Paul Faber, Surgeon Part 11

She looked at him pitifully. For a moment her lips parted, then a strange look as of sudden bodily pain crossed her face, her lips closed, and her mouth looked as if it were locked. She shut the book which lay upon her knee, and resumed her needlework. A shadow settled upon her face.

"What a pity such a woman should be wasted in believing lies!" thought the doctor. "How much better it would be if she would look things in the face, and resolve to live as she can, doing her best and enduring her worst, and waiting for the end! And yet, seeing color is not the thing itself, and only in the brain whose eye looks upon it, why should I think it better? why should she not shine in the color of her fancy? why should she grow gray because the color is only in herself? We are but bubbles flying from the round of Nature's mill-wheel. Our joys and griefs are the colors that play upon the bubbles. Their throbs and ripples and changes are our music and poetry, and their bursting is our endless repose. Let us waver and float and shine in the sun; let us bear pitifully and be kind; for the night cometh, and there an end."

But in the sad silence, he and the lady were perhaps drifting further and further apart!

"I did not mean," he said, plunging into what came first, "that I could not enjoy verse of the kind you prefer--as verse. I took the matter by the more serious handle, because, evidently, you accepted the tone and the scope of it. I have a weakness for honesty."

"There is something not right about you, though, Mr. Faber--if I could find it out," said Miss Meredith. "You can not mean you enjoy any thing you do not believe in?"

"Surely there are many things one can enjoy without believing in them?"

"On the contrary, it seems to me that enjoying a thing is only another word for believing in it. If I thought the sweetest air on the violin had no truth in it, I could not listen to it a moment longer."

"Of course the air has all the truth it pretends to--the truth, that is, of the relations of sounds and of intervals--also, of course, the truth of its relation as a whole to that creative something in the human mind which gave birth to it."

"That is not all it pretends. It pretends that the something it gives birth to in the human mind is also a true thing."

"Is there not then another way also, in which the violin may be said to be true? Its tone throughout is of suffering: does it not mourn that neither what gives rise to it, nor what it gives rise to, is any thing but a lovely vapor--the phantom of an existence not to be lived, only to be dreamed? Does it not mourn that a man, though necessarily in harmony with the laws under which he lives, yet can not be sufficiently conscious of that harmony to keep him from straining after his dream?"

"Ah!" said Miss Meredith, "then there is strife in the kingdom, and it can not stand!"

"There is strife in the kingdom, and it can not stand," said the doctor, with mingled a.s.sent and a.s.sertion. "Hence it is forever falling."

"But it is forever renewed," she objected.

"With what renewal?" rejoined Faber. "What return is there from the jaws of death? The individual is gone. A new consciousness is not a renewal of consciousness."

She looked at him keenly.

"It is hard, is it not?" she said.

"I will not deny that in certain moods it looks so," he answered.

She did not perceive his drift, and was feeling after it.

"Surely," she said, "the thing that ought to be, is the thing that must be."

"How can we tell that?" he returned. "What do we see like it in nature?

Whatever lives and thrives--animal or vegetable--or human--it is all one--every thing that lives and thrives, is forever living and thriving on the loss, the defeat, the death of another. There is no unity save absolutely by means of destruction. Destruction is indeed the very center and framework of the sole existing unity. I will not, therefore, as some do, call Nature cruel: what right have I to complain? Nature can not help it. She is no more to blame for bringing me forth, than I am to blame for being brought forth. Ought is merely the reflex of like. We call ourselves the highest in Nature--and probably we are, being the apparent result of the whole--whence, naturally, having risen, we seek to rise, we feel after something we fancy higher. For as to the system in which we live, we are so ignorant that we can but blunderingly feel our way in it; and if we knew all its laws, we could neither order nor control, save by a poor subservience. We are the slaves of our circ.u.mstance, therefore betake ourselves to dreams of what _ought to be_."

Miss Meredith was silent for a time.

"I can not see how to answer you," she said at length. "But you do not disturb my hope of seeing my father again. We have a sure word of prophecy."

Faber suppressed the smile of courteous contempt that was ready to break forth, and she went on:

"It would ill become me to doubt to-day, as you will grant when I tell you a wonderful fact. This morning I had not money enough to buy myself the pair of strong shoes you told me I must wear. I had nothing left but a few trinkets of my mother's--one of them a ring I thought worth about ten pounds. I gave it to my landlady to sell for me, hoping she would get five for it. She brought me fifty, and I am rich!"

Her last words trembled with triumph. He had himself been building her up in her foolish faith! But he took consolation in thinking how easily with a word he could any moment destroy that b.u.t.tress of her phantom house. It was he, the unbeliever, and no G.o.d in or out of her Bible, that had helped her! It did not occur to him that she might after all see in him only a reed blown of a divine wind.

"I am glad to hear of your good fortune," he answered. "I can not say I see how it bears on the argument. You had in your possession more than you knew."

"Does the length of its roots alter the kind of the plant?" she asked.

"Do we not know in all nature and history that G.o.d likes to see things grow? That must be the best way. It may be the only right way. If that ring was given to my mother against the time when the last child of her race should find herself otherwise helpless, would the fact that the provision was made so early turn the result into a mere chance meeting of necessity and subsidy? Am I bound to call every good thing I receive a chance, except an angel come down visibly out of the blue sky and give it to me? That would be to believe in a G.o.d who could not work His will by His own laws. Here I am, free and hopeful--all I needed. Every thing was dark and troubled yesterday; the sun is up to-day."

"There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune," said the doctor.

"I begin to fear you mean what you say, Mr. Faber. I hoped it was only for argument's sake," returned Miss Meredith.

She did not raise her eyes from her work this time. Faber saw that she was distressed if not hurt, and that her soul had closed its lips to him. He sprang to his feet, and stood bending before her.

"Miss Meredith," he said, "forgive me. I have offended you."

"You have not offended me," she said quietly.

"Hurt you then, which is worse."

"How should I have got through," she said, as if to herself, and dropped her hands with her work on her knees, "if I had not believed there was One caring for me all the time, even when I was most alone!"

"Do you never lose that faith?" asked the doctor.

"Yes; many and many a time. But it always comes back."

"Comes and goes with your health."

"No--is strongest sometimes when I am furthest from well."

"When you are most feverish," said the doctor. "What a fool I am to go on contradicting her!" he added to himself.

"I think I know you better than you imagine, Mr. Faber," said Miss Meredith, after just a moment's pause. "You are one of those men who like to represent themselves worse than they are. I at least am bound to think better of you than you would have me. One who lives as you do for other people, can not be so far from the truth as your words."

Faber honestly repudiated the praise, for he felt it more than he deserved. He did try to do well by his neighbor, but was aware of no such devotion as it implied. Of late he had found his work bore him not a little--especially when riding away from Owlkirk. The praise, notwithstanding, sounded sweet from her lips, was sweeter still from her eyes, and from the warmer white of her cheek, which had begun to resume its soft roundness.

"Ah!" thought the doctor, as he rode slowly home, "were it not for sickness, age, and death, this world of ours would be no bad place to live in. Surely mine is the most needful and the n.o.blest of callings!--to fight for youth, and health, and love; against age, and sickness, and decay! to fight death to the last, even knowing he must have the best of it in the end! to set law against law, and do what poor thing may be done to reconcile the inexorable with the desirable!

Who knows--if law be blind, and I am a man that can see--for at the last, and only at the last do eyes come in the head of Nature--who knows but I may find out amongst the blind laws to which I am the eyes, that blind law which lies nearest the root of life!--Ah, what a dreamer I should have been, had I lived in the time when great dreams were possible! Beyond a doubt I should have sat brooding over the elixir of life, cooking and mixing, heating and cooling, watching for the flash in the goblet. We know so much now, that the range of hope is sadly limited! A thousand dark ways of what seemed blissful possibility are now closed to us, because there the light now shines, and shows naught but despair. Yet why should the thing be absurd? Can any one tell _why_ this organism we call man should not go on working forever? Why should it not, since its law is change and renewal, go on changing and renewing forever? Why should it get tired? Why should its law work more feeble, its relations hold less firmly, after a hundred years, than after ten?

Why should it grow and grow, then sink and sink? No one knows a reason.

Then why should it be absurd to seek what shall encounter the unknown cause, and encountering reveal it? Might science be brought to the pitch that such a woman should live to all the ages, how many common lives might not well be spared to such an end! How many n.o.ble ones would not willingly cease for such a consummation--dying that life should be lord, and death no longer king!"

Plainly Faber's materialism sprang from no defect in the region of the imagination; but I find myself unable to determine how much honesty, and how much pride and the desire to be satisfied with himself, had relatively to do with it. I would not be understood to imply that he had an unusual amount of pride; and I am sure he was less easily satisfied with himself than most are. Most people will make excuses for themselves which they would neither make nor accept for their neighbor; their own failures and follies trouble them little: Faber was of another sort. As ready as any other man to discover what could be said on his side, he was not so ready to adopt it. He required a good deal of himself. But then he unconsciously compared himself with his acquaintances, and made what he knew of them the gauge, if not the measure, of what he required of himself.

It were unintelligible how a man should prefer being the slave of blind helpless Law to being the child of living Wisdom, should believe in the absolute Nothing rather than in the perfect Will, were it not that he does not, can not see the Wisdom or the Will, except he draw nigh thereto.

I shall be answered:

"We do not prefer. We mourn the change which yet we can not resist. We would gladly have the G.o.d of our former faith, were it possible any longer to believe in Him."

I answer again: