The Master-Knot of Human Fate Part 11

"Pins and needles, and until Christmas, books and shoes and stockings and sugar and a cook-stove and a piano," answered Robin, promptly. "I can live without the opera and a telephone, but if you only knew how I cherish my stock of pins, and with what dread I look forward to the day when, like a poor white trash family I used to know, I shall refer to _the_ needle. I used to think you could do anything with a pair of pliers and a bit of wire, but I tremble lest you may not be able to compa.s.s a needle." She looked up, and seeing Adam's troubled face said quickly, "Forgive me for being frivolous; I am so happy, I can't help it. What were you thinking of, Adam?"

He got up and walked away a few yards, and cut one of the long thick yucca leaves, and stripped it down to the central spine, while he went on speaking to her. "I was thinking," he said, "of what Mill said about inventions, and how they hadn't helped the laboring man; that they had neither decreased his number of working hours, nor increased his comforts, and wondering whether it would be better for a new race to find an electric light plant alongside their other plants, or whether they would better work out their own salvation, a little at a time, by main strength and awkwardness. I was thinking how strange our books would seem to men and women who knew nothing of the--the late earth." He held out to her what looked something like a needle threaded with coa.r.s.e white linen thread. "Will your Majesty deign to look at this?"

She took it, and looked at it wonderingly, and then ran in and brought back a torn towel, and began mending it. "Why, it sews very well," she said; "who taught you that?"

"The mother of inventions generally," he answered. "If you ever had gone on the round-up, you might have had occasion for a needle and thread when there wasn't any nearer than a hundred miles. But you haven't answered my question."

"About inventions and so on? It seems to me you have to consider the _raison d'etre_ of a people before you can tell the answer. What is the use of labor-saving inventions, if the time saved isn't of some great value? What is to be the chief end of man in a dispensation that has no catechism as a guide-post?"

"A very different end from the old one," answered Adam, half sternly.

"Work should not come to him as a curse, nor as his greatest boon; at least, not hard, manual labor. There should be work enough to insure ease and comfort, and every one should work freely and gladly. I should educate the individual; he should be strong of body and keen of mind, and should feel that his talents were given him for use, not for concealment; he should use his hands, both of them, and find delight in their work. It is a beautiful world, it always was, but I don't know that the steam-engine brought men's souls closer together, or that the electric light let in any more radiance upon our minds, or that the great telescopes made heaven any nearer. It should be a happier and a healthier world, if it was no more."

"Adam," she said abruptly, "if we had children, in what religious faith would you bring them up?"

"I don't know; I never thought about it very much," he answered honestly. "I have an ideal in my mind, but I can't explain it. I believe in one source of life, and therefore a common divinity."

Robin laughed quietly. "That is like the Hindoo proverb, 'That which exists is one; sages call it variously.' That has been called pantheism, and for that belief the Jews expelled Baruch Benedict Spinoza from their synagogue. In our time there was a very learned magazine published in its behalf, and I heard David Starr Jordan say no man could tell whether it was a mere jargon of words, meaningless and empty, or whether monism was the profoundest philosophy the world has ever known."

"I don't care what you call it," said Adam, stoutly. "I am not afraid of names, and I don't know anything about any of those religions, pantheism, Spinozaism, or monism; but I do know I would rather a child of mine saw G.o.d in everything than that he saw G.o.d in nothing save his own narrow creed. I would rather he was a pantheist than a Calvinist.

Spinoza never burned any one, did he, nor preached that h.e.l.l was paved with infants' skulls?"

Robin clapped her hands and laughed again. "I beg your pardon for laughing," she said, "but the idea of Spinoza, the 'G.o.d-intoxicated man,' presiding over an auto-da-fe is too absurd. If you only remembered anything about his gentle, retiring spirit and melancholy life; I think he was better known in our time than in his own, but his philosophy does not satisfy me. I am willing to grant the ident.i.ty of life, and its divine possibilities, but I cannot worship it as life itself, a mere manifestation of nature. I know that there is such a thing as living rock, and that it may be killed by a bolt of lightning as readily as a tree; but this does not make it any more worthy of worship than I am, and that is terribly unworthy. The rock and I are types of life, stages in the development of life, but for my child there must be something better. For the child I must lay hold on the everlasting life; I must find the rock that is higher than I. I do not know of any manifestation of that life so great, so G.o.dlike, and so lovable as His who said, 'I am the way, the truth, and the life.'"

"But surely you do not believe in the Immaculate Conception?" asked Adam, incredulously.

"I don't care anything about it, one way or the other. It's the immaculate life that concerns me. As you said yourself a few minutes ago, words cannot frighten me. Am I going to stand carping, 'Can any good come out of Nazareth?' What do I care if it comes out of Sodom and Gomorrah, if it is good?"

"But you surely don't believe in the miracles?" he asked.

"Surely I do, in some of them at least. I have seen a miracle or so myself. Besides, if you remember the greatest proof He gave was that the gospel was preached to the poor. Buddha was a prince; he whom the Jews expected was to reign as a king. What a fall was there! the gospel of hope and joy was brought to the children of Gibeon, the hewers of wood and drawers of water. The love of Christ has wrought greater miracles than He did. Look at the arena in Rome. Look at the whole countless army of martyrs. When Mrs. Booth died, the eighty thousand women that nightly walked the streets of London rebelled, and for once the long aisles of brick and stone were swept clean of that awful arraignment of civilization. That was more of a miracle than satisfying three thousand souls with food. At least, it's enough of a miracle for me."

The tears came into her eyes, and she gathered up her pans and went into the house.

XVIII

Are G.o.d and Nature then at strife, That Nature lends such evil dreams?

So careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single life:

So careful of the type? but no.

From scarped cliff and quarried stone She cries, "A thousand types are gone: I care for nothing, all shall go."

TENNYSON.

They were sitting in the doorway together. Robin rested her chin in her hands and looked down the valley, the lines of perplexity deepening in her forehead.

"If only we had an angel with a sword, or without one, to tell us what to do," she said. "If only we were deeply religious with the old-fashioned orthodox religion, that would enable us to believe we were predestined not to be drowned--"

"Or if we believed in a personal G.o.d, without whom not a sparrow falleth, though the waters cover the face of the earth and blot out millions of His creatures," answered Adam. "After all, can we do better than follow the dictates of Nature?"

"Do you mean to look through Nature up to Nature's G.o.d?" answered Robin. "How can we worship any G.o.d as pitiless as Nature? Nature is strong, but is it our place to help her in her care for the single type? Perhaps we are the trilobites of a new Silurian period; well, trilobites were painfully common, but we need not be. Nature's laws are immutable, so we have been told with wearying insistence, but suppose you and I have wills as strong as Nature herself? Suppose we ask what she has done for the humanity of which we are a part, that she should demand fresh victims from us? Oh, I know; you will tell me,--

"'What a piece of work is a man! How n.o.ble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a G.o.d!'

"And I should answer,--

"'What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor.'

"David or Hamlet, it comes to the same thing. Where are the crowns now, and how can we say Solomon was not right when he said the end of it all was vanity? What is Nature, and on what compulsion must we obey her? The imperative mandates of our own hearts? But what if our hearts are at war with our heads? Are we to follow no higher law than the blind instinct that moves the house-fly? Or will we aspire to the indomitable soul of the mocking-birds that feed their young in captivity until they see they are prisoners for life, and then bring them poisonous spiders that they may die rather than live under such conditions? Shall we give hostages to Nature when she has given nothing to us?"

She was standing now and speaking with more vehemence than was her wont. Adam caught her hands, as she flung them out with a gesture full of scorn.

"Do you really think we have nothing? How many million lovers have envied Adam and Eve their paradise? This Nature against which you bring so railing an accusation,--has she taken away more than she has given us? We had ambitions, you and I, but the way of ambition is full of weariness and disappointment and bitterness of spirit. We did not expect peace and comfort and joy, but work and turmoil. Our slates were set with a sum--"

"Yes, a sum in vulgar fractions," answered Robin.

"Perhaps; it was a sum in which the unknown and unknowable quant.i.ty determined the result. We had seen a good deal of what is called life,--it is a good name to distinguish it from the death it so much resembles,--and I am half inclined to think Nature has been merciful."

"But if she was merciful to them," said Robin, quickly, "why were we omitted?"

"She gave them oblivion, the hereafter, whatever comes hereafter. She gave us each other. We were going to miss one another in the careers we had mapped out. We might have lost each other forever, or for aeons of years. Nothing but a general breaking up of everything would ever have flung us into each other's arms. We were too much interested in my career, my vast influence on the political situation, to consider any existence apart from the setting we had chosen for the play. And, after all, what was it, that career from which we hoped so much? I stood waiting my cue, ready to act my part in the farce or tragedy, whichever it turned out to be."

"I think it was more like a circus," said Robin.

"Very like a circus," he admitted with grim appreciation. "A circus in which no one knew whether he was to be a ringmaster or a clown. There were the financial tight-rope walkers, and the social lion-tamers, and snake-charmers, and the political acrobats whose falls were unsoftened by any kind of network. There were heat and dust and discomfort, and weary, wretched animals looking out of cages at other weary, tortured animals, that were sometimes scarcely less pachydermatous than themselves. I know the program we had mapped out, the triumphal entry, the daring leaps, the cheers,--but was it worth while? After all, does one care to be the champion bareback rider in life's hippodrome?

Nature swept away my sawdust ring, but she gave me heaven for a canopy, earth for an arena, you for a queen. At times I am disposed to take a fatalist view of the case, and think that G.o.d, or Nature, knew there was no more to be done with the earth, not so much because of its wickedness, as on account of its stupidity and cruelty. All my plans had centered in a political career, and yet how could a man touch politics and remain undefiled? Yes, I know there were honorable men in politics, but they were lonely, and they hated with an unspeakable hatred all the means that were used to keep them there.

And there were any number of men who had been honorable once. When a man becomes possessed by the desire of place, his backbone becomes elastic, and he stoops to things of which he had believed himself incapable. I don't know what it is, but it weakens a man's moral fibre, and breaks down the tissues of his will, and gives him mental astigmatism. How dare I say I should have been any better than the rest?"

"Do you remember your address, a year ago Flag Day, and the old man with the little bronze b.u.t.ton of the Civil War veteran, who stood in front, and shook hands with you afterwards, with tears running down his face? And the applause? Can you honestly say that you find 'to utter love more sweet than praise'? You have told me of your dream of a home, but Emerson said, 'not even a home in the heart of one we love can satisfy the awful soul that dwells in clay.' Can it satisfy you, who hoped and expected so much?"

He hesitated and did not reply at once.

"Are you sure you are not making a virtue of necessity?" she asked a little bitterly.

"I think as much as anything," he said slowly, "I was excusing myself for not having known all along that the real life, and the most useful one, is the one we could have made together. Princ.i.p.alities and powers and empires and republics have fallen. When G.o.d wants to regenerate the world, He begins with the family. Now _I_," with unspeakable scorn,--"_I_ intended to begin with a different primary law. I could have made a good home, but I was intent on making an indifferent, honest congressman, or senator, or perhaps president. In a way your home always meant a good deal of what I am trying to say. You always had some one on hand you were trying to make capable of great things by believing in them. You made us welcome, and were ready to listen to our troubles, our literary curiosities, our musical gems and our aspirations. Suppose I had had sense enough to refuse the husks and choose--"

"Don't say it," she answered. "Don't say it, even if you mean it, for I should have sent you away, and have felt like reviling you for putting your hand to the plow and turning back. Your ambitions were the most attractive thing about you then. I hadn't pinned my faith on a primary law; I think it was government ownership that I regarded as the great regenerator. I am glad if my home seemed homelike to any one; it never reached my ideal; and when a woman's home isn't the hub of her universe,--well, she takes to china painting, or gossip, or philanthropy; a man takes to poker or politics. I took to politics, second-hand. Personally and concretely I abhorred the whole miserable farce, but abstractly, and as a means to an end which I greatly desired, I found it interesting. I admired you infinitely more than I liked you in those days, but I wouldn't have married you under any circ.u.mstances."

"Why?"

"First, because I didn't want to marry any one; I didn't want to care that much. And, secondly, because I wanted you to devote yourself to your country, and had you possessed a family your devotion would have been divided. I don't see," she went on reflectively, "how you, who know so well how empty it all was, and how hopeless the endeavor to lift it an inch,--I don't see how you can think anything would justify us in making it go on."

"But, on the other hand," he said, "are we justified in snuffing it all out? There was so much that was beautiful, and the possibilities were so glorious! Sweetheart, I shall not believe you love me if you think the world all cold and dark. I believe now the one law it needs, or has ever needed, is love, the fulfilling of the law."