The Master-Knot of Human Fate Part 13

"That is one of the questions that I was sent to bed for asking a preacher who was visiting at our house, when I was about seven years old. They hurried me hence before he had a chance to answer, so I never found out. But I know what you are thinking of, and I have thought of it too. Perhaps there isn't any land of Nod, or any land at all. And I have thought, also, how it would be if one of us died and left the other with little children. You might take my body and jump off the rock, but you couldn't take them too, and still less could you leave them."

"I have thought of the risk to you," he said, "and felt that not even for the sake of a child would I let you come so near death."

She laughed a little. "That is really funny," she said. "You must have been reading Michelet; I never thought of that at all. I am very well and strong, and my habits and my clothes are not such as to hamper my life nor endanger that of another. There is next to no risk, so far as that is concerned, certainly none I would not gladly take. But I have dreaded afterwards, when the child might fall ill and need help that we could not give it."

"Because there are no doctors in the world?" said Adam, with a touch of cynicism. "I don't know that we are not better off without them.

The greatest of them confessed that it was guess-work. The best doctors I ever knew were always trying to make their patients live more simply, take more exercise, and give nature a chance; they never resorted to medicine until there was nothing else to do. If all the germs and microbes have gone with them, the earth can stand the loss.

The main thing is to be well born, and when the body is healthy and leads a natural life, while it may know pain, it need not be a prey to disease. Very few children had a heritage worth having. It had been bartered away. No wonder we were taught to say, 'There is no health in us.'"

"Do you remember Gannett's 'Not All There'?" she asked soberly. "I am not sure I can recall it, but it began this way:--

"Something short in the making, Something lost on the way, As the little soul was taking Its path to the break of day.

"Only his mood or pa.s.sion, But it twitched an atom back, And she for her G.o.ds of fashion Filched from the pilgrim's pack.

"The father did not mean it, The mother did not know, No human eye had seen it, But the little soul needed it so.

"Thro' the street there pa.s.sed a cripple Maimed from before its birth; On the strange face gleamed a ripple Like a half dawn on the earth.

"It pa.s.sed, and it awed the city As one not alive nor dead; Eyes looked and burned with pity.

'He is not all there,' they said.

"Not all! for part is behind it, Lying dropped on the way; That part--could two but find it, How welcome the end of day!"

For a long while neither spoke, then Robin went on. The colt had wandered back to its mother, and she sat with her hands clasped, and her eyes looking far out to sea.

"I don't blame people for dreading the responsibility, nor even for shirking it, when I think of all the conditions we had to face. Men who thought they had hedged their trades about with so much skill that they had banished compet.i.tion, found that they had only succeeded in bringing into the field the machine that banished them. And everywhere there was such ghastly poverty,--poverty of body and brain and soul.

We had gone back to patrons and patronesses. Men or women did not do anything of themselves any more,--they did not sing or play, or give a reading, or exhibit a painting. They starved, or they performed or exhibited 'under the auspices of.' It has always been the same. Given a pure democracy, and demos reigns sooner or later. The shiftless go to the bottom, the thrifty to the top, and then like the upper and nether millstones, they grind everything between them. That which is below cries, 'Alms!' and that which is above responds, 'Largesse,' and the voice that cries, 'Justice,' is stifled between. The stone that crushed from above and the rock that ground from below were very near, and men dreaded them, for when the grist is ground, and flint strikes upon flint, the conflagration is at hand. Do you think I am talking like a Populist campaign book? I only know what I saw, and what the poets have said. I wouldn't dare to be as radical as Lowell, nor as bitter as Tennyson, nor as savage as Carlyle, or Ruskin, or Hugo. We had overcome the sharpness of death, but whence could we hope for deliverance from the sharpness of living?"

"We have been delivered," said Adam, slowly, "but you don't seem disposed to be the Miriam of this Israel--limited."

"Well, no," answered Robin. "I should like to believe that you and I were rewarded for our superhuman excellence by being saved when Pharaoh and his mult.i.tudes went under, but a somewhat wide acquaintance with other people forbids. On the other hand, we can't have been left on account of our superlative badness. Truly, Adam, don't you feel sometimes as if you would rather have died with the rest?"

He hesitated. The question was so unexpected, and so fraught with possibilities. She watched the struggle in his face and honored him for it. He put back a stray lock of hair and kissed her forehead before he answered.

"The streak of cowardice that we all of us have in us," he said finally, "the distrust of myself, and the doubt of all systems of life of which I know anything, prompts me to answer yes; for I think even if we had died, you and I would still be together. I think sometimes we have been, in the past, but whether we have or not, I know we shall be in the future. So while the mental part of me,--which it seems to me is the weakest and most contemptible part of man, because it is always reasoning him out of what his soul tells him is true,--while the mental part of me might find it easier to be dead than to know what we ought to do, everything else in me rejoices. I know that in the great plan we have a part, it seems to me a very happy and beautiful part. In all our world there is no cause for anger or hatred or sin. There is friendliness and content and gentleness and love all around us; look up, dear, and see how near heaven seems."

But though she looked up, she saw only the light in his eyes.

XXI

"We're all for love," the violins said.

SIDNEY LANIER.

Robin's music was a source of great delight to both of them. There was such a sense of time, infinite and unlimited, that they ceased to be the hurrying mortals of earth. The joy of life crept into their hearts, and they grew young with the new world.

One evening they watched the full moon come up over the mountains. She had been playing a few desultory airs, and looking up asked,--

"Who is it says 'music is love in search of a word'?"

"If you don't know, I'm sure I don't," answered Adam, laughing. "Do you know that you quote entirely too much?"

"Oh, yes," she said lightly. "I always knew that if I ever should break into print, the critics, supposing they ever deigned to notice me, would say, as they said of Lubbock's 'Beauties of Life,' that it wasn't a book, but a compendium of useful quotations. But do you really dislike quoting? I think it takes as much or nearly as much originality to quote well as to invent."

"Oh, no!" he interposed.

"No? Well, it seems so to me. I think the thing first myself, that is original so far as I am concerned, though it may be old as the hills, and then it comes to me afterward, in a dozen ways, perhaps, as other people have said it. I realize that in the kaleidoscope of life the pattern before my mind's eye approximates that which others have seen.

We don't say a man knows too many synonyms or antonyms, and I don't see much difference."

"I have a misty memory that quotation is said to be a confession of inferiority," answered Adam.

"That's Emerson," she said, laughing; "but he also says, 'genius borrows n.o.bly,' and I am willing to confess inferiority to a great many people; all that implies is that one should only quote well. If it wasn't that I'm not sure of the words, and that I can't verify them, I should confound you with a citation from Disraeli."

"Go on," said Adam, lazily; "I don't mind being crushed."

"It is to the effect that people think that where there is no quotation there must be great originality. Then he says, 'the greater part of our writers, in consequence, have become so original that no one cares to imitate them; and those who never quote are seldom quoted.' That's about it. Now are you answered?" She laughed gleefully. "It is delicious to disagree with you. I had almost forgotten that it was possible."

He echoed her laugh with the carefree heartiness of a boy. "I am going to make a riddle," he said. "Prepare yourself; this is the first conundrum of the new world. Why is it better to disagree than to differ?"

She made a little grimace. "It's a wonder the Sphinx does not rise from the other side of the world and eat you," she said with derision.

"Anybody who loved anybody could answer such a poor little excuse for a riddle as that; besides, it sounds like an extract from somebody's 'First Easy Lessons in Rhetoric.' Don't you see that I can disagree _with_ you, while I must differ _from_ you? That is too disgracefully easy. Indeed, Adam, that riddle of yours brings back every doubt, for they say--scientists and ologists and learned people, you know--that there is hope for delinquents and defectives, but none for degenerates, and that is an awfully degenerate joke."

"Play for me," he said, "and don't call names."

She lifted the bow and drew it across the strings in a series of cadences so wildly mournful that he shuddered. She put the bow down, and laid her hand upon the strings to still them. In the old days she had been given to sudden changes of mood, but of late she had been almost serene.

"What is it?" he asked gently.

"Oh, nothing,--everything! I was thinking of another thing which those wise ones said," she answered, with more bitterness than she had shown for many months. "It was that word 'degenerate' brought it back. You know birds are a very low order of being, a branch of the reptile family, in truth, and I have heard people say that musicians are generally lacking in something. They either have no moral or financial sense, and cannot be bound by ordinary rules. And I am musical to the very tips of my fingers. It is as if I could hear the song of the silence,--I feel its vibrations like those of a great organ."

She walked up and down, her hands back of her head, and the moonlight shining on her upturned, troubled face.

"There is another scientific fact you forget," he said.

She stopped to listen, and he went on.

"When a race has run its course, nature cries 'habet,' and nothing can alter its fate. It was not alone the merciless onslaughts of the white man that exterminated the buffalo. They died, and none came to take their places. They vanished, less on account of man's cruelty than by reason of their own sterility. Degenerates or regenerates, can't we leave the decision with a power that forever builds or destroys, in accordance with a law we do not understand, a higher law that comes from the source of all law, whatever that source may be? Don't think any more, but play for me. In spite of my lecture, I will quote too; my mother used to sing a hymn that went like this,--

'I'd soar and touch the heavenly strings, And vie with Gabriel while he sings,'--

Do you know it?"

She began the old tune, "Ariel," and then wandered on, playing many airs that brought back forgotten days. Adam threw himself down on the gra.s.s to listen, half jealously, for she seemed to forget everything.