Good Friday came, and with it the car to bring Edith home. As she was
whirled through the parkways toward the West Side, she felt very unready.
Easter had always been a great day in the family, and now she was
reluctant to meet it.
Finally she directed the chauffeur to take her to Hull-House in Halsted
Street, and leave her there, and explain to Mrs. Drummond that she would
be home in time for dinner at seven.
As the car drove away, Edith stood at the corner of Polk and Halsted
and looked at the scene. Her thought had been to enter the settlement
and inquire of her friend for any news of Elsie. But there was no use
in doing this, and at that instant she was willing to let Elsie go. An
animal must have its fling.
She boarded a street car and went north. She passed Trench’s house, and
longed to see him. How beautiful his lips were. How endearing that little
twist of rough hair at the top of his forehead.
She left the car at Division Street and turned her steps westward across
the bridges and the smoky mysteries of Goose Island. This was Chicago—and
Mr. Kipling had declared that he knew a wretched crossroads in India
which was a better place to live in! She walked west and then south
again, coming down through the great Polish district to little Sicily.
Near a church—it was the same which Saadi and Deland had visited—shops
were selling religious gear. A little girl who reminded her of Clara’s
sister darted into her father’s shop and came out with a crucifix, which
she offered for sale. For little Maria’s sake Edith bought it.
Then she looked at the church. She had done no thinking during her long
walk. Perhaps she had better go in and rest.
She found the interior very dark. She could see a few lonely worshippers,
but where was the altar? There was no ruby gleam from the shrine, and no
towering mystery such as had enthralled her in European churches. With a
shock she perceived that the altar had disappeared, and that in its place
was the tomb of Christ. She beheld the domelike roof of the rock-cut
sepulchre; and there beneath, lighted by the pale reflection of candles,
was the ashen body of the Son of Man.
For a moment she stood breathless. Then she reasoned it out. A great
painting had been stretched over the altar. Rome did not stop at mere
poetry. Yonder knelt Sicilian pagans gazing at Adonis in his grave, as
they had knelt long before Jesus lived.
She sank into a pew, unconsciously holding the crucifix against her
breast. She leaned forward against the rail of the next pew, and gazed at
the apparition, as Saadi had gazed at the two coffins.
What was the world of her studies? It was a closed system of environment
and response. The same energies within the body as without, so that on
close analysis the body disappeared in the general atomic tissue of the
universe. The same general structure for each organism, from lily to
bride. And to produce a lily or a bride, the same number of tyrannical
chromosomes in the impregnated cell. The lily was supposed to be an
unconscious creature, the bride a conscious. But the researches of Bose
showed them doing much the same things, and though the morning stirred
the bride to a sense of being a bride, it never showed her the inexorable
chemical processes within her body. And in all scientific probability,
the death of lily or bride was merely so much dissipation of energy.
If a spirit returned to animate that ashen, immobile mass of dead cells
yonder, why, the pattern of every cell that ever lived would return.
The case had only to be stated to be seen absurd. There had been no
resurrection of the cell, and therefore none of the body. And if the
resurrection of the “spirit” was true, biologists must believe exactly
as savages believe. Ghostly birds of paradise were restlessly walking in
asphodel meadows, unable to mate, and therefore refusing food—the ghostly
psyches of butterflies.
It was all derisible nonsense. The simple fact was that birds of paradise
were mottled by the earth they grew on, and carried their human origin on
every feather. So-called spirits of the dead were indeed half angel and
half bird, and all a wonder and a wild desire. These things were merely
secondary sex-traits made to float away from the organs that generated
them, and fancied to exist in a limbo of their own. In such bodiless
creations ecstasy is very cunning.
The pale cell-colony in the distance had its structure like the rest. The
jaw had fallen, and no longer crunched the flesh of other animals. It was
dead for good and all. But self-deceiving hominidæ had used it to serve
their own desire for survival. They had taken the grave-clothes of this
Jewish specimen and flung them over the whole earth, an enchanted veil of
false hope. The mechanism of desire had manufactured the risen Christ.
So she had come at last to Dr. Trench’s position. She would never be
able to win him to the fairy tale of immortality. She would never be
able to win him—she paused at the words, and something struggled into
consciousness. She loved him!
The thrill of it led her automatically to the next step. If she admitted
his point of view, might not she win him for herself? And if they had a
child, let it take its chances like the rest. Let it take its chances!
Let it be content with such brief joy and passion as earth could afford.
She would drink deep of this sweet cup, and then sleep forever. She
believed she could win him—she gave new meaning to the trembling of the
hand which once had lifted her own nearly to his lips.
For a minute she dreamed. She saw the twenty-eighth of June approach, and
herself awaiting him in the conservatory. She saw the feathery moss of
the orchids’ bed, where pink-veined bosoms lay revealed. “Yes,” she would
say, “they are but mechanisms, and do not know their own love.” And she
could hear him reply as she wished him to reply, “But, dearest, do we not
know ours?”
Then the reaction set in. She scanned her conclusion. It was free from
superstition, but was it free from stain? Suppose that Trench did come
in June, though still determined not to marry; suppose he did lose his
self-control—for her words would lead him as the lines of colour on the
cypripedium lead the insect to the stigma. How much would their conduct
differ from that of two uneducated persons whose excuse was that they
couldn’t help it? How much would it differ from Elsie’s running off with
a married man?
The reaction grew sharper. They were taking her Saviour from her, and
she knew not where they had laid him. God help her! What thoughts had
she entertained? Men had idealised that man in the tomb, but in doing so
they had thought nobly of man. In the pathos of their desire to be freed
from the remora of desire, they had shown confidence at least in Him. He
had been tempted without sin. They had called him the Prince of Peace,
because he had mastered the passions which are the cause of war. Though
he had felt the blind chemical urge of hunger and anger and love, even
as the machine called the scorpion feels it, he had shown men how to
control and refine their instincts. Whole races had been less beastly for
thinking of Him. These things she long had known, and yet she had been on
the point of tempting impersonal passion.
She had read in books of the “necessity” of love. She had read of lovers
who spoke of something stronger than they. But in the name of the Prince
of Peace, was there no necessity still stronger? She pressed fiercely
against the oaken rail, and the crucifix hurt her breast. The pain felt
good. It was as if she were a mother, and her baby were hurting her.
There welled up within her an overwhelming pity for the mothers of
millions untimely slain—and she knew once for all that she could never
abandon the hope of heaven for mothers and children.
Thus her faith returned on the wings of a single moral decision, and as
the price of giving up the man she loved. Whether God or chemistry had
compelled her made no difference.