Transcriber’s Notes

This e-text is based on ‘The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine,’ from September, 1913. The [table of contents], based on the index from the May issue, has been added by the transcriber.

Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation have been retained, but punctuation and typographical errors have been corrected. Passages in English dialect and in languages other than English have not been altered. Footnotes have been moved to the end of the corresponding article.

© H. H. Half-tone plate, engraved for THE CENTURY by H. Davidson

BRONZE GROUP OF THE UNDEFEATED AMERICAN POLO TEAM

HERBERT HAZELTINE’S SCULPTURE OF THE AMERICAN TEAM WHICH WON THE WORLD’S CHAMPIONSHIP IN ENGLAND, IN 1909, AND DEFENDED IT SUCCESSFULLY AGAINST ALL ENGLAND IN 1911 AND 1913

(The leading figure: Mr. Milburn. Second figure: Mr. Whitney, captain. Figure in background: Mr. Lawrence Waterbury. Figure on the right: Mr. J. M. Waterbury.)

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THE CENTURY MAGAZINE

VOL. LXXXVI

SEPTEMBER, 1913

NO. 5

Copyright, 1913, by THE CENTURY CO. All rights reserved.

CONTENTS

VERSE

LOVE BY LIGHTNING

BY MARIA THOMPSON DAVIESS

Author of “The Melting of Molly,” “Andrew the Glad,” “Miss Selina Lue,” etc.

WITH PICTURES BY F. R. GRUGER

LOVE is the début of a woman’s soul from the darkness under Adam’s left ribs into the sunshine of the Garden of Eden and his presence. It is heavenly, but very much like a major operation attended by convulsions, and I am going to write you the whole truth about it, my dear Evelyn, and not present to you an unadorned feminine version. It is going to be hard, for I’ve only been practising concise veracity for a little over a month, and if I am crude in places, you must forgive me.

What did it?

Aunt Grace, my unfilial virago of a disposition, and the will of God.

Please don’t let it make you uncomfortable to have me speak of Him in this friendly fashion, for He is in the story, and I can’t help it. Besides, that is part of what I want to tell you about.

The first of May, mother came home from a visit to Aunt Grace in Louisville with the most peculiar little man led by a halter for me. He has a title, genuine brand. Elizabeth Gentry is going to marry him now, and she’ll write you all about it. Aunt Grace had selected him in Rome at Easter, and told him the round numbers of the fortune Grandmother Wickliffe left me. She had instructed mother minutely as to my joyous and appreciative course of action toward him, and you know how my maternal parent is about Aunt Grace. I want to record it of father that he received the duke with a recoil, and went to New Orleans the next morning for an indefinite stay.

Of course the little man is a human being, but I consider the United States as fortunate that it is not now in complications with Italy over the murder of one of her scions by an enraged Tennessee woman. Two days after his arrival, and only several hours after the first time he tried to possess his funny little paws of my very garden-burned hand, I packed a few of my belongings in three trunks and a steamer-bag and departed to find Dudley. He is such a perfectly satisfactory brother that, since my earliest youth, I have always felt it best to flee to him when I feel a tantrum coming on. They don’t disturb the even tenor of his life in the least.

“Oh, Nell!” was all mother had the courage to say, when so far away from Aunt Grace, at the announcement of my intention.

“My brother is ill up in the Harpeth Hills, and I must go to him,” was all I said to the duke.

That was the feminine version of a line in Dudley’s last letter, saying he had caught a heavy cold sleeping out without his blanket while with one of his gangs marking lumber on Old Harpeth. But I did take his grace to call on Elizabeth before I departed. I will say that much for myself.

With it all I had left home in such a whirl of hurry and rage that I hadn’t had time really to realize myself until I sat in my seat and watched the train begin to wind around and around the foot-hills that lead up from the valley. And I must say that realization of myself was not much in the way of amusement. Why should I have left mother in a huff just because she is Aunt Grace’s obedient sister? Isn’t she also my browbeaten parent? And why rudely abandon the little nobleman, who was my guest, for trying to kiss my hand, which has been used for any old purpose, from digging worms for Dudley to fish with to supplying a surface to be pressed by Bobby Gentry’s adolescent bristles, even unto the mustache he at present flourishes? And others, too! No, I couldn’t honestly approve of myself, as hard as I tried.

And, to make it worse, the very day itself was a balmy, pliant, feminine thing, with not a bluster in its disposition to harmonize with mine. There was a soft bridal veil of spring mist all over the Harpeth Valley, behind which the orchards were blushing pink and white, while by noon, as we began to go up the hills, I caught a whiff of that indescribable, lilting honeysuckle note that comes in the June rhapsody in the Alleghanies. You remember it, don’t you, deary, even if you do live in an enchanted Breton garden with a husband who sings? I’m going to remember it in heaven.

No, I wasn’t very well pleased with myself, and I got more and more serious on the subject the higher the train crawled up toward the crown of Old Harpeth. If a naturally conscientious person has such a bad disposition that she finds it impossible to accept any form of criticism from other people, then she is ethically obliged to chastise her own self, which is the refinement of psychical cruelty.

By three o’clock the only way I could drag myself out of the depths was by remembering how Aunt Grace’s nostrils distend while she insinuates to mother in my presence what an unsatisfactory daughter I am. I can always get up a rage with that mental picture. That is, I could; now it is different, because—but that is what I am going to tell you about.

Of course I knew that Dudley’s letters all went to Crow Point, and the ticket-man had told me that we got there at five-fifty. That hour was not dark—quite, I knew, and I decided that I would have plenty of time to drive across the ridge to his camp at Pigeon Creek.

Isn’t it a good thing for women that they can’t take peeps into what is going to happen to them next? Men could digest their disclosed futures complacently, but on account of pure excitement, women never in the world could even sufficiently masticate theirs to swallow them.

“Is it far from Crow Point to Pigeon Creek?” I asked the conductor, by way of amusing myself.

“About one horse-pull,” he answered lucidly, as he went to help a woman and eleven children off at Hitch It.

I’m glad now he was no more explicit.

Crow Point was just a little farther along the road than Hitch It, and we got there before I had time to ask him any more questions. Purple dusk was just hovering over the mountain-top, as if uncertain about settling down upon it for the night, when the train stopped. He called Crow Point, and I jumped off—the universe.

I stood for a few minutes, with my mind tottering.

“Looking for anybody, little gal?” came a drawl from out the twilight just in time to keep me from running after the train to try and tell them that I didn’t want to be left alone in the mountains at dark. A man sat all hunched up on the tree-trunk that supported one end of the huge log which represented the station platform of Crow Point, whittling a small stick.

“Is this Crow Point?” I gasped from the depths of both consternation and amazement as I looked from him to the three trunks stacked on the ground by the rustic platform.

“Sure am,” was the answer, as the small red slivers of wood flew.

“Is this—this all of it?” I asked, this time less from consternation than astonishment.

“Well, they is a few more of us,” he answered. “Was you a-looking for any of us in particular?”

“Mr. Dudley Gaines,” I answered in a manner that bordered on the lofty, as if I felt that the status of my family must be much the same commanding one at Crow Point that it was down in Hillsboro.

“I reckon you’ll have to holler that loud enough to reach about twenty-five miles acrost to Pigeon Creek, gal, if you want to git him,” was the unimpressed answer.

“Twenty-five miles!” I spoke less haughtily this time. “Can’t I get there to-night?”

“You could ef you had started this time last night,” was the practical reply.

Suddenly the fact that I was planted down in the wilderness of gigantic mountains, alone except for one aborigine of the masculine gender, overpowered me so that I sank down on the log and became much meeker in manner and spirit.

“What’ll I do?” I asked, and this time my words were nothing more than a subdued and respectful peep.

“Wall, I reckon Stivers and missus will have to take you in for the night,” answered the native, with a condescending drawl. “They might not, but you mentioned young Gaines’s name. We ’most shot him for a revenue when he first came, but he’s brought a sight of good work amongst us, and lives like he was fellow-man with all. Be you his sister or his woman?”

“Sister,” I answered, taking a grain of courage at thus hearing Dudley’s name mentioned as that of a prominent citizen of the fastnesses.

“Yes, Stivers had a cross on his gun for Dud, and he mighty nigh got a bloodstain to smear on it ’fore he found out that he were just a logger. But Stivers’ll take you in, I reckon, now he knows you belong to his tribe, though his cabin is so small you couldn’t cuss a cat without getting hair in your teeth.”

“Where do Mr. and Mrs. Stivers live?” I ventured, with a shudder at the taste of cat-hair in my mouth.

“Round behind that crag and woodland there,” he answered as he turned the stick and looked at it critically in the fading light. “You can go on by yourself, or, if you want to wait until I whittle this little end slimmer, I can take you along with me. They is going to be a ruckus kind of a meetin’ of the gang there to-night, but they won’t nothing but dark draw the boys outen the bushes.”

“I’ll wait,” I answered trustfully, preferring to appear at the hostelry under the care of a strange man than risk the woods alone. Necessity is the stepmother of many conventions.

And there I sat on a companionable log beside a perfectly strange outlaw who had been talking about notches on guns and blood-splotches, waiting for him to whittle down the end of a stick exactly to satisfy his artistic tastes before accompanying me through a dark strip of woodland to the hospitable roof of a moonshiner, in hopes I would be taken in to spend the night thereunder.

And I must proudly and truthfully record it of myself that I bore the situation in dignified and complacent terror, sitting humbly still while the moonshiner slowly peeled tiny pink shavings off the end of the stick for what seemed like centuries to me. My interior was a small Vesuvius of disposition, frozen over temporarily, and I even had the strength to marvel at my own control of it.

Finally he held his work of art close to his eyes to see the point in the dusk, which had deepened by the moment, tested it on his finger carefully several times, peered at it again, and then nonchalantly threw it away in the grass.

“Come on and follow,” he said in commanding and indifferent mien as I rose to accompany him.

And follow him I did, in true squaw fashion, about ten paces behind. I was surprised he didn’t ask me to carry his gun, a long, heavy ante-bellum weapon that rested carelessly in the hollow of his arm. I’d have done it with the greatest graciousness if he had handed it to me. A frightened woman easily lapses into savagery, and is willing to accept impedimenta in the rear of man in times of danger.

And, as we walked, the shadows got blacker and blacker, and the tree-tops lowered lower and lower in their thick gloom. Every few minutes something furry, like the hallucination of a gigantic mouse, would scurry across our path, or a great creaky croak would be hurled at our heads from the groaning branches above. And, with every fresh horror, I got closer to the heels of the human animal in front of me, until I was in danger of having my nose skinned by the barrel of the gun, or stepping on the protruding heels of his heavy boots, into which his faded overalls were stuffed. My knees may have trembled, but I assure you I kept pace with grim determination through what seemed endless miles of that haunted woodland.

And as we tramped along in silence, my mood of self-depreciation, which had seized me on the train, again asserted itself, and my alarmed mentality was saying sternly that it had warned my proud spirit that such catastrophes would be the result of my headlong course of wilfulness, when we came out of the darkness into a clearing where a cabin stood, from which a dim light shone.

“Stivers’,” remarked my guide, fluently. “So long,” he added tersely, and disappeared again into the woods by another path. At the time I wondered if he could be troubled by the conventions. I did him an injustice; I know now it was a horse hitched on the other side of the clearing.

For more than a few long minutes I stood and pondered with panicky indecision over just what to do, the wood with its nightmares on the one hand, and the unknown on the other. I chose the unknown, and plunged in as I faltered up to the open door of the small two-room hut.

Suddenly two doors were shut hurriedly in the darkness, and I heard the scuffling of heavy feet as a man appeared in the flare of the dim candle in the front room and peered at me cautiously.

“What do you want?” was the hospitable greeting that issued from the cavern of his huge chest.

“Mr. Dudley Gaines,” I answered, using instinctively the name of introduction that I had seen succeed a few minutes earlier.

“He ain’t here; but if you are his woman, come in,” was the answer, and as Dudley’s property I entered the Stivers’s abode.

Even in my tragic situation for an instant my temper rose. Why should man’s possession justify the existence of a woman in the eyes of the primitive? However, masculine justification of life is a delicious feeling to a woman in a dark and fearful wood and—But I’ll tell you about that later.

With becoming gravity and timidity I entered the living-room of the moonshiner’s hut, and weakly seated myself in a chair he pointed out to me in a corner by an open window.

“Brat’s got fits, and the woman is out there tending it,” was my host’s ample excuse for the non-appearance of my hostess.

At his words my heart jumped and then stood still. I had never been in the house with a fit before, and the feeling was gruesome, coming so close on the heels of the woolly, furry things in the woods.

Then as I poised myself on the edge of the chair, holding on tight to keep myself from running out into the night, an eery wail came from the back of the house, and I collapsed on the seat, with a queer, suffocating pain in the place of that jump. I had never noticed a child’s cry before, and something moved in the region of my solar plexus.

“Can’t—can’t something be done?” I ventured in desperation.

“Naw,” came the answer in a drawl. “I reckon it is bound fer kingdom come this trip sure. Leader will take a look at it when he comes in fer a round-up of the gang. They’ll all be late to-night, on ’count of some dirty business over at Hitch It. If you want to go to bed, that’s the best bed in the lean-to out there we keep for over-nights. Better git settled and outen the way ’fore the gang gits here. They’re ’most too rough fer calico like you to stay around, and there’ll be a big fight on ’fore it’s over. Leader is snorting rough over that knifing at Hitch It, and somebody’ll be cut down with power by him ’fore he’s done with it. The woman is too upsot with the kid to see to you; but bedding is all you need, now dark has come. Better git to cover right away.”

Drawn by F. R. Gruger. Color-Tone, engraved for THE CENTURY by H. Davidson

“THEN, AS I FALTERED AND FELT THAT I MUST STOP AND SINK ON THE FLOOR, A WHILE A SHOULDER BRACED ITSELF AGAINST STRONG, WARM, BARE ARM CAME AROUND ME, AND UNDER MY ARM AROUND THE BABY, MINE, AS GABRIEL SWUNG INTO STEP WITH ME”

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As he was speaking, he took the candle and led the way into a little shed-room, while I followed with trembling knees, and the jelly of fear quivering all over my body. Every moonshine murder about which I had ever read in the papers trod in martial array before my mental eyes, and my breath was just a flutter between my chattering teeth. It really is a triumph of the survival of the life force in the human body that I am alive to tell the tale to you to-day.

“They’s light enough from the window for you to roll in,” the man said as he pointed to a low bed, built of logs and boughs along the wall next to the front room. “Better git to cover and stay there, a calico like you, with the boys as rough as they be; you mightn’t like ’em. I reckon they better not know you’re here, on ’count of the row that’s coming over that knifing; so lay close.”

And even before he had time to depart with his candle, I made a dive beneath the patched quilt, only grasping my hat in my hand instead of keeping it on my head. Then, as still as my trembling limbs would let me, I lay close to the rough, thin, pine planks that separated me from what seemed the only other human being in the world. And for hours it seemed I lay there and panted and groveled in spirit with terror and helplessness, waiting, waiting, for something dreadful to happen, and almost wishing it would come and be over.

Across the mountain-tops there began to be distant mutterings of thunder, and in the flashes of lightning I could see restless, dark birds wing by the small window. And save for the thunderings, there was a stillness that must have been on the waters before the first dawn reigned. I could hear my heart beat like a muffled motor, and only the uncanny wail broke the silence now and again, while once I thought I heard a woman’s stifled moan that sent a shudder to the very core of my body.

And as I lay and cowered in that darkness, the mood of self-realization came back upon me, and alone in that terror of blackness I turned at bay and faced myself. Was that coward thing I that lay helpless while a woman alone moaned away the life of her tortured child, and a plan for murder was plotted with my full knowledge? Why didn’t I run out into that dreadful night and warn the victim, stop him from stepping into the dreadful trap laid for him? And right then I impeached myself. I had been guarded and fended and had all humanity nurtured out of me, so that, rather than risk my own pitiful little life, I was willing to “lie close” and let my brother human be murdered in cold blood.

“But women are weak,” I argued in my own defense, “and terrible, wolfish things like these they cannot control or prevent. They must let them take their course.”

“Weak women have steeled themselves to the saving of their brothers and sisters centuries long,” came the still, small voice that seemed to be hovering over my breast.

“I can’t risk my own life for that of a rough moonshiner who probably spends his time whittling a stick to throw away,” I sobbed in answer to myself.

“What more important thing than whittling a stick do you do with your life?” came the question, relentlessly.

“Nothing,” I sobbed under my breath, as a vision of all the nothings I had done in my life came before me with a flash of the lightning that seemed to illumine the inside of the very inner me.

“And that other woman suffering in there, why don’t I go to her?” I demanded of myself, and failed to find an answer.

“Afraid of the roughness of some mountain man who would scarcely dare harm your brother’s ‘woman’?” I asked contemptuously from above my own breast. “You a ‘woman,’ if you let another woman watch her child die alone!”

Desperate at this goad, I sat up, and was pushing back the quilt, when the muffled sound of heavy boots came from across the clearing, and in another flash I saw a file of men, each one of whom looked ten feet tall, each with a gun on his arm, come out of the black woods and turn to the front of the house. I melted back to cover, and lay drawing breath like a drowning man.

Quietly they came into the room next to that in which I was hiding, and their drawly voices had a subdued and terrible sound as they exchanged a few remarks in guarded tones.

“Leader come?” one man asked from so near the pine board against which I trembled that he couldn’t have been a foot away from me.

“Naw; and Bill is waiting in the woods to ketch him ’fore he gits here, if he kin,” came the mumble of my host’s big voice.

“It’ll be nip and tuck ’twixt ’em, and lay out the worst man feet due west,” another voice took up the gruesome chorus.

“That’s Bill now, coming outen the woods,” exclaimed Stivers, ominously. “I reckon he thinks he missed Leader. Don’t nobody say nothing when he comes in, but let him set and wait for his knock-out. Nobody’s business but Leader’s.”

Listening frantically, I heard the doomed man’s hesitating feet shuffle into the room and the chair groan as he took his seat amid the glum silence.

And there I lay, and with Bill I waited I didn’t know for what, some nameless horror that would kill the life in me and make me a dishonored thing all my life—a human too cowardly to cry out the word of warning to another of God’s creatures. And through it all the little child wailed and the woman moaned.

Then in the midst of another thick muttering from the head of Old Harpeth, which was followed by a vivid flash, I heard another pair of feet step on the threshold of the cabin. I cowered under the quilt, held my breath, and took the bullet into my own heart—or thought I did.

Then high and clear through the flash of the lightning, over the mutterings of the thunder and the scuffle of the men’s feet, accompanied by a glad cry from the moaning woman, there came a voice of an archangel singing in tones of command that thrilled that whole mountain until it seemed to shake with its reverberations:

“Stand up! stand up for Jesus!

Ye soldiers of the cross;

Lift high His royal banner,

It must not suffer loss.”

I lay still, and something poured into my heart that was a peace made from the glory of the storm, the moan of the woman, and the song of a dawn-bird. Out of the darkness my soul came like—I think I partly expressed it in the first sentence of this confession, if you will turn back and see, Evelyn dear.

After the men had sung the wonderful old hymn through to its very last lines,

“To him that overcometh

A crown of life shall be;

He with the King of Glory

Shall reign eternally,”

Bill and I kept very still and took our “knock-out.”

Bill had stuck a knife into a gallant over at Hitch It for offering to exchange snuff-sticks with Malinda Budd, and I could easily detect a decided vein of sympathy in the voice of Leader while he administered a rousing reproof to the knife, but extolled the use of fists in such cases, much to the approval of the rest of the gang.

In fact, that was the greatest sermon ever spoken in the English language on the theme of justice, courage, feminine protection, manly dignity, and brotherly love, and it was done in about five minutes, I should say. Every word of it hit Bill fair and square, and me also, to say nothing of all the rest of the world. During the last minute and a half of the discourse the men were indulging in muttered “Ahmens” and “Glory be’s,” and I could hardly restrain myself from throwing off the quilt and—well, you know, Evelyn, that Grandmother Wickliffe was a pillar in the Methodist Church of Hillsboro, and at times of great emotion, during the visit of the presiding elder, she did—shout. Aunt Grace never likes to hear it mentioned.

Now, let me see, this is just about the beginning of the real story, and I am so anxious to tell it all, though I really feel a hesitancy. However, when I am through with the letter, I can leave out any part of it that doesn’t sound seemly for me to tell about him—and me, can’t I?

To begin with, I hardly know how to make you understand about that baby’s stomach, and how near a tragedy it was. Don’t laugh! I tremble when I think about it, and I don’t ever believe I’ll learn to do it to them. I hope I won’t have to practise on one of my own first; but, then, it would be awful to kill another woman’s baby experimenting on it, wouldn’t it? I’d better not think about that now, or I can’t tell the rest of the story.

Well, after the doxology had been sung by the strange Gabriel in the next room, accompanied by some really lovely rough men’s voices, and he had sent them away so he could see to the sick baby in the other room, I lay still and had a racking, glorious experience. For the first time in my life I really prayed to Something that answered in the dark. I didn’t have much to say for myself, but a great Gentleness reached down and laid hold of me for always, and I can never be lost from Him any more, and I knew it. Now, I have been taught that it is called the witness of the spirit, and it’s what Grandmother Wickliffe had. But I didn’t inherit it; I had to find it myself, and I got it through tribulation, by the way of Gabriel’s song in the terror of the night, followed by the sermon to Bill.

And while I was lying there under the quilt, just shouting in my soul with ancestral ardor, I was called to come forth and attest my new convictions. And I did. If I hadn’t got that faith in God just a few minutes before on the wings of a great emotion, I never could have steeled myself to taking that awful purple, twitching baby and helping Gabriel do the dreadful things to it he did. I would have taken to the woods at the first look at it. But I know now that I had got the real religion that darts right through the emotions, and prods you up to do things. And I did them.

“It’ll die, and I can’t hold it,” whimpered the poor exhausted mother when Gabriel told her to hold the baby’s mouth open while he poured in the hot water. At that time I was still safe and rejoicing over myself under the quilt.

“You must hold him while I wash him out, or he will die. Come, brace up and help me!” I heard Gabriel plead to the poor creature, with positive agony in his voice, while the baby moaned.

“No use, Leader; I’ve done give’ up,” and I heard her fling herself on the floor and begin to moan in chorus with the baby.

It took me just half a minute to get to my feet, into that other room, and that baby in my arms, as awful to look at as it was. Of course it seemed as if God was honoring me by crowding works on my new faith pretty closely, and how I got through with such credit I don’t see; but I did.

“You’ll have to show me just what to do; I never touched a baby before, but I will try to help,” I said to Gabriel, who was looking at me in an absolute astonishment and devout thankfulness that encouraged my new-found capableness.

“A woman, thank God!” I heard him mutter before he spoke.

“Tip him on your arm, hold his head close against your breast, with your finger down his throat, while I pour in this hot water; then turn him over on your knee quick when it is about to come up. He is full of fried potatoes, and that is what is making the spasms. I’ll hold his legs with my left hand, so he can’t kick away from you. We must get down enough of this water to bring up all of the potatoes.”

Gabriel’s voice was quick and respectful, as if he were speaking to somebody that had as much intellect and manual training as himself. I suppose that is what helped me through with those dreadful hours of time that it took to work up that awful potato—that and the positive way I said:

“Now, God, help me, please, and quick!”

At last it all came forth, and I don’t suppose it really was hours; but the baby was apparently done for.

“No use, Leader; his time have come. She’s buried five out thar in the clearing at jest about his age. Let the little critter go in peace,” said Stivers, who had come in through the back door. His rough voice had a note of suffering in it, though he lit his pipe by a coal from the fire calmly enough.

But at the mention of the five little graves out in that awful night, the poor woman on the floor groveled up on to her knees and caught at my skirts.

“God help you!” said Gabriel, gently, to her. “He’s rid of the poison, but so collapsed that there seems nothing more to do.”

“Yes, and I’m going to help God help her,” I said suddenly, and I rose from the chair to walk the floor with the limp, white thing that had been the purple horror in my arms. “I didn’t know how to unpoison him, but if it’s strength and heat he needs, I can give him that,” and I held the tiny mountaineer close against my bare breast, from which his poor little convulsed fingers had torn all the foolish lace and embroidered linen.

“If a physician were here, he would try transfusion; the child is anemic, anyway,” said Gabriel, thoughtfully.

“We don’t need any physician but God to get my heat and strength into him. I only wish I had on a real flannel petticoat, as a decent woman ought to have for cases of emergency like this, to wrap him in. This old piece of blanket isn’t real wool.”

“Poor folks can’t buy much but shoddy these days,” said Stivers, with glum resentfulness.

“Here, my shirt’s the thing,” said Leader, and as quick as one of the flashes that came in the window with the thunder mutterings, he had peeled off his own gray flannel blouse, and was wrapping it around the baby, and tucking it close over my breast.

“Now fight, and I’m with you,” he said as he looked straight into my eyes in the dim light.

“He isn’t going to die; he’s got a right to live, and he’s going to do it, God helping,” I answered, as I got a firm grasp of the mite on my left arm, and put my warm right hand over the poor little collapsed stomach.

And then for what seemed hours of eternity I walked and rubbed and hugged that limp baby, while I prayed inside my own vitals to the tune of “Stand up.” Stivers stood smoking sullenly by the fire, the mother lay on the floor, moaning, and Gabriel stood over by the window, with his bare shoulders gleaming comfortingly with every flash of lightning. And the knowledge that all three of those strong, useful real people were depending upon ignorant, foolish me to lead the fight for that poor little life made the new wings of my spirit raise themselves and soar out into some wonderful space I had never been in before, but through which I knew the way and could take the baby with me.

How long I plodded across and across that rickety floor of the cabin I don’t know, but once I staggered as I came near Gabriel at the window, and my right shoulder sagged under its burden. Then, as I faltered and felt that I must stop and sink on the floor, a strong, warm, bare arm came around me, and under my arm around the baby, while a shoulder braced itself against mine, as Gabriel swung into step with me.

“Keep fighting,” he said deep in his throat.

And again I soared away with the baby up to where God was there to help us.

Then suddenly we both were brought back to earth by my feeling him stir, and huddle closer to my breast, while the limp little knees found strength to press themselves in against the ribs over my heart.

“Oh!” I sobbed with a quick breath.

The mother moaned, and Gabriel steadied us both closer. He thought the baby was dead, I knew.

“Want to give him to me?” he asked gently.

“No, I don’t,” I answered jerkily enough to sound like a snap; “but wipe the perspiration out of my eyes. He’s getting hot now, and I’m melting, but I don’t dare stop hugging and patting. Make his mother understand he’s getting all right.”

But nobody has to make a mother understand when her baby is saved. The poor creature just gave one pitiful gasp, and went to nice, comfortable crying instead of moaning. It was lovely to hear hearty boohoos, though she never said a word except to ask Stivers for her snuff-stick, which he attentively swabbed in the can before he handed it to her.

“You can’t go on walking and joggling forever; sit down and rock and rest with him,” suggested Gabriel, timidly and respectfully, after he had passed a nice, cool, linen handkerchief all over my hot face for me, even with intelligence enough to wipe in the hollow under my chin.

“Not now; he’s squirming deliciously, and I don’t dare. Suppose he should go limp again,” I answered fearfully.

“He’s due to drop off to sleep now,” announced Leader in such a positive, though kind, voice that almost immediately young Stivers obediently turned himself a bit, settled in a nice, soggy way, and I could feel the little lungs so near mine begin to draw breath in a regular, good sound sleep.

I waited a minute to be sure, then sank with him into a chair beside the fire.

“Yes, he’s all right now,” Leader said in a lovely, quiet voice, with just a husky note of happiness in it as he gently raised into his own strong hand one tiny paddie that had stolen up on my breast from out the warm, gray shirt. For a wonderful second we were all soul-becalmed together, and then he went over into the corner and slipped on his khaki hunting-coat, which he had hung on a peg in the wall, and decorously tied his silk handkerchief around his neck, in true mountaineer fashion. He never did get that shirt again, for I originated some remarkable bandages for young Stivers out of it next day.

Color-Tone, engraved for THE CENTURY by H. Davidson

“‘ARE YOU REAL?’ HE WHISPERED, WITH MY CHEEK PRESSED HARD AGAINST HIS, AND HIS ARMS TERRIFIC WITH TENDERNESS”

DRAWN BY F. R. GRUGER

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Then he came back to the fire, and while I hovered the kiddie, the mother came close on her knees and settled beside us, so that together we took a worse ministerial drubbing than even Bill got for the knifing episode, delivered in a voice of such heavenly sympathy that Grandmother Wickliffe’s spirit again rose in me, and if it hadn’t been for the baby, I believe she would have broken out this time in one good shout. She hasn’t up to date, but I feel sure she will some day, and I don’t always intend to restrain her manifestations.

The sermon this time had for its text the sacredness of the use of the maternal fount for the young instead of promiscuous food, but it embraced all the advanced feminist questions of the day, and was an awful glorification and arraignment of human females all in one breath. Why don’t women begin to know what dreadful and wonderful creatures they really are earlier in life? The knowledge comes with an awful shock when it does come, and ought to be experienced while young. I had taken Bill’s sermon to heart, but that one to Mrs. Stivers I got right in the center of my soul. It is still there.

And when it was over, the poor mother was kneeling by the fire, with the baby at her breast, sobbing and crooning softly as she rocked it to and fro in its deep sleep.

“It’s suffocating in here, now that it is all over. Don’t you want to come out and watch the storm?” Gabriel asked me in a low voice as he stood beside me looking down on the comfortable pair on the hearth. “Don’t be afraid. It is a great one, mostly electrical, and will likely go on all night this way. It makes the atmosphere almost unendurably heavy. Do you want to watch it from the bluff there at the end of the clearing? You can look down and see it at play in the valley.”

“Please,” I answered, catching the word in the middle with a breath that was a sob in retreat.

Then before I knew it, or how, we were seated together on a big rock that jutted out from the edge of the world. The cabin, with its one or two dim lights, loomed with shadowy outlines behind us, and tall trees hugged us close on both sides; but before us and beneath us was a wild, black, turbulent night.

“Now look down into the valley when the next flash comes,” Gabriel said with a note of excitement sounding in his deep voice that matched the wind through the trees.

Then just as he finished speaking, a slow, steady sheet of light came and lit up the world below us. The fields in their spring garments, embroidered by the threads of silver creeks, lay lush and green, dotted by farm-houses in which dim lights twinkled, bouqueted by glowing pink orchards, and outlined by blooming hedges. Tall trees were massed along the edges of the meadows and the river-banks, and among them the white lines of the old sycamores gleamed in masses of high lights. And in the wild, soft wind that rushed up the mountain-sides and flung itself upon us there was mingled the tang of the honeysuckle and rhododendron with the sweetness of the orchards and pungence of newly plowed earth.

Then as suddenly as the picture had risen before our eyes it sank back into the purple blackness, and I caught my breath with the glory of it.

“And God made it!” I exclaimed softly, with the last sob that had been left in my heart caught from my mouth by the wind.

“‘The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein,’” he answered, and the wind took his words as if it had been waiting for them to carry across the mountains.

After that for several long minutes, I don’t know how many, I sat silent in the windy blackness, with the tree-branches sighing and crashing over our heads, and wild things rustling in the leaves and bushes beside us, and wondered what was happening to me.

Of course I have been deadly afraid of a minister all my life, and the times we have had the bishops and presiding elders and pastors to dinner with us in honor of the memory of Grandmother Wickliffe have been times of torture to me. I always thought, of course, they were not real men, though the way they looked and their hearty appetites for both viands and jokes kept them from seeming conventional angels; but this Gabriel materialization that sat close to me on that rock, which was the end of the universe, was a strong, heart-beating man, who alone stood between me and the real wilderness of the woods and the awful wilderness of my ignorant and convicted spirit. It was terrific, but heavenly sweet.

“I know He made me,—I found that out to-night,—but I don’t see what for, and I wish I knew why,” I said in the smallest voice I had ever heard myself use; and this time there was just the echo of that last sob left to sigh out on the wind.

“He saw I needed you pretty badly a few hours ago,” Gabriel said in that delicious warm voice he had used to me to encourage me through the worst baby chokings.

“I’ve always been a dreadful woman, and wanted to be more and more so until I heard you sing ‘Stand up for Jesus!’ when I was dead and gone from fear of your gun, and talk to Bill about loving the girl with the snuff-stick in the right way, and the man, too, just because we are all God’s children. I was lost, but Something found me in the dark just before you and the baby did. I never belonged to anything or anybody before, and even now how do I know that God wants me after the awful way I have lived?” My words trailed in positive anguish.

“He does want you, woman dear. Take my word for that, or would you like me to quote you about five hundred passages from His Book to prove it to you?” He laughed as he said it in a wooing, comforting way that was both manly and ministerial.

“You don’t know me. I’m a perfect stranger to you,” I answered with agonizing honesty, because the regard of that man, whom I had never seen a few hard, long hours before, was becoming very valuable to me, and I felt afraid that if I didn’t warn him about myself before he took me for a friend, I might not ever do it, but dishonestly make him like me, as I have done to so many other men.

“We couldn’t be perfect strangers after the battle with those potatoes—and after seeing what that flash revealed of the valley together, could we?” he asked, with the amusement sounding still more plainly in his voice. “And you know you heard me preach twice. Isn’t that a kind of left-handed introduction?”

“People that are introduced to me don’t ever know me,” I answered forlornly; for I felt that the time had come for me to confess my sins before men, and this was the hardest man to do it to I had ever met, and also the easiest.

“Then tell me about yourself. I’ve been wondering a bit since I have had time. You answered a hurry-call I had to send above pretty quickly,” he said in a beguiling and encouraging tone of voice that sounded just as other agreeable men’s voices have sounded to me before, only more so.

Just then a furry thing rustled in the bushes, and I moved an inch nearer him. I felt him stir, but he sat comfortingly still. I didn’t want him to move to me.

“The worst thing about me is that I am utterly and entirely worthless,” I began, dropping the words out slowly in the dark. “If God made me, He can’t help but be dreadfully disappointed in me, and wishing He hadn’t. I’m just a wicked white kitten, with a blue ribbon around my neck, kept in a basket, and fed the warm milk of other people’s work and attentions.”

“That is not always the kitten’s fault,” said Gabriel, gently.

“It’s this kitten’s. My family would have liked for me to be strong-minded and go to college and do things in the world. They’ve tried to persuade me. Dudley, my brother, says I have got so much brains held in solution that he is afraid some day something will happen to precipitate them before the world is ready for them; but I ignore them strenuously. My mother is the president of the Home Mission Society that Grandmother Wickliffe founded, and Aunt Grace is state president of the Colonial Daughters, and makes remarkable speeches. I am just a large, white-skinned, well-fed, red-headed bunch of nothing, and I don’t know how to get over it.”

“At least you are of the blessed company of the meek,” answered Gabriel, this time with a real human chuckle that he might have used if he had found three of a kind in a poker-hand.

“Oh, no, I’m not meek,” I hastened to assure him. “I’m the most conceited woman on the earth, the vain kind of conceit that looks in the glass and admires its black lashes and white teeth, and long curves in good frocks, not the intellectual-attainment kind, that has some excuse for existence. I know I’m beautiful, and I hugely enjoy it.”

“You sound beautiful by description, and a few flashes of lightning, added to candle-light, bear you witness. Still, why shouldn’t you appreciate the gifts God has made you? Beauty can have the most wonderful influence in the world in the way of enjoyment for us people at large. Use yours that way when no misguided potatoes call you.” His voice was enthusiastic and delightful, and what he said about the flashes of lightning made me blush so there in the dark that I was sorry one didn’t come that minute and let him see it—the blush. That thought, coming into my mind, cast me into the depths of humiliation that I had had it about him.

“That’s the trouble,” I faltered in unhappy mortification at my instability of character. “I use it to make other people miserable, and know when I do it—men people and things like that.”

“Sometimes that isn’t fair, is it?” he asked after a minute’s pause. “And yet women will do it. What makes them?”

“I don’t know,” I almost sobbed, but controlled it. “I never knew how wrong it was until you talked to Bill about that snuff-stick girl, and how he ought to feel about her, and influence her not to do other men that way. I’m like her, only I do worse than snuff-sticks; and I enjoy it. No, I know God doesn’t want a woman like that.”

“But perhaps you won’t be like that any more. I don’t believe you could, after tasting to-night’s adventure. You lapped up that situation pretty enthusiastically,” he said gently. But somehow there was a hint of amusement in his voice that set my dreadful temper off for a second, and made me wild to convince him of the depths of my sinfulness. I felt that the occasion demanded his serious attention and not levity.

All my life my temper has been a whirlwind that rose and carried me to the limit of things, and then beyond, without any warning. I thought I was making a confession in a state of religious zeal, but I am afraid it was just the same old rage. Religious zeal often takes these peculiar forms of exaggerated temper, and often never finds itself out. From this you’ll see I’m trying very hard to differentiate myself; but it is difficult.

Then for minutes and minutes, and perhaps hours, I sat there in the dark beside that strange man, and told him things that I had never told anybody living, and some I had never admitted to myself. It came out in a wailing, sobbing volume, and I trembled so that he had to take my cold hand in his, I suppose to keep me from sliding off the rock down into the valley.

I wonder if any woman before ever talked out her whole wild self into a man’s ears? And I wonder if it shook him as it did this one out under the lowering clouds and dark trees? When women habitually reveal themselves to men, it is going to bring social revolution, and they must go slow.

And I did go slow. I tried to be truly considerate of him. I began on a few ridiculous misdemeanors that I am surprised I remembered of myself, such as inconsiderate extraction of money from father by means of unwarranted tantrums, impositions on my dear mother’s loving credulity about some of my hunting forays with Bobby, when I left home riding Lady Gray, side-style, only to fling a leg over Dudley’s Grit two squares down the street, where Bobby was waiting with him for me.

It surprised me that he only chuckled delightedly, and wanted to know just exactly who and what Bobby was or is.

But I couldn’t be diverted, and was determined to tell the whole tale. I felt as if I must get one or two things off my conscience and on to his. I went the whole length, and succeeded.

When I told him of that mad escapade at Louisville, while I was visiting Aunt Grace, with Stanley Hughes and the supper party he gave to that French dancing-girl in “The Bird-Flight,” when I got out of the taxi and walked home in my satin slippers in the snow for ten blocks rather than stay and have Stanley take me another block in the state he was in, though I had done nothing to stop his drinking and laughed at him, I heard him catch his breath and shudder.

I never told anybody before that it was a paper-knife in my hands that ripped open Henry Hedrick’s cheek for an inch, down in his library while Mamie was up-stairs putting their six-months’ old baby to bed, and I was a guest in their house. In this case I had suspected how he felt about me before I came, but had contemptuously ignored it because I liked to be with Mamie. I told the last few minutes of that tale with dry sobs breaking my words, and while I shook, he folded my cold hand in both his warm ones, and I heard him mutter between his teeth:

“God love her and keep her!”

Then, after a long stillness, I crept closer to him, so that my head bowed against his arm, and opened the very depths to him.

“I don’t think any woman ought to say this to any man,” I began from very far down in my throat, “but you are a preacher, and that makes a difference, and you won’t mind. I am disrespectful and ungrateful to Aunt Grace about it when she is trying her level best to do it to me, but—but I ought to get married. There are lots of wonderful women all over the world who are doing gloriously without husbands, and living happily forever after; but I’m not one. Some women have such frivolous spirits that nothing but a good, firm husband and an enormous family of children can ever chasten them. I’m one. I’ve always thought that he’d find me some day long before I was ready for him—or them; but now I’m afraid he’ll never come. I know he won’t.” I clung to his strong fingers desperately.

“I think he will,” he answered as he kindly, but firmly, possessed himself of his own hand and coat-sleeve, but in such a way as not to hurt my feelings. “I seem to feel that he is well on the road, though fighting hard,” he added in what sounded like mild exasperation or desperation, I couldn’t tell which.

“No,” I answered, with pitiful sadness and real conviction—“no; I am not worthy of him, and he won’t come. It is too late. God and you have just taught me this dreadful night what a good woman really is, and now I will have to be so busy trying all the rest of my life to be one that I won’t have time to look for—that is, he won’t find me. I don’t want anything but a good one, and if I’m being so good as all that, how’ll I let him know I want him?”

“Maybe he’ll get a revelation,” answered Gabriel in a low and controlled voice that seemed to come from the very fastnesses of something within him.

And as he spoke I felt something warm and sweet and terrible stealing over me; but I plunged forward in my confession, past the episode of the duke, my traitorous flight from home, and up to the arrival at Stivers’s, and the cowardly taking of refuge under the patchwork quilt.

“I misunderstood, and thought from the way the men talked that you were going to kill Bill, and I was too much of a coward to run out and find him in the dark and warn him. You see, I lay still and let Bill be killed, whether you did it or not; and so I murdered him, even if he is alive,” I deduced miserably.

“Dudley was wise to fear the precipitation of the logical part of the solution,” Gabriel remarked so quietly that it seemed as if he preferred that I shouldn’t hear him.

“Yes; and, you see, I am a common murderer as well as all the other dreadful things. And I let that baby die, too, rather than go and help the woman wash it outside and in, as you made me do. That is two murders; and I’m another one for not knowing how to fill it up with hot water and poke my finger down its throat and press the potatoes and water up at the same time. I’m a woman, or I ought to be. It’s my life business to know and perform ably such terrible and simple operations on babies. That makes me three murderers. And how did I know that Bill wouldn’t kill you at the same time you killed him, and Mr. Stivers and—”

“Stop!” Gabriel exclaimed suddenly, and he was shaking so hard with unseemly mirth that he shook me, too; for without being able to help myself, I had been crowding closer and closer to him, until I was burrowing right under his arm in the agonies of confession. “The damages will be endless if you go on at this rate. How many of these murders did you realize you were doing at the time you did ’em?”

“Only Bill,” I answered, after a few minutes of intense mental suffering. “I knew I ought to go and sympathize with the mother of the baby, but I didn’t know about that squeezing a baby’s stomach in the right place; but, as I say, I ought to have known, and—I did throw the quilt back to start to Mrs. Stivers when you came in. Please don’t laugh!”

“Then you stand acquitted of all responsibility of faulty impulse except about the murder of Bill, which didn’t come off,” Gabriel answered in a gentle, serious, and respectful voice that soothed me into a cheerful frame of mind over my crimes even before he had more than half uttered the words. I felt hope for myself rise in my heart.

“And then—then you came to the door and began to sing ‘Stand up for Jesus!’ so that eyes in my soul opened suddenly, and I saw Him standing and looking pitifully down into my awful black heart, and I felt Him reach out His hand to me in the darkness. I’ve always avoided and been afraid of God before, but now do you think He feels about me as He did the man on the other cross who had done awful things, I forget just what, and as long as Bill and the baby are both alive, and I worked so hard, He will forgive me and love me? And give me more awful work to do? Tell me, and what you say I will believe.” I crouched at his knee as I asked the question breathlessly.

“Oh, you wonderful, foolish woman, you! Don’t you know that the good God knows and claims His own?” Gabriel answered, as he bent forward and put his hand on the head that had bowed on his knee. For a heart-still instant we trembled together, then he said quietly and humbly: “I give up. All my life I have prayed that my ‘woman’ would be one who had seen her Master face to face. Stumbling in the darkness, groping, both of us, we found each other and—clung. Are you mine? God, dare I claim a miracle such as You sent to Your servants of old? Have we together met You in the bush, and is it burning? Can we believe that You mean to”—

Then suddenly, in the very midst of his prayer, came a great, white, steady glare, which rent the black clouds above us and revealed us to each other, like the sun at high noon. The very mountains seemed to reel in it, and the forest behind us was stilled from the rack of the winds.

And clasping his knees, I looked and looked into his eyes, down, down until I found a light more blinding than that without, while I could feel his searching mine sternly, solemnly, and with a hope so great that I was tempted to cower, but was prevented by a fierce hunger that rose in me and demanded. I don’t know how long the light lasted, but when it went out, and had left us in the night, the ordeal was over, and I was welded into his arms, and his lips were pouring out love to me in broken words of blessing and demand.

“Are you real?” he whispered, with my cheek pressed hard against his, and his arms terrific with tenderness. “Can I believe it is true? Can I claim a miracle? Can I?”

“Yes,” I answered with triumphant certainty in my mind and voice—“yes. It’s that revelation you said you—that is, the—the man that was coming for me would have. I know it’s a miracle, because I am as afraid of a preacher as of—of that thing rustling out there in the bushes; but if God let me get into your arms this awful way He means for me to stay. And it’s my miracle, not yours. I needed one, and you didn’t. You are it! You don’t think He will take you away from me in the daylight, do you?”

“Never,” he laughed against my lips, with the coax and woo both in his throat, under my hand pressed against it. And that was the taming of the wild me.

A long time after, when I had settled myself comfortably against his shoulder, and gone permanently to housekeeping in the parsonage of his arms, softly the clouds above us drifted apart, and a glorious full moon shone down on us in the warmest congratulatory approval.

“Let me look good at you, love-woman, so I’ll not confuse you with the other flowers when morning comes,” Gabriel fluted from above my head as he attempted to turn me on his arm a fraction of an inch away from him.

“You can use the moon, if you need it for identification purposes, but that lightning was enough for me,” I answered, retiring from his eyes for a hot-cheeked second under the silk handkerchief around his neck. “It may take time and moonlight to teach you me, but I knew you in a flash. I know it’s awful, but most women learn love by lightning, and it’s agony to have to wait while men slowly arrive at it by the light of the sun, moon, and stars. Will nothing ever teach them to hurry?”

“I should say,” answered Gabriel, with a delicious laugh, which I got double benefit of, for I both heard it and felt it, “that I had met you at least half-way.”

“And I’m a perfect stranger to you,” I was reiterating honestly, when an amazed answer arrived from the other side of the rock.

“Well, you don’t look it—perfect strangers!” came in Dudley’s astonished voice, as he rose from beneath the crag and stood beside us. “You old psalm-singer, you, where did you get that girl?” he demanded with a great, but, for the circumstances, very calm, interest.

“Just picked her up in the woods, where she has always been waiting for me, you old log-killer, you. Yes, I guessed the fact that she is your sister, but I dare you to try to take her away from me,” answered Gabriel, as he held me closer, when, with sisterly dignity, I tried to get into a position to squelch Dudley.

“I’ll never try,” answered Dudley, with devout thankfulness sounding in his voice up from his diaphragm. “Maybe you can hold her down, Gates; you seem to have got a good grip for a starter. The family never could.”

Yes, my dear Evelyn, Gabriel turned out to be that wonderful Gates Attwood to whom Chicago has given five million dollars to build his great Temple of Labor down on the South Side. He has been up here visiting Dudley at his camp at Pigeon Creek, hiding for a little rest for three months, and circuit-riding the mountaineers. If I had met him under the shelter of my own roof-tree, I in evening dress, with the lights on, I would have taken one insolent look at him, and then talked to Bobby the rest of the evening, while Aunt Grace raged in pantomime at mother about me. I realized this the instant Dudley called his name, and I turned and hid my eyes against his lips as I trembled at such an escape from losing him.

“I never belonged to anybody but you and—God. That’s what made me bad to the others before I was found and claimed,” I whispered across his cheek, while he nestled me still deeper into his breast, ignoring Dudley, as he deserved.

“God’s good woman, and mine,” was the low answer I felt and heard.

“Well, I’d better go scare Mr. and Mrs. Possum and the Coon Sisters off your trunks over at Crow Point,” remarked Dudley, with more than brotherly consideration. “Something familiar about that collection of baggage yanked me off the down train. I’ll fix you up at Stivers’s when you want to come in, Nell. Here’s to her permanent change of heart, Parson!” And he lighted his pipe as he strolled away through the woods.

And as he left, an awful shyness came pressing in between me and the great man who sat on an Old Harpeth crag and held me so mercifully in his arms.

“Isn’t there a mistake somewhere?” I asked in fear and trembling. “Or did I really get born again, with you to help me?”

“Yes, love,” he answered softly. “This is the right way of things. I needed you; you, me. We were ready, and He let us touch hands in the storm, to be new created. Don’t you feel—kind of weak and young?”

“No,” I whispered just as softly. “Dreadfully strong. I know now how Eve felt when she put her hand to Adam’s side, where there wasn’t even a scar, and didn’t have to ask where she really came from.”

THE LETTER THAT REALLY WAS SENT

Hillsboro, Tennessee, May 30.

My dear Evelyn:

Yes, I know it sounds dreadful for him, that I’m going to marry Gates Attwood next month; but I am going to be better than you can believe I will. I tried to write you all about it, but I couldn’t. No, that isn’t exactly true. I did, but Gates is wearing the letter in his left breast pocket, and won’t give it up. Everybody will just have to trust him with me because he does; and he must know what’s best, because God trusts him. Please come home in time for the wedding. I need you, but I haven’t made any plans. I can’t think or plan. I’m feeling. Were you ever born again? If you have been, you will know what I’m talking about when I tell you; and if you haven’t, you will think I am crazy.

Lovingly,
HELEN.

Color-Tone, engraved for THE CENTURY by H. Davidson

LES DEUX AVOCATS (THE TWO LAWYERS)

FROM THE HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED PAINTING BY HONORÉ DAUMIER

NOW IN THE COLLECTION OF ALEXANDER W. DRAKE

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LIFE AFTER DEATH[1]

BY MAURICE MAETERLINCK

Author of “The Life of the Bee,” “Pelléas and Mélisande,” etc.

THIS calm, judicious review of the results of organized psychical research cannot fail to be immensely valuable in clearing up the mists accumulated in twenty-eight years of earnest investigation into “the debatable phenomena designated by such terms as mesmeric, psychical, and spiritualistic.” The accumulations of evidence, and of argument based upon evidence, have been so enormous that few men busy with life have found time more than to dip into the wonderful subject and turn dismayed and reluctant away. Nothing has been so much needed by the Public Concerned with the Greater Things as a careful digestion of this subject to date, and we are fortunate in having so broad, so scientific, so many-sided a mind as Maeterlinck’s perform this service for us.

This paper is the first of many in which THE CENTURY will take account of civilization’s accomplishments in many fields for the benefit of busy men and women.—THE EDITOR.

THE THEOSOPHICAL HYPOTHESIS

I HAVE recently been studying two interesting solutions of the problem of personal survival—solutions which, although not new, have at least been lately renewed. I refer to the neotheosophical and neospiritualistic theories, which are, I think, the only ones that can be seriously discussed. The first is almost as old as man himself; but a popular movement of some magnitude in certain countries has rejuvenated the doctrine of reincarnation, or the transmigration of souls, and brought it once more into prominence.

The great argument of its adherents—the chief and, when all is said, the only argument—is only a sentimental one. Their doctrine that the soul in its successive existences is purified and exalted with more or less rapidity according to its efforts and deserts is, they maintain, the only one that satisfies the irresistible instinct of justice which we bear within us. They are right, and, from this point of view, their posthumous justice is immeasurably superior to that of the barbaric heaven and the monstrous hell of the Christians, where rewards and punishments are forever meted out to virtues and vices which are for the most part puerile, unavoidable, or accidental. But this, I repeat, is only a sentimental argument, which has only an infinitesimal value in the scale of evidence.

We may admit that certain of their theories are rather ingenious; and what they say of the part played by the “shells,” for instance, or the “elementals,” in the spiritualistic phenomena, is worth about as much as our clumsy explanations of fluidic and supersensible bodies. Perhaps, or even no doubt, they are right when they insist that everything around us is full of living, sentient forms, of diverse and innumerous types, “as different from one another as a blade of grass and a tiger, or a tiger and a man,” which are incessantly brushing against us and through which we pass unawares. If all the religions have overpopulated the world with invisible beings, we have perhaps depopulated it too completely; and it is extremely possible that we shall find one day that the mistake was not on the side which one imagined. As Sir William Crookes well puts it in a remarkable passage:

It is not improbable that other sentient beings have organs of sense which do not respond to some or any of the rays to which our eyes are sensitive, but are able to appreciate other vibrations to which we are blind. Such beings would practically be living in a different world to our own. Imagine, for instance, what idea we should form of surrounding objects were we endowed with eyes not sensitive to the ordinary rays of light but sensitive to the vibrations concerned in electric and magnetic phenomena. Glass and crystal would be among the most opaque of bodies. Metals would be more or less transparent, and a telegraph wire through the air would look like a long narrow hole drilled through an impervious solid body. A dynamo in active work would resemble a conflagration, whilst a permanent magnet would realise the dream of mediæval mystics and become an everlasting lamp with no expenditure of energy or consumption of fuel.

All this, with so many other things which they assert, would be, if not admissible, at least worthy of attention, if those suppositions were offered for what they are, very ancient hypotheses that go back to the early ages of human theology and metaphysics; but when they are transformed into categorical and dogmatic assertions, they at once become untenable. Their exponents promise us, on the other hand, that by exercising our minds, by refining our senses, by etherealizing our bodies, we shall be able to live with those whom we call dead and with the higher beings that surround us. It all seems to lead to nothing very much and rests on very frail bases, on very vague proofs derived from hypnotic sleep, presentiments, mediumism, phantasms, and so forth. We want something more than arbitrary theories about the “immortal triad,” the “three worlds,” the “astral body,” the “permanent atom,” or the “Karma-Loka.” As their sensibility is keener, their perception subtler, their spiritual intuition more penetrating, than ours, why do they not choose as a field for investigation the phenomena of prenatal memory, for instance, to take one subject at random from a multitude of others—phenomena which, although sporadic and open to question, are still admissible?

THE NEOSPIRITUALISTIC HYPOTHESIS

OUTSIDE theosophy, investigations of a purely scientific nature have been made in the baffling regions of survival and reincarnation. Neospiritualism, or psychicism, or experimental spiritualism, had its origin in America in 1870. In the following year the first strictly scientific experiments were organized by Sir William Crookes, the man of genius who opened up most of the roads at the end of which men were astounded to discover unknown properties and conditions of matter; and as early as 1873 or 1874 he obtained, with the aid of the medium Florence Cook, phenomena of materialization that have hardly been surpassed. But the real beginning of the new science dates from the foundation of the Society for Psychical Research, familiarly known as the S. P. R. This society was formed in London twenty-eight years ago, under the auspices of the most distinguished men of science in England, and, as we all know, has made a methodical and strict study of every case of supernormal psychology and sensibility. This study or investigation, originally conducted by Edmund Gurney, F. W. H. Myers, and Frank Podmore, and continued by their successors, is a masterpiece of scientific patience and conscientiousness. Not an incident is admitted that is not supported by unimpeachable testimony, by definite written records and convincing corroboration. Among the many supernormal manifestations, telepathy, previsions, and so forth, we will take cognizance only of those which relate to life beyond the grave. They can be divided into two categories: first, real, objective, and spontaneous apparitions, or direct manifestations; second, manifestations obtained by the agency of mediums, whether induced apparitions, which we will put aside for the moment because of their frequently questionable character, or communications with the dead by word of mouth or automatic writing. Those extraordinary communications have been studied at length by such men as F. W. H. Myers, Richard Hodgson, Sir Oliver Lodge, and the philosopher William James, the father of the new pragmatism. They profoundly impressed and almost convinced these men, and they therefore deserve to arrest our attention.

It appears, therefore, to be as well established as a fact can be that a spiritual or nervous shape, an image, a belated reflection of life, is capable of subsisting for some time, of releasing itself from the body, or surviving it, of traversing enormous distances in the twinkling of an eye, of manifesting itself to the living and, sometimes, of communicating with them.

For the rest, we have to recognize that these apparitions are very brief. They take place only at the precise moment of death, or follow very shortly after. They do not seem to have the least consciousness of a new or superterrestrial life, differing from that of the body whence they issue. On the contrary, their spiritual energy, at a time when it ought to be absolutely pure, because it is rid of matter, seems greatly inferior to what it was when matter surrounded it. These more or less uneasy phantasms, often tormented with trivial cares, although they come from another world, have never brought us one single revelation of topical interest concerning that world whose prodigious threshold they have crossed. Soon they fade away and disappear forever. Are they the first glimmers of a new existence or the final glimmers of the old? Do the dead thus use, for want of a better, the last link that binds them and makes them perceptible to our senses? Do they afterward go on living around us, without again succeeding, despite their endeavors, to make themselves known or to give us an idea of their presence, because we have not the organ that is necessary to perceive them, even as all our endeavors would not succeed in giving a man who was blind from birth the least notion of light and color? We do not know at all; nor can we tell whether it is permissible to draw any conclusion from all these incontestable phenomena. Meanwhile, it is interesting to observe that there really are ghosts, specters, and phantoms. Once again, science steps in to confirm a general belief of mankind, and to teach us that a belief of this sort, however absurd it may at first seem, still deserves careful examination.

THE DILEMMA OF THE TRUTH-SEEKER

NOW, what are we to think of it all? Must we, with Myers, Newbold, Hyslop, Hodgson, and many others who have studied this problem at length, conclude in favor of the incontestable agency of forces and intelligences returning from the farther bank of the great river which it was deemed that none might cross? Must we acknowledge with them that there are cases ever more numerous which make it impossible for us to hesitate any longer between the telepathic hypothesis and the spiritualistic hypothesis? I do not think so. I have no prejudices,—what were the use of having any in these mysteries?—no reluctance to admit the survival and the intervention of the dead; but, before leaving the terrestrial plane, it is wise and necessary to exhaust all the suppositions, all the explanations, there to be discovered. We have to make our choice between two manifestations of the unknown, two miracles, if you prefer, whereof one is situated in the world which we inhabit and the other in a region which, rightly or wrongly, we believe to be separated from us by nameless spaces which no human being, alive or dead, has crossed to this day. It is natural, therefore, that we should stay in our own world as long as it gives us a foothold, as long as we are not pitilessly expelled from it by a series of irresistible and irrefutable facts issuing from the adjoining abyss. The survival of a spirit is no more improbable than the prodigious faculties which we are obliged to attribute to the mediums if we deny them to the dead: but the existence of the medium, contrary to that of the spirit, is unquestionable; and therefore it is for the spirit, or for those who make use of its name, first to prove that it exists.

Do the extraordinary phenomena of which we have spoken—transmission of thought from one subconscious mind to another, perception of events at a distance, subliminal clairvoyance—occur when the dead are not in evidence, when the experiments are being made exclusively between living persons? This cannot be honestly contested. Certainly no one has ever obtained among living people series of communications or revelations similar to those of the great spiritualistic mediums Mrs. Piper, Mrs. Thompson, and Stainton Moses, nor anything that can be compared with these so far as continuity or lucidity is concerned. But though the quality of the phenomena will not bear comparison, it cannot be denied that their inner nature is identical. It is logical to infer from this that the real cause lies not in the source of inspiration, but in the personal value, the sensitiveness, the power of the medium. These mediums are pleased, in all good faith and probably unconsciously, to give to their subliminal faculties, to their secondary personalities, or to accept, on their behalf, names which were borne by beings who have crossed to the further side of the mystery: this is a matter of vocabulary or nomenclature which neither lessens nor increases the intrinsic significance of the facts.

THE BORDER-LAND OF LIFE AND DEATH

WELL, in examining these facts, however strange and really unparalleled some of them may be, I never find one which proceeds frankly from this world or which comes indisputably from the other. They are, if you wish, phenomenal border incidents; but it cannot be said that the border has been violated. It is simply a matter of distant perception, subliminal clairvoyance, and telepathy raised to the highest power; and these three manifestations of the unexplored depths of man are to-day recognized and classified by science, which is not saying that they are explained. That is another question. When, in connection with electricity, we use such terms as positive, negative, induction, potential, and resistance, we are also applying conventional words to facts and phenomena of the inward essence of which we are utterly ignorant; and we must needs be content with these, pending better. Between these extraordinary manifestations and those given to us by a medium who is not speaking in the name of the dead, there is, I insist, only a difference of the greater and the lesser, a difference of extent or degree, and in no wise a difference in kind.

For the proof to be more decisive, it would be necessary that neither the medium nor the witnesses should ever have known of the existence of him whose past is revealed by the dead man; in other words, that every living link should be eliminated. I do not believe that this has ever actually occurred, nor even that it is possible; in any case, it would be a very difficult experiment to control. Be this as it may, Dr. Hodgson, who devoted part of his life to the quest of specific phenomena wherein the boundaries of mediumistic power should be plainly overstepped, believes that he found them in certain cases, of which, as the others were of very much the same nature, I will merely mention one of the most striking. In a course of excellent sittings with Mrs. Piper, the medium, he communicated with various dead friends who reminded him of a large number of common memories. The medium, the spirits, and he himself seemed in a wonderfully accommodating mood; and the revelations were plentiful, exact, and easy. In this extremely favorable atmosphere, he was placed in communication with the soul of one of his best friends, who had died a year before, and whom he simply called “A.” This A, whom he had known more intimately than most of the spirits with whom he had communicated previously, behaved quite differently and, while establishing his identity beyond dispute, vouchsafed only incoherent replies. Now, A “had been troubled much, for years before his death, by headaches and occasionally mental exhaustion, though not amounting to positive mental disturbance.”

The same phenomenon appears to recur whenever similar troubles have come before death, as in cases of suicide.

“If the telepathic explanation is held to be the only one,” says Dr. Hodgson (I give the gist of his observations), “if it is claimed that all the communications of these discarnate minds are only suggestions from my subconscious self, it is unintelligible that, after having obtained satisfactory results from others whom I had known far less intimately than A and with whom I had consequently far fewer recollections in common, I should get from him, in the same sittings, nothing but incoherencies. I am thus driven to believe that my subliminal self is not the only thing in evidence, that it is in the presence of a real, living personality, whose mental state is the same as it was at the hour of death, a personality which remains independent of my subliminal consciousness and absolutely unaffected by it, which is deaf to its suggestions, and draws from its own resources the revelations which it makes.”

The argument is not without value, but its full force would be obtained only if it were certain that none of those present knew of A’s madness; otherwise it can be contended that, the notion of madness having penetrated the subconscious intelligence of one of them, it worked upon it and gave to the replies induced a form in keeping with the state of mind presupposed in the dead man.

IS THE FUTURE LIFE DIM AND SHADOWY?

OF a truth, by extending the possibilities of the medium to these extremes, we furnish ourselves with explanations which forestall nearly everything, bar every road, and all but deny to the spirits any power of manifesting themselves in the manner which they appear to have chosen. But why do they choose that manner? Why do they thus restrict themselves? Why do they jealously hug the narrow strip of territory which memory occupies on the confines of both worlds and from which none but indecisive or questionable evidence can reach us? Are there, then, no other outlets, no other horizons? Why do they tarry about us, stagnant in their little pasts, when, in their freedom from the flesh, they ought to be able to wander at ease over the virgin stretches of space and time? Do they not yet know that the sign which will prove to us that they survive is to be found not with us, but with them, on the other side of the grave? Why do they come back with empty hands and empty words? Is that what one finds when one is steeped in infinity? Beyond our last hour is it all bare and shapeless and dim? If it be so, let them tell us; and the evidence of the darkness will at least possess a grandeur that is all too absent from these cross-examining methods. Of what use is it to die, if all life’s trivialities continue? Is it really worth while to have passed through the terrifying gorges which open on the eternal fields in order to remember that we had a great-uncle called Peter and that our Cousin Paul was afflicted with varicose veins and a gastric complaint? At that rate, I should choose for those whom I love the august and frozen solitudes of the everlasting nothing. Though it be difficult for them, as they complain, to make themselves understood through a strange and sleep-bound organism, they tell us enough categorical details about the past to show that they could disclose similar details, if not about the future, which they perhaps do not yet know, at least about the lesser mysteries which surround us on every side and which our body alone prevents us from approaching. There are a thousand things, large or small, alike unknown to us, which we must perceive when feeble eyes no longer arrest our vision. It is in those regions from which a shadow separates us, and not in foolish tittle-tattle of the past, that they would at last find the clear and genuine proof which they seem to seek with such enthusiasm. Without demanding a great miracle, one would nevertheless think that we had the right to expect from a mind which nothing now enthralls some other discourse than that which it avoided when it was still subject to matter.

This is where things stood when, of late years, the mediums, the spiritualists, or, rather, it appears, the spirits themselves, for one cannot tell exactly with whom we have to do, perhaps dissatisfied at not being more definitely recognized and understood, invented, for a more effectual proof of their existence, what has been called “cross-correspondence.” Here the position is reversed: it is no longer a question of various and more or less numerous spirits revealing themselves through the agency of one and the same medium, but of a single spirit manifesting itself almost simultaneously through several mediums often at great distances from one another and without any preliminary understanding among themselves. Each of these messages, taken alone, is usually unintelligible, and yields a meaning only when laboriously combined with all the others.

As Sir Oliver Lodge says:

The object of this ingenious and complicated effort clearly is to prove that there is some definite intelligence underlying the phenomena, distinct from that of any of the automatists, by sending fragments of a message or literary reference which shall be unintelligible to each separately—so that no effective telepathy is possible between them,—thus eliminating or trying to eliminate what had long been recognized by all members of the Society for Psychical Research as the most troublesome and indestructible of the semi-normal hypotheses. And the further object is evidently to prove as far as possible, by the substance and quality of the message, that it is characteristic of the one particular personality who is ostensibly communicating, and of no other.[2]

The experiments are still in their early stages, and the most recent volumes of the “Proceedings” are devoted to them. Although the accumulated mass of evidence is already considerable, no conclusion can yet be drawn from it. In any case, whatever the spiritualists may say, the suspicion of telepathy seems to me to be in no way removed. The experiments form a rather fantastic literary exercise, one intellectually much superior to the ordinary manifestations of the mediums; but up to the present there is no reason for placing their mystery in the other world rather than in this. Men have tried to see in them a proof that somewhere in time or space, or else beyond both, there is a sort of immense cosmic reserve of knowledge upon which the spirits go and draw freely. But if the reserve exist, which is very possible, nothing tells us that it is not the living rather than the dead who repair to it. It is very strange that the dead, if they really have access to the immeasurable treasure, should bring back nothing from it but a kind of ingenious child’s puzzle, although it ought to contain myriads of lost or forgotten notions and acquirements, heaped up during thousands and thousands of years in abysses which our mind, weighed down by the body, can no longer penetrate, but which nothing seems to close against the investigations of freer and more subtle activities. They are evidently surrounded by innumerable mysteries, by unsuspected and formidable truths that loom large on every side. The smallest astronomical or biological revelation, the least secret of olden time, such as that of the temper of copper, an archæological detail, a poem, a statue, a recovered remedy, a shred of one of those unknown sciences which flourished in Egypt or Atlantis—any of these would form a much more decisive argument than hundreds of more or less literary reminiscences. Why do they speak to us so seldom of the future? And for what reason, when they do venture upon it, are they mistaken with such disheartening regularity? One would think that, in the sight of a being delivered from the trammels of the body and of time, the years, whether past or future, ought all to lie outspread on one and the same plane.[3] We may therefore say that the ingenuity of the proof turns against it. All things considered, as in other attempts, and notably in those of the famous medium Stainton Moses, there is the same characteristic inability to bring us the veriest particle of truth or knowledge of which no vestige can be found in a living brain or in a book written on this earth. And yet it is inconceivable that there should not somewhere exist a knowledge that is not as ours and truths other than those which we possess here below.

A LACK OF VITAL COMMUNICATIONS

THE case of Stainton Moses, whose name we have just mentioned, is a very striking one in this respect. This Stainton Moses was a dogmatic, hard-working clergyman, whose learning, Myers tells us, in the normal state did not exceed that of an ordinary schoolmaster. But he was no sooner “entranced” before certain spirits of antiquity or of the Middle Ages who are hardly known save to profound scholars—among others, St. Hippolytus; Plotinus; Athenodorus, the tutor of Augustus; and more particularly Grocyn, the friend of Erasmus—took possession of his person and manifested themselves through his agency. Now, Grocyn, for instance, furnished certain information about Erasmus which was at first thought to have been gathered in the other world, but which was subsequently discovered in forgotten, but nevertheless accessible, books. On the other hand, Stainton Moses’s integrity was never questioned for an instant by those who knew him, and we may therefore take his word for it when he declares that he had not read the books in question. Here again the mystery, inexplicable though it be, seems really to lie hidden in the midst of ourselves. It is unconscious reminiscence, if you will, suggestion at a distance, subliminal reading; but no more than in cross-correspondence is it indispensable to have recourse to the dead and to drag them by main force into the riddle, which, seen from our side of the grave, is dark and impassioned enough as it is. Furthermore, we must not insist unduly on this cross-correspondence. We must remember that the whole thing is in its earliest stages, and that the dead appear to have no small difficulty in grasping the requirements of the living.

In regard to this subject, as to the others, the spiritualists are fond of saying:

“If you refuse to admit the agency of spirits, the majority of these phenomena are absolutely inexplicable.”

Agreed; nor do we pretend to explain them, for hardly anything is to be explained upon this earth. We are content simply to ascribe them to the incomprehensible power of the mediums, which is no more improbable than the survival of the dead, and has the advantage of not going outside the sphere which we occupy and of bearing relation to a large number of similar facts that occur among living people. Those singular faculties are baffling only because they are still sporadic, and because only a very short time has elapsed since they received scientific recognition. Properly speaking, they are no more marvelous than those which we use daily without marveling at them; as our memory, for instance, our understanding, our imagination, and so forth. They form part of the great miracle that we are; and, having once admitted the miracle, we should be surprised not so much at its extent as at its limits.

Nevertheless, I am not at all of opinion that we must definitely reject the spiritualistic theory; that would be both unjust and premature. Hitherto everything remains in suspense. We may say that things are still very little removed from the point marked by Sir William Crookes, in 1874, in an article which he contributed to the “Quarterly Journal of Science.” He there wrote:

The difference between the advocates of Psychic Force and the Spiritualists consists in this—that we contend that there is as yet insufficient proof of any other directing agent than the Intelligence of the Medium, and no proof whatever of the agency of Spirits of the Dead; while the Spiritualists hold it as a faith, not demanding further proof, that Spirits of the Dead are the sole agents in the production of all the phenomena. Thus the controversy resolves itself into a pure question of fact, only to be determined by a laborious and long-continued series of experiments and an extensive collection of psychological facts, which should be the first duty of the Psychological Society, the formation of which is now in progress.

HAS THE SPIRIT ONLY AN INCOHERENT MEMORY OF LIFE?

MEANWHILE, it is saying a good deal that rigorous scientific investigations have not utterly shattered a theory which radically confounds the idea which we were wont to form of death. We shall see presently why, in considering our destinies beyond the grave, we need have no reason to linger too long over these apparitions or these revelations, even though they should really be incontestable and to the point. They would seem, all told, to be only the incoherent and precarious manifestations of a transitory state. They would at best prove, if we were bound to admit them, that a reflection of ourselves, an after-vibration of the nerves, a bundle of emotions, a spiritual silhouette, a grotesque and forlorn image, or, more correctly, a sort of truncated and uprooted memory, can, after our death, linger and float in a space where nothing remains to feed it, where it gradually becomes wan and lifeless, but where a special fluid, emanating from an exceptional medium, succeeds at moments in galvanizing it. Perhaps it exists objectively, perhaps it subsists and revives only in the recollection of certain sympathies. After all, it would be not unlikely that the memory which represents us during our life should continue to do so for a few weeks or even a few years after our decease. This would explain the evasive and deceptive character of those spirits which, possessing only a mnemonic existence, are naturally able to interest themselves only in matters within their reach. Hence their irritating and maniacal energy in clinging to the slightest facts, their sleepy dullness, their incomprehensible indifference and ignorance, and all the wretched absurdities which we have noticed more than once.

But, I repeat, it is much simpler to attribute these absurdities to the special character and the as yet imperfectly recognized difficulties of telepathic communication. The unconscious suggestions of the most intelligent among those who take part in the experiment are impaired, disjointed, and stripped of their main virtues in passing through the obscure intermediary of the medium. It may be that they go astray and make their way into certain forgotten corners which the intelligence no longer visits, and thence bring back more or less surprising discoveries; but the intellectual quality of the aggregate will always be inferior to that which a conscious mind would yield. Besides, once more, it is not yet time to draw conclusions. We must not lose sight of the fact that we have to do with a science which was born but yesterday, and which is groping for its implements, its paths, its methods, and its aim in a darkness denser than the earth’s. The boldest bridge that men have yet undertaken to throw across the river of death is not to be built in thirty years. Most sciences have centuries of thankless efforts and barren uncertainties behind them; and there are, I imagine, few among the younger of them that can show from the earliest hour, as this one does, promises of a harvest which may not be the harvest of their conscious sowing, but which already bids fair to yield such unknown and wondrous fruit.[4]

TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS

SO much for survival proper. But certain spiritualists go further, and attempt the scientific proof of palingenesis and the transmigration of souls. I pass over their merely moral or scientific arguments, as well as those which they discover in the prenatal reminiscences of illustrious men and others. These reminiscences, though often disturbing, are still too rare, too sporadic, so to speak; and the supervision has not always been sufficiently close for us to be able to rely upon them with safety. Nor do I purpose to pay attention to the proofs based upon the inborn aptitudes of genius or of certain infant prodigies—aptitudes which are difficult to explain, but which, nevertheless, may be attributed to unknown laws of heredity. I shall be content to recall briefly the results of some of Colonel de Rochas’s experiments, which leave one at a loss for an explanation.