallen. But she well knew how to bridge the
chasm between ecstasies and earth’s needs so as to turn raptures into
rational-spiritualized results.
Her first swift act was to concentrate on Reginald this focussed energy,
in a way to fetch his wandering mind into harmony with the work of this
epoch; not by sundering him suddenly from the realm he lived in, but by
giving him an interior sense of the presence of those who stood there
with her and with him, in that instant’s transfiguration on the mount of
vision, when altogether they were allied to the doings of the dualized.
Ethel never “lost herself”—as the term goes—in these ecstasies, any more
than an eagle in the delight of its ascending flight to heights, even
above the eyrie where it dwells, loses itself. It is an eagle still, and
knows its way aloft and below. Nevertheless, she knew that when she went
aloft this time, it was as if at the sound of a triumphal trump, persons
there rallied and sped away with her. And upborne by her wings and
seeing with her un-sun-blinded eyes, they saw what she saw, and learned
what she knew. For when the urgency of her need rang through the
silence, calling on life, that Life _per se_ should show itself to those
who knew it not, that the sight of it should baptize this household into
fitness for the Herculean-labors of this epoch, she knew trusted helpers
then, with an under-lift, had upborne her and hers into participation
with all-creative bliss. And that what they then learned no art, not
even music’s own, with octaves ever so many, can hint to mortal ears.
For what these seers then saw, tones, nor half-tones, quarters nor
eighths, in octaves ever so many, not yet have learned to melodize.
“Grace of heaven, Daksha, is she living woman, or spirit only?” said
Paul Palmer breathlessly.
“I only know,” said Robert, in tones muffled by his heart’s quick pulse,
“that one day the spirit of harmony came and dwelt under the roof, where
I had had cradle. And this is she.”
“Yes, yes, it is the new Madonna,” whispered Reinsvelt, Robert’s artist
friend. And he sped away out at the path from the house to the street.
“He does well,” said Paul. “He goes to whiten white canvas with that
white ‘vision’s inward illuminings.’ Visions, which will ‘pierce gross
sight, and with mild persistence urge man’s search to vaster issues,
whose growing sway controls the growing life of man.’”
“He has caught the art-thought of the new age. For you see, Robert, as
the pictures of the Crucified Man have tortured woman’s soul to a
devotion of self-sacrificing desire to rescue man from the cross which
man’s passions make for him,—so the new picture of that dearer self, in
ecstatic union with the gladsome heights above, will arouse _men_
themselves to become the sanctuary of nuptial rites. For see you not the
meaning of George Eliot’s most wonderful poem? ‘Oh, Might I Join the
Choir Invisible?’ Robert, Madonna, self-crossed by the will-of-wisdom is
Elohim; the cabalistic feminine-duad of the Hebrew. And it lacks not the
mother there, but ‘shapes it forth before the multitude, divinely human,
raising worship so, to reverence more mixed with’ WISDOM.”
And Paul Palmer, like Reinsvelt, as if empowered by some dynametrical
battery affixed to the forces of heaven, sped away to write of new deeds
for the redemption of that hundred-headed power, the Cerberi—the masses
of the people. Seeing that we are all of the mass—_the high mass_.
For as Ethel, raised from private considerations, lived amid public and
illustrious thoughts, those whom she attracted were attracted not to
her, but to the _public and illustrious thoughts_ which were her realest
and most entirely creative self. So that the centripetal attraction
toward this self was balanced by the centrifugal force which sent those
who admired her out and far away from her bodily-presence to work the
work of that force which sent them on its way.
As had done Paul and Reinsvelt, so did the rest, one after another. For
they speedily bethought them of deeds that should be wrought at once,
impelled by the new force to high enterprise.
For the centripetal power that attracted people to Ethel was like that
of the sun or of mightier Arcturus, never absorbing them emotionally
into her atmosphere; but on the reverse, filling them with the vigor of
God, and sending them to achieve newly discerned lines of public
beneficence.
Thus Ethel suddenly found herself standing alone. For everyone had
fallen away from her presence, away and out to do the will-of-wisdom.
And for an instant she halted, with a sense of sudden and unaccountable
desertion; forgetting for the moment how many hundred times the same
thing had befallen her, after one of those mystical uplifts had filled
with power those who had entered with her into the moment of full
vision, and who from thence had hastened gladly down among the multitude
to practicalize there what the vision had but illustrated.
“’Twas but that ‘loneliness which inures to oneliness,’” she said to
herself; entering then herself again into the at-one-ment with the
divine purpose.
Then it came. And reeling under the sudden inflow of the might of the
Eternal, as it surged through brain and nerve, she knew some great need
was at hand, calling for all the power with which she was now being
surcharged. Then arms trembling with the eagerness of a shuddering
soul’s necessities, closed around her.
“I have waited years. Love me, Ethel. I am friendless, distrusted and
forlorn. Let me tell you fully now, my story and Reginald’s. For I have
a suspicion that haunts me, and I want to get square with all moral
questions all round. But all stands still, while Reginald is as he is.
It is time he was well.”
In external stature Ethel was a grand, large woman. And with a solemn
glorifying of her power, inhaling a breath which attendant hosts
supplied, seating herself, she took to her arms her courageous friend,
holding her commodiously, and saying: “Your hour has come. Tell me what
you will. Your work is ready for you now, and you for your work, choose
what you may.”
And as great Isis might have held a woman, childlike in proportion to
herself, so held she Alitza Roccoca, bathing her spirit in a _love_ now
again becoming known to mortals in this passion-wearied age.