IT was this new growth of humanity which made continuing social progress so rapid and so sure.
These young minds had no rubbish in them. They had a vivid sense of the world as a whole, quite beyond their family “relations.” They were marvelously reasonable, free from prejudice, able to see and willing to do. And this spreading tide of hope and courage flowed back into the older minds, as well as forward into the new
I found that peopled ideas of youth and age had altered materially. Nellie said it was due to the change in women — but then she laid most things to that. She reminded me that women used to be considered only as females, and were “old” when no longer available in that capacity; but that as soon as they recognized themselves as human beings they put “Grandma” into the background, and “Mother” too; and simply went on working and growing and enjoying life up into the lively eighties — even nineties, sometimes.
“Brains do not cease to function at fifty,” she said. “Just because a woman is no longer an object to ‘fall in love’ with, it does not follow that life has no charms for her. Women today have all that they ever had before, all that was good in it; and more, a thousand times more. When the lives of half the world widen like that it widens the other half too.”
This quite evidently had happened.
The average mental standard was higher, the outlook broader. I found many very ordinary people, of course; some whose only attitude toward this wonderful new world was to enjoy its advantages; and even some who grumbled. These were either old persons with bad digestions or new immigrants from very backward countries.
I traveled about, visiting different places, consulting all manner of authorities, making notes, registering objections. It was all interesting, and grew more so as it seemed less strange. My sense of theatrical unreality gave way to a growing appreciation of the universal beauty about me.
Art, I found, held a very different position from what it used to hold. It had joined hands with life again, was common, familiar, used in all things. There were pictures, many and beautiful, but the great word Art was no longer so closely confined to its pictorial form. It was not narrow, expensive, requiring a special education, but part of the atmosphere in which all children grew, all people lived.
For instance the theatre, which I remember as a two-dollar affair, and mainly vulgar and narrow, was now the daily companion and teacher. The historic instinct with which nearly every child is born was cultivated without check. The little ones played through all their first years of instruction, played the old stone age (most natural to them!) the new stone age, the first stages of industry. Older children learned history that way; and as they reached years of appreciation, special dramas were written for them, in which psychology and sociology were learned without hearing their names.
Those happy, busy, eager young things played gaily through wide ranges of human experience; and when these emotions touched them in later years, they were not strange and awful, but easy to understand.
In every smallest village there was a playhouse, not only in the child-gardens, but for the older people. They each had their dramatic company, as some used to have their bands; had their musical companies too, and better ones.
Out of this universal use of the drama rose freely those of special talent who made it the major business of their lives; and the higher average everywhere gave to these greater ones the atmosphere of real appreciation which a growing art must have.
I asked Nellie how the people managed who lived in the real country — remote and alone.
“We don’t live that way any more,” she said. “Only some stubborn old people, like Uncle Jake and Aunt Dorcas. You see the women decided that they must live in groups to have proper industrial and educational advantages; and they do.”
“Where do the men live?” I asked grimly.
“With the women, of course — Where should they? I don’t mean that a person cannot go and live in a hut on a mountain, if he likes; we do that in summer, very largely. It is a rest to be alone part of the time. But living, real human living, requires a larger group than one family. You can see the results.”
I could and I did; though I would not always admit it to Nellie; and this beautiful commonness of good music, good architecture, good sculpture, good painting, gpod drama, good dancing, good literature, impressed me increasingly. Instead of those perpendicular peaks of isolated genius we used to have, surrounded by the ignorantly indifferent many, and the excessively admiring few, those geniuses now sloped gently down to the average on long graduated lines of decreasing ability. It gave to the commonest people a possible road of upward development, and to the most developed a path of connection with the com monest people. The geniuses seemed to like it too. They were not so conceited, not so disagreeable, not so lonesome.
People seemed to have a very good time, even while at work; indeed very many found their work more fun than anything else. . The abundant leisure gave a sort of margin to life which was wholly new, to the majoriety at least. It was that spare time, and the direct efforts of the government in wholesale educational lines, which had accomplished so much in the first ten years.
Owen reminded me of the educational vitality even of the years I knew; of the university extension movement, the lectures in the public schools, the push of the popular magazines; the summer schools, the hundreds of thousands of club women, whose main effort seemed to be to improve their minds.
“And the Press,” I said — “our splendid Press.”
“That was one of our worst obstacles, I’m sorry to say,” he answered.
I looked at him. “Oh, go ahead, go ahead! You’ll tell me the public schools were an obstacle next.”
“They would have been — if we hadn’t changed them,” he agreed. “But they were in our hands at least, and we got them re-arranged very promptly. That absurd old despotism which kept the grade of teachers down so low, was very promptly changed. We have about five times as many teachers now, fifty times as good and far better paid, not only in cash, but in public appreciation. Our teachers are ‘leading citizens’ now — we have elected one President from the School Principalship of a state.”
This was news, and not unpleasant.
“Have you elected any Editors?”
“No — but we may soon. They are a new set of men now I can tell you; and women, of course. You remember in our day journalism was frankly treated as a trade; whereas it is visibly one of the most important professions.”
“And did you so reform those Editors, so that they became as self-sacrificing as country doctors?”
“Oh, no. But we changed the business conditions. It was the advertising that corrupted the papers — mostly; and the advertisers were only screaming for bread and butter — especially butter. When Socialism reorganized business there was no need to scream.
“But I find plenty of advertising in the papers and magazines.”
“Certainly — it is a great convenience. Have you studied it?”
I had to own that I had not particularly — I never did like advertising.
“You’ll find it worth reading. In the first place it’s all true.”
“How do you secure that?”
“We have made lying to the public ay crime — don’t you remember? Each community has its Board of Standards; there is a constant effort to improve standards you x see, in all products; and expert judgment may always be had, for nothing. If any salesman advertises falsely he loses his job, if he’s an official; and is posted, if he’s selling as a private individual. When the public is told officially that Mr. Jones is a liar it hurts his trade.”
“You have a Government Press?”
“Exactly. The Press is preeminently a public function — it is not and never was a private business — not legitimately.”
“But you do have private papers and magazines?”
“Yes indeed, lots of them. Ever so many personal ‘organs’ large and small. But they don’t carry advertising. If enough people will buy a man’s paper to pay him, he’s quite free to publish.”
“How do you prevent his carrying advertising?”
“It’s against the law — like any other misdemeanor. Post Office won’t take it — he can’t distribute. No, if you want to find out about the latest breakfast food — ( and there are a score you never heard of) — or the last improvement in fountain pens or air-ships — you find it all, clear, short, and reliable, in the hotel paper of every town. There’s no such bulk of advertising matter now, you see; not so many people struggling to sell the same thing.”
“Is all business socialized?”
“Yes — and no. All the main business is; the big assured steady things that our life depends on. But there is a free margin for individual initiative — and always will be. We are not so foolish as to cut off that supply. We have more inventors and idealists than ever; and plenty of chance for trial. You see the two hours a day which pays board, so to speak, leaves plenty of time to do other work; and if the new thing the man does is sufficiently valuable to enough people, he is free to do that alone. Like the little one-man papers I spoke of. If a man can find five thousand people who will pay a dollar a year to read what he says he’s quite as likely to make his living that way.” “Have you no competition at all?” “Plenty of it. All our young folks are? racing and chasing to break the record; to do more work, better work, new work.”
“But not under the spur of necessity.”
“Why, yes they are. The most compelling necessity we know. They have to do it; it is in them and must come out.”
“But they are all sure of a living, aren’t they?”
“Yes, of course. Oh, I see! What you meant by necessity was hunger and cold. Bless you, John, poverty was no spur. It was a deadly anaesthetic.”
I looked my disagreement, and he went on: “You remember the hideous poverty and helplessness of the old days — did that ‘spur’ the population to do anything? Don’t you see, John, that if poverty had been the splendid stimulus it used to be thought, there wouldn’t have been any poverty? Some few exceptional persons triumphed in spite of it, but we shall never know the amount of world loss in the many who did not.
“It was funny,” he continued meditatively, “how we went on believing that in some mysterious way poverty ‘strengthened character,’ ‘developed initiative,’ ‘stimulated industry,’ and did all manner of fine things; and never turned our eyes on the millions of people who lived and died in poverty with weakened characters, no initiative, a slow, enforced and hated industry. My word, John, what fools we were!”
I was considering this Government Press he described. “How did you dispose of the newspapers you had?”
“Just as we disposed of the saloons; drove them out of business by underselling them with better goods. The laws against lying helped too.”
“I don’t see how you can stop people’s lying”
“We can’t stop their lying in private, except by better social standards; but we can stop public lying, and we have. If a paper published a false statement anyone could bring a complaint; and the district attorney was obliged to prosecute. If a paper pleaded ignorance or misinformation it was let off with a fine and a reprimand the first time, a heavy fine the second time, and confiscation the third time; as being proved by their own admission incompetent to tell the truth! If it was shown to be an intentional falsehood they were put out of business at once.”
“That’s all very pretty,” I said, “and sounds easy as you tell it; but what made people so hot about lying? They didn’t used to mind it. The more you tell me of these things the more puzzled I am as to what altered the minds of the people. They certainly had to alter considerably from the kind I remember, to even want all these changes, much more to enforce them.”
Owen wasn’t much of a psychologist, and said so. He insisted that people had wanted better things, only they did not know it.
“Well — what made them know it?” I insisted. “Now here’s one thing, small in a way, but showing a very long step in altertion; people dress comfortably and beautifully; almost all of them. What made them do it?”
“They have more money,” Owen began, “more leisure and better education.”
But I waved this aside.
“That has nothing to do with it. The people with money and education were precisely the ones who wore the most out — rageous clothes. And as to leisure — they spent their leisure in getting up foolish costumes, apparently.”
“Women are more intelligent, you see,” he began again; but I dismissed this also.
“The intelligence of a Lord Chancellor didn’t prevent his wearing a wig! How did people break loose from the force of fashion, I want to know?”
He could not make this clear, and said he wouldn’t try.
“You show me all these material changes,” I went on; “and I can see that there was no real obstacle to them; but the obstacle that lasted so long was in the people’s minds. What moved that? Then you show me this marvellous new education, as resulting in new kinds of people, better people, wiser, freer, stronger, braver; and I can see that at work. But how did you come to accept this new education? You needn’t lay it all to the women, as Nellie does. I knew one or two of the most advanced of them in 1910, and they had no such world-view as this. They wore foolish clothes and had no ideas beyond ‘Votes for Women’ — some of them.”
“No sir! I admit that there was potential wealth enough in the earth to support all this ease and beauty; and potential energy in the people to produce the wealth. I admit that it was possible for people to leave off being stupid and become wise — evidently they have done so. But I don’t see what made them.”
“You go and see Dr. Borderson,” said Owen.
DR. BORDERSON, it seemed, held the chair in Ethics at the University, I knew a Borderson once and was very fond of him. Poor Frank! If he was alive he would have more likely reached a prison or a hospital than a professorship. Yet he was brilliant enough. We were great friends in college, and before; let me see — thirty-five years ago. But he was expelled for improper conduct, and went from bad to worse. The last I had heard of him was in a criminal case — but he had run away and disappeared. I well remembered the grief and shame it was to me at the time to see such a promising young life ruined and lost so early.
Thinking of this, I was shown into the study of the great teacher of ethics, and as I shook hands I met the keen brown eyes of — Frank Borderson. He had both my hands and shook them warmly.
“Well, John! It is good to see you again. How well you look; how little you have changed! It’s a good world you’ve come back to, isn’t it?”
“You are the most astonishing thing I’ve seen so far,” I replied. “Do you really mean it? Are you — a Professor of Ethics?”
“When I used to be a God-forsaken rascal, eh? Yes, it’s really so. I've taught Ethics for twenty years, and gradually pushed along to this position. And I was a good deal farther off than Tibet, old man.”
I was tremendously glad to see him. It was more like a touch of the old life than anything I had yet found — except Nellie, of course. We spoke for some time of those years of boyhood; of the good times we had had together; of our common friends.
He kept me to dinner; introduced me to his wife, a woman with a rather sad, sweet face, which seemed to bear marks of deep experience; and we settled down for an evening’s talk.
“I think you have come to the right person, John; not only because of my special studies, but because of my special line of growth. If I can tell you what changed me, so quickly and so wholly, you won’t be much puzzled about the others, eh?”
I fully agreed with him. The boy I knew was clever enough to dismiss all theology, to juggle with philosophy and pick ethics to pieces; but his best friends had been reluctantly compelled to admit that he had “no moral character.” He had, to my knowledge, committed a number of unquestionable “sins,” and by hearsay I knew of vices and crimes that followed. And he was Dr. Borderson!
“Ill take myself as a sample, Whitman fashion,” said he. “There I was when you knew me — conceited, ignorant, clever, self-indulgent, weak, sensual, dishonest. After I was turned out of college I broke a good many laws and nearly all the commandments. What was worse, in one way, was that my ‘wages’ were being paid me in disease — abominable disease. Also I had two drug habits — alchohol and cocaine. Will you take me as a sample?”
I looked at him. He had not the perfect health I saw so much of in the younger people; but he seemed in no way an invalid, much less a drug victim. His eyes were clear and bright, his complexion good, his hand steady, his manner assured and calm.
“Frank,” said I, “you beat anything I’ve seen yet. You stand absolutely to my mind as an illustration of ‘Before Taking’ and ‘After Taking.’ Now in the name of reason tell me what it was you Took!”
“I took a new grip on Life — that’s the whole answer. But you want to know the steps, and I’ll tell you. The new stage of ethical perception we are in now — or, as you would probably say, this new religion — presents itself to me in this way:
“The business of the universe about us consists in the Transmission of Energy. Some of it is temporarily and partially arrested in material compositions; some is more actively expressed in vegetable and animal form; this stage of expression we call Life. We ourselves, the human animals, were specially adapted for high efficiency in storing and transmitting this energy; and so were able to enter into a combination still more efficient; that is, into social relations. Humanity, man in social relation, is the best ex pression of the Energy that we know. This Energy is what the human mind has been conscious of ever since it was conscious at all; and calls God. The relation between this God and this Humanity is in reality a very simple one. In common with all other life forms, the human being must express itself in normal functioning. Because of its special faculty of consciousness, this human engine can feel, see, think, about the power within it; and can use it more fully and wisely. All it has to learn is the right expression of its degree of life-force, of Social Energy.” He beamed at me. “I think it’s about all there, John.”
“You may be a very good Professor of Ethics for these new-made minds, but you don’t reach the old kind — not a little bit. To my mind you haven’t said anything — yet.”
He seemed a little disappointed, but took it mildly. “Perhaps I am a little out of touch. Wait a moment — let me go back and try to take up the old attitude.”
He leaned badk in his chair and shut his eyes, I saw an expression of pain slowly grow and deepen on his face; and suddenly realized what he was doing.
“Oh, never mind, Frank; don’t do it; don’t try, I’ll catch on somehow.”
He seemed not to hear me; but dropped his face in his hands. When he raised it it was clear again. “Now I can make things clearer perhaps,” he said. “We had in our minds thirty years ago a strange hodge-podge of old and new ideas. What was called God was still largely patterned after the old tribal deity of the Hebrews. Our ideas of ‘Sin’ were still mostly of the nature of disobedience — wrong only because we were told not to do it. Sin as a personal offence against Somebody, and Somebody very much offended; that was it. We were beginning to see something of Social values, too, but not clearly. Our progress was in what we called ‘The natural sciences’; and we did not think with the part of our minds wherein we stored religion. Yet there was very great activity and progress in religious thought; the whole field was in motion; the new churches widening and growing in every direction; the older ones holding on like grim death, trying not to change, and changing in spite of themselves; and Ethics being taught indeed, but with no satisfying basis. That’s the kind of atmosphere you and I grew up in, John. Now here was I, an ill-assorted team of impulses and characteristics, prejudiced against religion, ignorant of real ethics, and generally going to the devil — as we used to call it I You know how far down I went — or something of it.”
“Don’t speak of it, Frank!” I said. “That was long ago; forget it, old man!” But he turned toward me a smile of triumph.
“Forget it! I wouldn’t forget one step of it if I could! Why, John, it’s because of my intimate knowledge of these down-going steps that I can help other people up them!”
“You looked decidedly miserable just now, all the same, when you were thinking them over.”
“Oh, bless you, John, I wasn’t thinking of myself at all! I was thinking of the awful state of mind the world was in, and how it suffered! Of all the horror and misery and shame; all that misplaced, unnecessary cruelty we called punishment; the Dark Ages we were still in, in spite of all we had to boast of. However, this new perception came.”
I interrupted him.
“What came? Who came? Did you have a new revelation? Who did it? What do you call it? Nobody seems to be able to give me definite information.”
He smiled broadly. “You’re a beautiful proof of the kind of mental jumble I spoke of. Knowledge of evolution did not come by a revelation, did it? Or did any one man, or two, give it to us? Darwin and Wallace were not the only minds that helped to see and express that great idea; and many more had to spread it. These great truths break into the world-mind through various individuals, and coalesce so that we cannot dis connect them. We have had many writers, preachers, lecturers, who discoursed and explained; this new precept as to the relation between man and God came with such a general sweep that no one even tries to give personal credit for it. These things are not personal — they are world-percepts.”
“But every religion has had its Founder, hasn’t it?”
“Z don’t call it a religion, my dear fellow! It’s a science, like any other science. Ethics is The Science of Human Relation. It is called Applied Sociology — that’s all.”
“How does a thing like that touch one, personally?” I asked.
“How does any science touch one personally? One studies a science, one teaches a science, one uses a science. That’s the point — the use of it. Our old scheme of religion was a thing to ‘believe,’ or ‘deny’; it was a sort of shibboleth, a test question one had to pass examination in to get good marks! What I’m telling you about is a general recognition of right behavior, and a general grasp of the necessary power.”
“You leave out entirely the emotional side of religion.”
“Do I? I did not intend to. You see, we do not distinguish religion from life now, and are apt to forget old terms. You are thinking, I suppose, of the love of God, and man, which we used to preach. We practice it now.
“That Energy I spoke of, when perceived by us, is called Love. Love, the real thing we had in mind when we said ‘God is Love,’ is beneficent energy. It is the impulse of service, the desire to do, to help, to make, to benefit. That is the ‘love’ we were told to bestow on one another. Now we do.”
“Yes; but what made you do it? What keeps you up to it?”
“Just nature, John. It is human nature. We used to believe otherwise.” He was quiet for a while.
“One of these new doctors got hold of me, when I was about as near the bottom as one can go and get back. Not a priest with a formula, nor a reformer with an exhortation; but a real physician, a soul-doctor, with a passionate enthusiasm for an interesting case. That’s what I was, John; not a lost soul; not even a ‘sinner’ — just ‘a case.’ Have you heard about these moral sanitariums?”
“Yes — but not definitely.”
“Well, as soon as this view of things took hold, they began to want to isolate bad cases, and cure them if they could. And they cured me.”
“How, Frank — how? What did they tell you that you didn’t know before? What did they do to you?”
“Sane, strong, intelligent minds put themselves in connection with mine, John, and shared their strength with me. I was matters to feel that my individual failure was na great matter, but that my social duty wast that the whole of my dirty past was as nothJ ing to all our splendid future, that whatever I had done was merely to be forgotten — the sooner the better, and that all life was open before me — all human life; endless, beautiful, profoundly interesting — the game was on, and I was in it.
“John — I wish I could make you feel it. It was as if we had all along had inside us an enormous reservoir of love, human love, that had somehow been held in and soured! This new arrangement of our minds let it out — to our limitless relief and joy. No ‘sin’ — think of that I Just let it sink in. No such thing as sin. . . . We had, collectively and privately, made mistakes, and done the wrong thing, often. What of it? Of course we had. A growing race grew that way. i
“Now we are wiser and need not keep on going wrong. We had learned that life was far easier, pleasanter, more richly satisfying when followed on these new lines — and the new lines were not hard to learn. Love was the natural element of social life. Love meant service, service meant doing one’s special work well, and doing it for the persons served — of course!
“All our mistakes lay in our helated Individualism. You cannot predicate Ethics of individuals; you cannot fulfill any religion as individuals. My fellow creatures took hold of me, you see. That power that was being used so extensively for physical healing in our young days had become a matter of common knowledge — and use.”
“How many of these — moral hygienists — did you have?”
“Scores, hundreds, thousands — we all help one another now. If a person is tired and blue and has lost his grip, if he can’t rectify it by change of diet and change of scene, he goes to a moral hygienist, as you rightly call it, and gets help. I do a lot of that sort of work.”
I meditated awhile, and again shook my head. “I’m afraid it’s no use. I can’t make it seem credible. I hear what you say and I see what you’ve done — but I do not get any clear understanding of the process. With people as they were, with all those case-hardened old sinners, all the crass ignorance, the stupidity, the sodden prejudice, the apathy, the selfishness — to make a world like that see reason — in thirty years! — No — I don’t get it.”
“You are wrong in your premises, John. Human nature is, and was, just as good as the rest of nature. Two things kept us back — wrong conditions, and wrong ideas; we y; have changed both. I think you forget the ’ sweeping advance in material conditions and its effect on character. What made the well-bred, well-educated, well-meaning, pleasant people we used to know? Good conditions, for them and their ancestors. There were just as pleasant people among the poor and among their millions of children; they had every capacity for noble growth — given the chance. It took no wholesale change of heart to make people want shorter hours, better pay, better housing, food, clothes, amusements. As soon as the shameful pressure of poverty was taken off humanity it rose like a freed spring. Humanity’s all right.” I “There were some things all wrong,” I replied, “that I know. You could not obliterate hereditary disease in ten — or thirty years. You couldn’t make clean women of hundreds of thousands of prostitutes. You couldn’t turn an invalid tramp into a healthy gentleman.”
He stopped me. “We could do better than that,” he said, “and we have. I begin to see your central difficulty, John; the difficulty that used to hold us all. You are looking at life as a personal affair — a matter of personal despair or salvation.”
“Of course, what else is it?”
“What else! Why, that is no part of human life! Human life is social, John, collectively, common, or it isn’t human life at all. Hereditary disease looks pretty hopeless when you see one generation or two or three so cursed. But when you realize how swiftly the stream of human life can be cleansed of it, you take a fresh hold. The percentage of hereditary disease has sunk by more than half in thirty years, John, and at its present rate of decrease will be gone, clean gone, in another twenty. Remember that every case is known, and that they are either prevented from transmitting the inheritance, isolated, or voluntarily living single. Diseases from bad conditions we no longer endure, nor diseases from ignorance, those from bacilli we are able to resist or cure; disease was never a permanent thing — only an accident. As for the prostitutes — we thought them ‘ruined’ because they were no longer suitable for our demands in marriage. As if that was everything! I tell you we opened a way out for them!”
“Namely?”
“Namely all the rest of life! Sex-life isn’t everything, John. Not fit to be a mother, we said to them; never mind — there is everything else in the world to be. You may remember, my friend, that thousands of men, as vicious as any prostitutes, and often as diseased, continued to live, to work, and to enjoy. Why shouldn’t the women? You haven’t ruined your lives, we said to them; only one part. It’s a loss, a great loss, but never mind, the whole range of human life remains open to you, the great moving world of service and growth and happiness. If you’re sick, you’re sick — we’ll cure it if possible. If not, you’ll die — never mind, we all die — that’s nothing.”
“Does your new religion call death nothing?”
“Certainly. The fuss we made about death was wholly owing to the old religions; the post-mortem religions, their whole basis was death.”
“Hold on a bit. Do you mean to tell me the people aren’t afraid of death any more?”
“Not a bit. Why should they be? Every living thing dies; that’s part of the living. We do not hide it from children now, we teach it to them.”
“Teach death — to children! How horrible!”
“Did you see or hear anything horrible in your educational excursions, John? I know you didn’t. No, they learn it naturally; in their gardens; in their autumn and winter songs; in their familiarity with insects and animals. Our children learn life, death, and immortality, from silk-worms; and, then only incidentally. The silk is what they are studying.
“It takes a great many silk-worms to make silk, generations of them. They see them horn, live and die, as incidents in silk culture. So we show them how people are horn, live and die, in the making of human history. The idea is worked into our new educational literature — and all our literature for that matter. We see human life as a continuous whole now. People are only temporary parts of it. Dying isn’t any more trouble than being born.
“People feared death, originally, because it hurt; being chased and eaten was not pleasant. But natural dying does not hurt. Then they were made to fear it by the hell-school of religions. All that is gone by. Our religion rests on life.”
“The life of this world or the life eternal?”
“The eternal life of this world, John. We have no quarrel with anyone’s belief as to what may happen after death, that is a free field; but the glory and power of our religion is that it rests with assurance on common knowledge of the beautiful facts of life. Here is Humanity, a continuing stream of life. Its line of advance is clear. That which makes Humanity stronger, wiser and happier is evidently what is rigit for it to do. We do teach it to all our children.”
“And they do it?”
“Of course they do it. Why shouldn’t they?”
“But our evil tendencies ”
“We don’t have evil tendencies, John — and never did. We have earlier and later tendencies; and it is perfectly possible to show the child which is which.”
“But surely it is easier to follow the lower impulses than the higher; easier to give way than to strive.”
“There’s the old misconception, John, that Striving idea.’ We assumed that it was ‘natural’ to be ‘bad’ and ‘unnatural’ to be ‘good’ — that we had to make special efforts, painful and laborious, to become better. We had not seen, thirty years ago, that social evolution is as ‘natural’ as the evolution of the horse from the eohippus. If it was easier to be an eohippus than a horse why did the thing change?
“As to that army of ‘fallen women 5 you are so anxious about, they just got up again, that’s all, got up and went on. They had only fallen from one position; there was plenty of room left to stand and walk. Why they were not a speck on society compared to the ‘fallen men.’ Two hundred thousand prostitutes in the city of New York — well? How many patrons? A million, at the least. They kept on doing business, and enjoying life. I tell you, John, all the unnecessary evils of condition in the old days, were as nothing to the unnecessary evils of our foolish ideas! And ideas can be changed in the twinkling of an eye!
“As to your hoboes and bums, that invalid tramp you instanced — I can settle your mind on that point. I was an invalid tramp, John; a drunkard, a cocaine fiend, a criminal, sick, desperate, as bad as they make them.”
“Which brings us back to that ‘moral sanitarium’ I suppose?”
“Yes. I strayed away from it. I keep forgetting my own case. But it is an excellent one for illustration. I was taken hold of with the strong hand, and given a course of double treatment, deep and thorough. By double treatment I mean physical and mental at once; such a complete overhauling and wise care as enabled my exhausted vitality slowly to reassert itself, and at the same time such strong tender cheerful companionship, such well-devised entertainment, such interesting, irresistible instruction — Why, John — put a tramp into Paradise, and there’s some hope of him.”
I was about to say that tramps did not deserve Paradise, but as I remembered what this man had been, and saw what he was now, I refrained.
He read my mind at once.
“It’s not a question of desert, John. We no longer deal in terms of personal reward or punishment. If I have a bad finger or a bad tooth I save it if I can; not because it deserves it, but because I need it. People who used to be called sinners are now seen to be diseased members of society, and society turns all its regenerative forces on at once. We never used to dream of that flood of power we had at hand — the Regenerative Forces of Society!”
He sat smiling, his fine eyes full of light. “Sometimes we had to amputate,” he continued, “especially at first. It is very seldom necessary now.”
“You mean you killed the worst people?”
“We killed many hopeless degenerates, insane, idiots, and real perverts, after trying our best powers of cure. But it is really astonishing to see how much can be done with what we used to call criminals, merely by first-class physical treatment. I can remember how strange it seemed to me, having elaborate baths, massage, electric stimulus, perfect food, clean comfortable beds, beautiful clothes, books, music, congenial company, and wonderful instruction. It was very confusing. It went far to rearrange all my ideas.”
“If you treat — social invalids — like that, I should think they would ‘lie down;’ just to remain in hospital forever. Or go out and be bad in order to get back again.”
“Oh, no,” he said. “A healthy man can’t lie around and do nothing very long. Also it is good outside too, remember. Life is good, pleasant, easy. Why on earth should a man want to prowl around at night and steal when he can have all he wants, with less effort, in the daytime? Happy people do not become criminals.
“But I can tell you what treatment like that does to one. It gives a man a new view of human life, of what it is he belongs to. A sense of pride in our common accomplishment, of gratitude for the pleasure he receives, of a natural desire to contribute something. I took this new ethics — it satisfied me, it’s reasonable, it’s necessary. We make it our basic study now, in all the schools. You must have noticed that?”
“Yes, I had noticed it, as I looked back. But they don’t call it that,” I said.
“No, they don’t call it anything to the children. It is just life, the rules of decent behavior.”
We sat silent awhile after this. Things were clearing up a little in my mind.
“A sort of crystallization of chaotic progressive thought into clear diamonds of usable truth — is that about what happened?” I said.
“That’s exactly it,”
“And a general refutation and clearing out of — of — ”
“Of a lot of things we deeply believed — that were not so! That is what was the matter with us, John. Our minds were full of what Mrs. Eddy christened error. I wish I could make you feel what a sunrise it was to the world when we left off believing lies and learned the facts.”
“Can you, in a few words, outline a little of your new ‘Ethics’ to the lay mind?”
“Easily. It is all ‘lay’ enough. We don’t make a separate profession of religion, or a separate science of ethics. Ethics is social hygiene — it teaches how humanity must live in order to be well and strong. We show the child the patent facts of social relation, how all our daily life, our accumulated wealth and beauty and continuing power, rests on common action, on what people do together. Everything about him teaches that. Then we show him the reasons why such and such actions are wrong, what the results are; how to avoid wrong lines of action and adopt right ones. It’s no more difficult than teaching any other game, and far more interesting.”
I suppose I looked unconvinced, for he added, “Remember we have nature on our side. It is natural for a social animal to develop social instincts; any personal desire which works against the social good is clearly a survival of a lower presocial period; wrong, in that it is out of place. What we used to call criminals were relics of the past. By artificially maintaining low conditions, such as poverty, individual wealth, we bred low-grade types. We do not breed them any more.”
Again we sat silent. I was nursing my knee and sat looking into the fire; the soft shimmering play of rosy light and warmth with which electricity now gave jewels to our rooms.
He followed my eyes.
“That clean, safe, beautiful power was always here, John — but we had not learned of it. The power of wind and water and steam were here — before we learned to use them. All this splendid power of human life was here — only we did not know it.”
After that talk with Frank Borderson I felt a little clearer in my mind about what had taken place. I saw a good deal of him, and he introduced me to others who were in his line of work. Also I got to know his wife pretty well. She was not so great an authority on ethics as he; but an excellent teacher, widely useful.
One day I said something to her about her lovely spirit, and what she must have been to him — such an uplifting influence.
She laughed outright.
“Ill have to tell you the facts, Mr. Robertson, as part of your instruction. So far from my uplifting him, he picked me out of the gutter, literally, dead drunk in the gutter, the lowest kind of wreck. He made me over. He gave me — Life.”
Her eyes shone.
“We work together,” she added cheerfully.
They did work together, and evidently knew much happiness. I noted a sort of deep close understanding between them, as in those who have been through the wars in company,
I found Nellie knew about them. “Yes, indeed,” she said. “They are devoted to each other, and most united in their work. He was just beginning to try to work, after his own rebuilding; but feeling pretty lonesome. He felt that he had no chance of any personal life, you see, and there were times hen he missed it badly. He had no right to marry, of course; that is, with a well woman. And then he found this broken lily — and mended it. There can’t be any children, but there is great happiness, you can see that.”
“And they are — received?”
“Received? — Oh, I remember. You mean they are invited to dinners and parties. Why, yes.”
“Not among the best people, surely?”
“Precisely that, the very best; people who appreciate their wonderful lives.”
“Tell me this, Sister; what happened to the Four Hundred — the F. F. V’s — and the rest of the aristocracy?”
“The same thing that happened to all of us. They were only people, you see. Their atrophied social consciousness was electrified with the new thoughts and feelings. They woke up, too, most of them. Some just died out harmlessly. They were only by-products.”
I consulted a rather reactionary old professor of Sociology, Morris Banks; one who had been teaching Political Economy in my youth, and who ought to be able to remember things. I asked him if he would be so good as to show me the dark side of this shield.
“Surely there must have been opposition, misunderstanding, the usual difficulties of new adjustments,” I said. “You remember the first years of change — I wish you would give me a clear account of it.”
The old man considered awhile: “Take any one state, any city, or country locality, and study back a little,” he said, “and you find the story is about the same. There was opposition and dissent, of course, but it decreased very rapidly. You see the improvements at first introduced were such universal benefits that there could not be any serious complaint.
“By the time we had universal suffrage the women were more than ready for it, full of working plans to carry out, and rich by the experience of the first trials.
“By the time Socialism was generally adopted we had case after case of proven good in Socialistic methods; and also the instructive background of some failures.”
“But the big men who ran the country to suit themselves in my time, they didn’t give up without a struggle surely? You must have had some fighting,” I said.
He smiled in cheerful reminiscence. “We had a good deal of noise, if that’s what you mean. But there’s no fighting to be done, with soldiers, if the soldiers won’t fight.
Our workingmen declined to shoot or to be shot any longer, and left the big capitalists to see what they could do alone.”
“But they had the capital?”
“Not all of it. The revenues of the cities and of the United States Government are pretty considerable, especially when you save the seventy per cent, we used to spend on wars past and possible; and the ten or twenty-more that went in waste and graft. With a Socialist State private Capital has no grip!”
“Did you confiscate it?”
“Did not have to. The people who were worth anything, swung into line and went to work like other people. Those that weren’t were just let alone. Nobody has any respect for them now.”
“You achieved Socialism without blood-shed?”
“We did. It did not happen all at once, you see; just spread and spread and proved its usefulness.”
MORE and more I cut loose from the explanatory guiding strings of my sister and the family, even from the requested information of specialists, and wandered by myself in search of the widening daily acquaintance which alone could make life seem real again.
It was an easy world to wander in. The standard of general courtesy and intelligence of the officials, and of the average passer-by, was as much above what I remembered as the standard in Boston used to be above that of New York.
As most of the business was public business one could study and inquire freely. As much work as could be advantageously localized was so arranged, this saving in trans portation. The clothing industry, for in stance, instead of being carried on in swarming centers, and then distributed all over the country, formed part of the pleasant everyday work in each community and was mostly in the hands of women.
As a man I could appreciate little of the improved quality of fabrics, save as I noticed their beauty, and that my own clothes wore longer, and both looked and felt more agreeable. But women told me how satisfying it was to know that silk was silk, and wool, wool. This improvement in textile values, with the outgrowing of that long obsession called fashion, reduced the labor of clothes-making materially.
Women’s clothes, I found, as I strolled were very delicate and fine, and had a gracious dignity and sanity far removed from the frantic concoctions I remembered in the windows; — shredded patchwork of muslin and lace, necessarily frail and short-lived even as ornaments, never useful, and costing arduous labor in construction, with corresponding expense to the purchaser.
The robes and gowns were a joy to the eye. Some showed less taste than others, naturally, but nowhere was to be seen the shameless ugliness so common in my youth.
Beauty and peace, I found, care, leisure, quietness, plenty of gaiety, too, both in young and old. It struck me that the young (people, owing to their wider and sounder upbringing, were more serious, and that older people, owing to their safer, easier lives, were jollier. These sweet-faced, broad-minded young women did not show so much giggling inanity as once seemed necessary to them; and a young man, even a young man in college, did not, therefore, find pleasure in theft, cruelty, gross practical jokes and destruction of property.
As I noted this, I brought myself up with a start. It looked as if Nellie had written it. Surely, when I was in college — and there rose up within me a memory of the crass, wasteful follies that used to be called “pranks” in my time, and considered perfectly natural in young men. I had not minded them in those days. It gave me a queer feeling to see by my own words how my judgment was affected already.
I explored the city from end to end, and satisfied myself that there was no poverty in it, no street that was not clean, no house that was not fit for human habitation. That is, as far as I could judge from an outside view.
Aimong the masses of people, after their busy mornings, there were vast numbers who used the afternoons for learning, the easy, interesting, endless learning now carried on far and wide. The more they learned the more they wanted to know; and the best minds, free for research work, and upheld in it by the deepening attention of the world, constantly pushed on the boundaries of knowledge.
There were some hospitals yet, but as one to a hundred of what used to be, of higher quality, and fuller usefulness. There were some of what I should have called prisons, though the life inside was not only as comfortable as that without, but administered with a stricter care for the advantage of those within.
There were the moral sanitariums — healthful and beautiful, richly endowed with the world’s best methods of improvement, and managed by the world’s best people. It made me almost dizzy to try to take in this opposite pole of judgment on the criminal.
Out of town I found that the park-like roads, so generally in use, by no means interfered with the wide stretches of what I used to call “real country.” Intensive agriculture took less ground, rather more; and the wide use of food-bearing trees had restored the wooded aspect, so pleasant in every sense.
The small country towns were of special interest to me; I visited scores of them; each differing from the others, all beautiful and clean and busy. They were numerous too; replacing the areas of scattered lonely farmhouses, with these comfortable and pretty groups, each in its home park, with its standard of convenience as high as that in any town.
The smallest group had its power plant, supplying all the houses with heat, light and water, had its child gardens, its Town House and Club House, its workshops and foodshops as necessary as its postoffices.
The Socialized industries ensured employment to every citizen, and provided all the necessaries of life — larger order this than it used to be. Quite above this broad base of social control, the life of the people went on; far freer and more open to individual development than it had ever had a chance to be in the whole history of the world.
This I frankly conceded. I found I was making more concessions in my note-book than I had yet made to either Nellie or Owen. They encouraged me to travel about by myself. In fact, my sister was now about to resume her college position and Owen was going with her.
They both advised me not to settle upon any work for a full year.
“That’s little enough time in which to cover thirty,” Nellie said, patting my shoulder. “But you’re doing splendidly, John. We are proud of you. And there’s no hurry. You know there’s enough from our mine to enable you to join the leisure class’ — if you want to!”
I had no idea of doing this, as she well knew, but I did feel it necessary to get myself in some way grafted on to this new world before I took up regular employment. I found that there was not much call for ancient languages in the colleges, even if I had been in touch with the new methods; but there remained plenty of historical work, for which I had now a special fitness. Indeed some of my new scientific friends assured me I could be of the utmost service, with my unique experience.
So I was not worried about what to do, nor under any pressure about doing it. But the more I saw of all these new advantages, the more I was obliged to admit that they were advantages; the more I traveled and read and learned, the more lonesome and homesick I became.
It was a beautiful world, but it was not my world. It was like a beautiful dream, but seemed a dream nevertheless. I could no longer dispute that it was possible for people to be “healthy, wealthy and wise”; and happy, too — visibly happy — here they all were; working and playing and enjoying life as naturally as possible. But they were not the people I used to know; those, too, were like Frank Borderson and Morris Banks — changed so that they seemed more unreal than the others.
The beauty and peace and order of the whole thing wore on — me. I wanted to hear the roar of the elevated — to smell the foul air of the subway and see the people pile in, pushing and angry, as I still remembered in my visits to New York.
I wanted to see some neglected-looking land, some ragged suburbs, some far-away farmhouse alone under its big elms, with its own barns in odorous proximity, its own cows, boy-driven, running and stumbling home to be milked.
I wanted a newspaper which gave me the excitement of guessing what the truth was, I wanted to see some foolish, crazily dressed, giggling girls, and equally foolish boys, but better dressed and less giggling, given to cigarettes and uproarious “good times.”
I was homesick, desperately homesick. So without saying a word to anyone I betook myself to old Slide-face, to see Uncle Jake.
All the way down — and I went by rail — no air travel for this homecoming! — I felt an increasing pleasure in the familiar look of things. The outlines of the Alleghanies had not changed. I. would not get out at any town, the shining neatness of the railroad station was enough; but the sleeping cars were a disappointment. The beds were wide, soft, cool, the blankets of light clean wool, the air clear and fresh, the noise and jar almost gone. Oh, well, I couldn’t expect to have everything as it used to be, of course.
But when I struck out, on foot, from Paintertown, and began to climb the road that led to my old home, my heart was in my mouth. It was a better road, of course — but I hardly noticed that. All the outlying farms were better managed and the little village groups showed here and there — but I shut my eyes to these things.
The hills were the same — the hills I had grown up among. They couldn’t alter the face of the earth much — that was still recognizable. Our own house I did not visit — both father and mother were gone, and the little wooden building replaced by a concrete mining office. Nellie had told me about all this; it was one reason why I had not come back before.
But now I went past our place almost with my eyes shut; and kept on along the. road to Uncle Jake’s. He had been a rich man, as farmers went, owning the land for a mile or two on every side, owning Slide-face as a matter of fact; and as he made enough from the rich little upland valley where the house stood, to pay his taxes, he owned it still.
The moment I reached his boundary I knew it, unmistakably. A ragged, home-made sign, sagging from its nails, announced “Private Road. No trespassers allowed.” Evidently they heeded the warning, for the stony, washed-out roadbed was little traveled.
My heart quite leaped as I set foot on it. It was not “improved” in the least from what I remembered in my infrequent visits. My father and Uncle Jake had “a coldness” between them; which would have been a quarrel, I fancy, if father had not been a minister, §p I never saw much of these relations.
Drusilla I remembered well enough, though, a pretty, babyish thing, and Aunt Dorcas’s kind, patient, tired smile, and the fruit cakes she made.
Up and up, through the real woods, ragged and thick with dead boughs, fallen trunks and underbrush, not touched by any forester, and finally, around the shoulder of Slide-face, to the farm.
I stood still and drew in a long breath of utter satisfaction. Here was something that had not changed. There was an old negro plowing, the same negro I remembered, apparently not a day older. It is wonderful ( how little they do change with years. His wool showed white though, as he doffed his ragged cap and greeted me with cheerful cordiality as Mass’ John.
“We all been hearin’ about you, Mass’ John. We been powerful sorry ‘bout you long time, among de heathen,” he said. “You folks’ll be glad to see you!”
‘.‘Well, young man!” said Uncle Jake, with some show of cordiality; “better late than never. We wondered if you intended to look up your country relations.”
But Aunt Dorcas put her thin arms around my neck and kissed me, teary kisses with little pats and exclamations. “To think of it! Thirty years among savages! We heard about it from Nellie — she wrote us, of course. Nellie’s real good to Keep us posted.”
“She never comes to see us!” said my Uncle. “Nor those youngsters of hers. We’ve never had them here but once. They’re too ‘advanced’ for old-fashioned folks.”
Uncle Jake’s long upper lip set firmly; I remembered that look, as he used to sit in his wagon and talk with mother &t our gate, refusing to come in, little sunny-haired Drusilla looking shyly at me from under her sunbonnet the while.
Where was Drusilla? Surely not — that! A frail, weak, elderly, quiet, little woman stood there by Aunt Dorcas, her smooth fine, ash-brown hair drawn tightly back to a flat knot behind, her dull blue calico dress falling starkly about her.
She came forward, smiling, and held out a thin work-worn hand. “We’re so glad to see you, Cousin John,” she said. “We certainly are.”
They made much of me in the old familiar ways I had so thirsted for. The sense of family background, of common knowledge and experience was comforting in the extreme, the very furnishings and clothes as I recalled them. I told them what a joy it was.
This seemed to please Uncle Jake enormously.
“I thought you’d do it,” he said. “Like to find one place that hasn’t been turned upside down by all these new-fangled notions. Dreadful things have been goin’ on, John, while you were amongst them Feejees.”
I endeavored to explain to him something of the nature and appearance of the inhabitants of Tibet, but it made small impression. Uncle Jake’s mind was so completely occupied by what was in it, that any outside fact or idea had small chance of entry.
“They’ve got wimmin votin’ now, I understand,” he pursued; “I don’t read the papers much, they are so ungodly, but I’ve heard that. And they’ve been meddlin’ with Divine Providence in more ways than one — but I keep out of it, and so does Aunt Dorcas and the girl here.”
He looked around at my Aunt, who smiled her gentle, faithful smile, and at Drusilla, who dropped her eyes and flushed faintly. I suspected her of secret leanings toward the movement of the world outside.
“I don’t allow my family off the farm,” he went on, “except when we go to meetin’, and that’s not often. There’s hardly an orthodox preacher left, seems to me; hut we go up to the Ridge meetin’ house sometimes.”
“I should think you would find it a little dull — don’t you?” I ventured.
Drusilla flashed a grateful look at me.
“Nothing of the sort,” he answered. “I was horn on this farm, and it’s hig enough for anybody to be contented on. Your Aunt was born over in Hadley Holler — and she’s contented enough. As for Drusilly — ” he looked at her again with real affection, “Drusilly ‘s always been a good girl — never made any trouble in her life. Unless ’twas when she pretty near married that heretic minister — eh, Drusilly?”
My cousin did not respond warmly to this sally, but neither did she show signs of grief. I was conscious of a faint satisfaction that she had not married the heretic minister.
They made me very welcome, so welcome indeed that as days passed, Uncle Jake even broached the subject of my remaining there.
“I’ve got no son,” he said, “and a girl can’t run the farm. You stay here, John, and keep things goin’, and I’ll will it to you — what do you say? You ain’t married, I see. Just get you a nice girl — if there’s any left, and settle down here.”
I thanked him warmly, but said I must have time to consider — that I had thought of accepting other work which offered.
He was most insistent about it. “You better stay here, John. Here’s pure air and pure food — none of these artificial kickshaws I hear of folks havin’ nowadays. We smoke our own hams just as we used to do in my grandfather’s time — there’s none better. We buy sugar and rice and coffee and such as that; but I grind my own corn in the little mill there on the creek — reckon I’m the only one who uses it now. And your Aunt runs her loom to this day. Drusilly can, too, but she ‘lows she hates to do it. Girls aren’t what they used to be when I was young!”
It did not seem possible that Uncle Jake had ever been young. His sturdy, stooping frame, his hard, ruddy features were the same at seventy as I remembered them at forty, only the hair, whitened and thinned, was different.
My bedroom was exactly as when I last slept in it, on my one visit to the farm as a boy of fifteen. Drusilla had seemed only a baby then — a slender little five-year old. She had followed me about in silence, with adoring eyes, and I had teased her! — I hated to think of how I had teased her.
The gold in her hair was all dulled and faded, the rose-leaf color of her cheeks had faded, too, and her blue eyes wore a look of weary patience. She worked hard. Her mother was evidently feeble now, and the labor required in that primitive home was considerable.
The old negro brought water from the spring and milked the cows, but all the care of the dairy, the cooking for the family, the knitting and sewing and mending and the sweeping, scrubbing and washing was in the hands of Aunt Dorcas and Drusilla.
She would make her mother sit down and chat with me, while Uncle Jake smoked his cob pipe, but she herself seemed always at work.
“There’s no getting any help nowadays,” said my Uncle. “Even if we needed it. Old Joe there stayed on — he was here before I was born. Joe must be eighty or over — there’s no telling the age of niggers. But the young ones are too uppity for any use. They want to be paid out of all reason, and treated like white folks at thatl”
He boasted that he had never worn a shirt or a pair of socks made off the place. “In my father’s time we raised a heap of cotton and sold it. Plenty of niggers then. Now I manage to get enough for my own use, and we spin and weave it on the spot!”
I watched Aunt Dorcas at her wheel and loom, and rubbed my eyes. It was only in the remote mountain regions that these things were done when I was young, and to see it now seemed utterly incredible. But Uncle Jake was proud of it.
“I don’t believe there’s another wheel agoin’ in the whole country,” he said. “The mountains ain’t what they used to be, John. They’ve got the trees all grafted up with new kinds of foolishness — nuts and fruit and one thing’n another — and unheard-of kinds of houses and schools, and play-acting everywhere. I can’t abide it,”
He set his jaw firmly, making the stiff white beard stand out at a sharp angle. “The farm’ll keep us for my time,” he concluded; “but I should hate to have it all ‘reformed’ and torn to pieces after I’m gone.” And he looked meaningly at me.
I lingered on, still enjoying the sense of family affection, but my satisfaction in the things about me slowly cooling.
A cotton quilt was heavier but not so warm as a woolen blanket. Homespun sheets were durable, doubtless, but not comfortable. The bathing to be done in a small steep-sided china basin, with water poured from a pitcher the outlines of which were more concave than convex, was laborious and unsatisfying.
The relish of that “hog and hominy” and the beaten biscuit, the corn pone, the molasses and pork gravy of my youth, wore off as the same viands reappeared on the table from day to day and week to week, and seemed ceaselessly present within me.
It was pleasant to listen to Aunt Dorcas’s gentle reminiscences of the past years, of my father and mother in their youth, of my infancy, and Drusilla’s. She grieved that she had not more to tell. “I never was one to visit much,” she said.
But it was saddening to find that the dear old lady could talk of absolutely nothing else. In all her sixty-eight years she had known nothing else; her father’s home and her husband’s, alike in their contents and in their labors, her own domestic limitations, and those of her neighbors, and her church paper — taken for forty years, and arbitrarily discontinued by Uncle Jake because it had grown too liberal.
“It never seemed over-liberal to me,” she said softly, “and I do miss it. I wouldn’t a’believed ‘Id a’missed anything so much. It used to come every week, and I kept more acquainted with what the rest of this circuit was doing. But your Uncle Jake is so set against liberalism!”
I turned to my cousin for some wider exchange of thoughts, and strove with all the remembered arts of my youth, and all the recently acquired wisdom of my present years, to win her confidence.
It was difficult at first. She was shy with the dumb shyness of an animal; not like a wild animal, frankly curious, not like a hunted animal, which runs away and hides, but like an animal in a menagerie, a sullen, hopeless timidity, due to long restriction. Life had slipped by her, all of it, as far as she knew. She had been an “old maid” for twenty-five years — they call them that in these mountains if they are not married at twenty. Her father’s domineering ways had discouraged most of the few young men she had known, and he had ruthlessly driven away the only one who came near enough to be dismissed.
Then it was only the housework, and caring for her mother as she grew older. The one pleasure of her own she ever had was in her flowers. She had transplanted wild ones, had now and then been given “a slip” by remote neighbors — in past years; and those carefully nurtured blossoms were all that brought color and sweetness into her gray life.
She did not complain. For a long time I could not get her to talk to me at all about herself, and when she did it was without hope or protest. She had practically no education — only a few years in a country school in childhood, and almost no reading, writing, conversation, any sort of knowledge of the life of the world about her.
And here she lived, meek, patient, helpless, with neither complaint nor desire, endlessly working to make comfortable the parents who must some day leave her alone — to what?
My thirty years in Tibet seemed all at once a holiday Compared to this thirty years on an upland farm in the Alleghanies of Carolina. My loss of life — what was it to this loss? I, at least, had never known it, not until I was found and brought back, and she had known it every day and night for thirty years. I had come back at fifty-five, regaining a new youth in a new world. She apparently had had no youth, and now was old — older at forty-five than women of fifty and sixty whom I had met and talked with recently.
I thought of them, those busy, vigorous, eager, active women, of whom no one would ever predicate either youth or age; they were just women, permanently, as men were men. I thought of their wide, free lives, their absorbing work and many minor interests, and the big, smooth, beautiful, moving world in which they lived, and my heart went out to Drusilla as to a baby in a well.
“Look here, Drusilla,” I said to her at last, “I want you to marry me. We’ll go away from here; you shall see something of life, my dear — there’s lot of time yet.”
She raised those quiet blue eyes and looked at me, a long, sweet, searching look, and then shook her head with gentle finality. “O, no,” she said. “Thank you,’ Cousin John, but I could not do that.”
And then, all at once I felt more lonely and out of life than when the first shock met me.
“O, Drusilla!” I begged; “Do-do! Don’t you see, if you won’t have me nobody ever will? I am all alone in the world, Drusilla; the world has all gone away from me! You are the only woman alive who would understand. Dear cousin — dear little girl — you’ll have to marry me — out of pity!” And she did.
Nobody would know Drusilla now. She grew young at a rate that seemed a heavenly miracle. To her the world was like heaven, and, being an angel was natural to her anyway.
I grew to find the world like heaven, too — if only for what it did to Drusilla.
The End