Love, Mrs. Lauderdale had said in her absent-minded way, was not at all
like other passions. The words remained in Katharine’s memory and
pleased her and comforted her in a manner which would have surprised the
elder woman, had she guessed that she had unintentionally drawn music
from a human soul with one of those dull and stereotyped phrases which
people fall back upon when they cannot or will not explain themselves.
But that was precisely what Katharine wished to believe--that love was
not at all like other passions, that it bore not the slightest
resemblance in its nature to those which she had seen asserting
themselves so strongly around her, and of which she was beginning to
understand something by proxy, as it were. For though she had said that
her love for John Ralston was like her father’s love of money, she did
not in the least wish to believe it. She attached to love the highest
interpretation of which it is capable; she attributed to it the purest
and most disinterested motives; she gave it in her thoughts the
strongest and best qualities which anything can have.
She had a right to do so, and though she sought an explanation of her
right, she was not disturbed because she found none. She dreamed of
theories vague, but as beautiful as they were untenable, as men of
ancient times imagined impossible, but deeply poetic, interpretations of
nature and her doings. Her soul, and the soul of the man she loved had
elected one another of old from amongst myriads; neither could give
light without the other, nor could either live without the other’s life.
Together they were one immortal; separate they must perish. The good of
each was the triumphant enemy of evil in the other, and the evil in both
was gradually to be driven out and forgotten in the perfection of the
whole.
All that was contemplative in her nature was entranced before the
exquisite beauty of her imagined deity. Little by little, as other
attachments were rudely shaken, broken, and destroyed, the one of all
others which she most valued grew stronger and fairer in the wreck of
the rest; the one passion which she saw was good towered in her soul’s
field as an archangel among devils, spotless, severe, and invincible.
The angel was not John Ralston, nor were the devils those persons with
whom her life had to do. They all had other features, immortal natures,
and transcendent reasoning. At that time there was in her the foundation
of a great mythology of ideals, good and bad, personified and almost
named, among which love was king over all the rest, endowed with divine
attributes, with knowledge of the human soul, and power to move the
human heart, knowing all motives and divining all impulses,--a being to
whom a prayer might be said in trouble, and whose beneficent hand would
be swift and strong to help. Love, in her theory of the world, was the
prime cause, the intelligent director, and at the same time the ultimate
end. She and her husband were under his immediate and especial
protection. If they were faithful to him, he would shield them from
harm, and make them immortal with himself beyond the stars. If they
denied him--that is, if they ceased to love one another--his face would
grow dark, his right hand would be full of semi-biblical terrors, and he
would abandon them to the wicked will of the devils,--which were the bad
passions the girl saw in others,--to be tormented until they themselves
should be extinguished in eternal night.
Practically, Katharine had constructed a religion for herself out of the
most human thing in her nature, since she had lost the bearings of
anything higher in the storms through which she had passed. It was by no
means an unassailable religion, nor a very logical one, being derived
altogether from the exaltation of the most human of all passions, and
having its details deduced from the one-sided experience of an innocent
child. But that very innocence, that very impossibility of conceiving
that there should be anything not good in love that was true, gave it an
enormous force against the powers which were evidently evil. There was
an appearance of inexorably sound reason, too, in the conclusion that
all human motive was passion of one kind or another, and that all
passions but love were bad and self-destructive in the end, having their
foundation in selfishness, and not in the other self that fills
love-dreams.
Since passion and motive were one and the same, thought Katharine, there
could be no question as to which of them all was the best, since true
love such as hers was the only passion that had no one of the seven
capital sins attached to it. Such an argument was manifestly
unanswerable when it came from her, and she rejoiced in the security of
knowing herself to be right in the midst of many wrongs, which is one of
the highest satisfactions of human vanity for the young or the old. Day
by day, through the changing events of the past year, the conviction had
grown, until it was now the dominant cause and mover of her being, and
was assuming superhuman proportions in her estimated values of things
transcendent.
Paul Griggs, with his vaguely expressed explanations of things which
meant much, and meant it clearly, to himself, had unconsciously helped
Katharine to deify love at the expense, and to the ruin, of any form of
religious belief to which she might have been inclined. He was assuredly
not one of those men who seem to make it their business to destroy the
convictions of others, and to give them nothing in exchange for what was
consolation, if not salvation. He was, at least, a man who believed in
belief, so to say, and who, perhaps, believed many things which must
have seemed utterly incredible to ordinary beings of ordinary
experience. But he was fond of stating the results he had reached, in a
careless way, which seemed less than half-serious, without giving the
smallest hint as to the means by which he had obtained them. The
statements themselves were fragmentary: here a hand, there a head, now a
foot, and next a bit of the shoulders. He was not conscious of his
fault. To him the image was always present and complete. It seemed to
him that he was but calling attention to one point or another of the
visible whole, when it seemed to others as though he were offering them
broken bits, often unrecognizable as belonging to any possible image
whatsoever. Others sometimes put the bits together in their own way.
He was not in any sense an ordinary being, nor one to be judged by
ordinary standards, though he rarely claimed the right to be treated as
an exception. The difference between him and the average man lay not in
any very unusual gifts, and many might have been found who, knowing him
well, would have denied that there was any radical difference at all.
He would certainly have taken little pains to persuade these of the
contrary. Outwardly, he was a man of letters who had met with
considerable success in his career--about as much as justifies
good-natured people in making a lion of an author or an artist, but no
more. He had written many books, and had learned his business in the
bitter struggles which attend the commencement of an average literary
man’s life, when the fight for bare existence forces the slender talent
to bear burdens too heavy for its narrow shoulders, along paths not easy
to tread for those most sure of foot. He had some valuable gifts,
however, which had stood him in good stead. He possessed almost
incredible physical strength in certain ways, without the heavy,
sanguine temperament which requires regular exercise and perpetual
nourishment. His endurance was beyond all comparison greater than that
of men usually considered very strong, and he had been able to bear the
strain of excessive labour which would have killed or paralyzed most
people. That was one of the secrets of his success. Secondly, he had
acquired an unusual mechanical facility in the handling of language and
the arrangement of the matter he produced, so as to give it the most
favourable appearance possible. His imagination was not abundant, but he
did the best he could with it under all circumstances, and answered all
critics with the unassailable statement that he wrote for a living and
did the best he could, and sincerely regretted that he was not Walter
Scott, nor Goethe, nor Thackeray, nor any of the great ones. That was
his misfortune, and not his fault. People flattered him, he said, by
telling him that he could do better if he tried. It was not true. He
could not do better.
But in all these points he did not differ very widely from the average
man who attains to a certain permanent and generally admitted success by
driving his faculties to their utmost in the struggle for a living. The
chief difference between him and other men had been produced by an
experience of life under varying circumstances, such as an ordinary
individual rarely gets, and possibly by the long-continued action of
unusual emotions with which this study, or history, of Katharine
Lauderdale can have nothing to do, and which did not directly concern
his literary career nor his relations with the world at large, though
the outward result was to make unthinking people say that there was
something mysterious about him, which either attracted them or repelled
them, according to their temperaments and tastes. At all events, his
life had tended to the creation of a form of belief and a mode of
judgment which seemed very simple to himself, and perfectly
incomprehensible to almost every one else. He showed other people
fragments and bits of it, when he was in the humour, and sometimes
seemed surprised that those who heard him should not also understand
him. One of his fundamental articles of faith seemed to be that life as
a possession was of no value whatsoever: a doctrine which attracted very
few. But those who knew him and watched him were sure that there was no
affectation in that part of his creed, though they might hesitate in
finding reasons for his belief in it. It was strongly contrasted with
his immovable faith--not in a life to come, for he despised the
expression--but in the present fact of immortality. The mere fact that
he laughed at the idea of ‘past’ and ‘future’ in their relation to the
soul, sufficiently confused most of those who had heard him talk of such
things.
Katharine Lauderdale had neither the man’s experience to help her in
following him, nor any superior genius of insight to lead her to his
conclusions by what one might call the shorthand of reason--intuition.
She was simply attracted without understanding, as so many people are
nowadays, by everything which promises a glimpse at the unknown, if not
a knowledge of the unknowable. She took the longing for the power of
comprehension, the fragments for the whole, and the crumbs for the bread
of life. It was not unnatural, considering the tendencies of modern
culture, but it was unfortunate.
She halved her soul, and gave John Ralston his share of it, though he
had a very good one of his own. She elaborated a theory of
interchangeable and interdependent selves for herself and him, which
momentarily satisfied all her wants. She took his self with her own into
the temple of love, and bade it bow down and worship with her the
glorious deification of human passion which she had set up there. And
his imaginary self, being really but that part of her own being which
she called his, consented and obeyed, and did as she did. And the
incense rose before the shrine, and the love-angels chanted love’s
litany of praise, while Love himself smiled down upon her, and told her
that he was immortal, and would make her deathless for her belief in
him. The temple was beautiful beyond compare; the deity was spotless,
fair of form, and noble of feature; the heart that worshipped was fresh,
unsullied, and sincere. There had never been anything more perfect than
it all was in Katharine’s imagination; and there could never, in all the
long life that was before her, be anything so perfect again. John
Ralston, single-hearted and deeply loving as he was, could never have
any conception of the divinity his maiden wife adored in secret. Her
instinct told her that though he was with her, the manliness in him
looked at the world from another point of view; and in all their many
exchanges of thought she never spoke of her visions of blessedness. The
fact that she kept them to herself gave them more strength, and
preserved their intact beauty in all its splendid strength and all its
infinite delicacy.
In a certain way she owed to Paul Griggs some of her sweetest and most
exquisite thoughts, of which the memory must be with her all her life,
long after the humanity of truth supplanted the dignity of the ideal.
Not that he had taught her anything of what he believed and thought that
he knew. She, like the rest, had received only fragments of his meaning;
but out of them she had constructed a whole which was beautiful in
itself, if nothing else--as lovers of art have dreamed an unbroken ideal
of perfection upon bits of marble unearthed from the grave of a great
thing destroyed, moulding theories upon it, and satisfying their tastes
through it, each in his own way, though perhaps all very far from what
was once the truth.
But, on the other hand, Griggs was partly responsible for the eclipse of
what, in her nature, as in all, was essentially necessary. She did not
at the present time feel the loss, if it were really a loss, and not a
mere temporary shutting off of all higher possibilities from her mental
sight. She did not, perhaps, fully realize the distance to which she had
gone in unbelief in substituting one ideal for another; and she would
have been profoundly shocked had any one told her that she had at the
present time wholly abandoned anything approaching to a form of
Christianity. She would have reasoned that she said prayers, as she
supposed other people did; but she would have found it hard to say what
she thought when she said them. Nine-tenths of them were for John
Ralston, and were in reality addressed to the divinity in the love
temple--the remaining ones were mere words, and said in a perfunctory
way, with a sort of sincerity of manner, but with no devotion whatever,
and no attempt to strengthen them with a belief that they might be
answered. She had been taught to say them, and continued to say them
with the conscientiousness which is born of habit, before there can be
any thought connected with the thing done.
Griggs and his talk had only contributed to this result. The quick and
noiseless destruction of Katharine’s beliefs had been chiefly brought
about by the actions of the persons with whom she had to do, and by the
collapse of their principles in the face of difficulties, temptations
and tests. It was natural that she should ask herself of what use her
father’s blind faith and rigid practice could be, when neither the one
nor the other could diminish his avarice nor check his cruelty when
anything or any one stood between him and money. She was not to be
blamed if she doubted the efficacy of the true faith, when she saw her
religious mother half mad with envy of her own daughter’s youth and
beauty. As for the rest of them all, they did not pretend to be
religious people. Their misdeeds killed her faith in human nature, which
is, perhaps, the ordinary key to that state of mind which believes in
God, though it is by no means the only one.
Had she been able to discern and analyze what was going on in her own
heart, she would have seen that her difficulty was the old one. The
existence of evil in the world disproved to her the existence of a
Supreme Power which was all good. But she neither analyzed nor
discerned. It was sufficient for her that the earthly evil facts existed
to assure her that the heavenly, transcendent Power was an
impossibility. She never made the statement to herself, but she
unconsciously took it for granted in substituting one divinity for the
other. John Ralston said that he ‘believed in things’--and did, vaguely.
But she had never found it possible to bring him to any concise
statement of what his beliefs were. And yet he was, in her loving
opinion, by far the morally best of all the men and women she had ever
known. He did not go to church every Sunday, as her father did. She
believed that he never went to church at all, in fact. But there was no
denying the superiority of a man who had bravely overcome such
temptation as John Ralston had formerly had to deal with, over one who,
like her father, believed, trembled, and nevertheless gave himself up
wholly to his evil passion.
So she had lost her belief in human nature. But as she could not afford
to lose her belief in the man she loved, she had taken him out of the
rest of humanity, and made him the half of herself, so that they two
stood quite alone in the world, and had their temple to themselves, and
their little god to themselves, and their faith and belief and religious
practice altogether to themselves, though John Ralston was quite
ignorant of the fact. But that made no difference to Katharine. He was
in her earthly paradise, though he did not know it, and was as sincere a
worshipper of the divinity as she herself.
In this way she excepted both him and her from common humanity, and was
sure that she had found the true path which leads to the fields of the
blessed. Love was the centre of hope and the circumference of life; it
was the air she breathed, the thoughts she thought, and the actions she
performed. There was nothing else. And since eternity was the present,
as Griggs said, there was no hereafter, and so there could never be
anything but love, even after men ceased to count time. In the midst of
the prosaic surroundings of a society life, as in the midst of the great
and evil passions which do devilish deeds just below the calm,
luxurious and dull surface, there was one true idealist, one maiden soul
that dreamed of love’s immortality, and placed hers in love’s heart of
hearts.