Chapter XXIV

To those who have followed a routine or system of living in this world—who have, by slow degrees and persistent effort, built up a series of habits, tastes, refinements, emotions and methods of conduct, and have, in addition, achieved a certain distinction and position, so that they have said to one "Go!" and he goes, and to another "Come!" and he comes, who have enjoyed without stint or reserve, let or hindrance, those joys of perfect freedom of action, and that ease and deliberation which comes with the presence of comparative wealth, social position, and comforts, the narrowing that comes with the lack of means, the fear of public opinion, or the shame of public disclosure, is one of the most pathetic, discouraging and terrifying things that can be imagined. These are the hours that try men's souls. The man who sits in a seat of the mighty and observes a world that is ruled by a superior power, a superior force of which he by some miraculous generosity of fate has been chosen apparently as a glittering instrument, has no conception of the feelings of the man who, cast out of his dignities and emoluments, sits in the dark places of the world among the ashes of his splendor and meditates upon the glory of his bygone days. There is a pathos here which passes the conception of the average man. The prophets of the Old Testament discerned it clearly enough, for they were forever pronouncing the fate of those whose follies were in opposition to the course of righteousness and who were made examples of by a beneficent and yet awful power. "Thus saith the Lord: Because thou hast lifted thyself up against the God of Heaven, and they have brought the vessels of His house before thee, and thou and thy Lords, thy wives and concubines, have drank wine in them, and thou hast praised the gods of silver and gold, of brass, iron, wood, and stone...God hath numbered thy Kingdom and finished it. Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting; thy Kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and the Persians."

Eugene was in a minor way an exemplification of this seeming course of righteousness. His Kingdom, small as it was, was truly at an end. Our social life is so organized, so closely knit upon a warp of instinct, that we almost always instinctively flee that which does not accord with custom, usage, preconceived notions and tendencies—those various things which we in our littleness of vision conceive to be dominant. Who does not run from the man who may because of his deeds be condemned of that portion of the public which we chance to respect? Walk he ever so proudly, carry himself with what circumspectness he may, at the first breath of suspicion all are off—friends, relations, business acquaintances, the whole social fabric in toto. "Unclean!" is the cry. "Unclean! Unclean!" And it does not matter how inwardly shabby we may be, what whited sepulchres shining to the sun, we run quickly. It seems a tribute to that providence which shapes our ends, which continues perfect in tendency however vilely we may overlay its brightness with the rust of our mortal corruption, however imitative we may be.

Angela had gone home by now to see her father, who was now quite old and feeble, and also down to Alexandria to see Eugene's mother, who was also badly deteriorated in health.

"I keep hoping against hope that your attitude will change toward me," wrote Angela. "Let me hear from you if you will from time to time. It can't make any difference in your course. A word won't hurt, and I am so lonely. Oh, Eugene, if I could only die—if I only could!" No word as to the true state of things was given at either place. Angela pretended that Eugene had long been sick of his commercial career and was, owing to untoward conditions in the Colfax Company, glad to return to his art for a period. He might come home, but he was very busy. So she lied. But she wrote Myrtle fully of her hopes and, more particularly, her fears.

There were a number of conferences between Eugene and Myrtle, for the latter, because of their early companionship, was very fond of him. His traits, the innocent ones, were as sweet to her as when they were boy and girl together. She sought him out in his lovely room at Kingsbridge.

"Why don't you come and stay with us, Eugene?" she pleaded. "We have a comfortable apartment. You can have that big room next to ours. It has a nice view. Frank likes you. We have listened to Angela, and I think you are wrong, but you are my brother, and I want you to come. Everything is coming out right. God will straighten it out. Frank and I are praying for you. There is no evil, you know, according to the way we think. Now"—and she smiled her old-time girlish smile—"don't stay up here alone. Wouldn't you rather be with me?"

"Oh, I'd like to be there well enough, Myrtle, but I can't do it now. I don't want to. I have to think. I want to be alone. I haven't settled what I want to do. I think I will try my hand at some pictures. I have a little money and all the time I want now. I see there are some nice houses over there on the hill that might have a room with a north window that would serve as a studio. I want to think this thing out first. I don't know what I'll do."

He had now that new pain in his groin, which had come to him first when her mother first carried Suzanne off to Canada and he was afraid that he should never see her any more. It was a real pain, sharp, physical, like a cut with a knife. He wondered how it was that it could be physical and down there. His eyes hurt him and his finger tips. Wasn't that queer, too?

"Why don't you go and see a Christian Science practitioner?" asked Myrtle. "It won't do you any harm. You don't need to believe. Let me get you the book and you can read it. See if you don't think there is something in it. There you go smiling sarcastically, but, Eugene, I can't tell you what it hasn't done for us. It's done everything—that's just all. I'm a different person from what I was five years ago, and so is Frank. You know how sick I was?"

"Yes, I know."

"Why don't you go and see Mrs. Johns? You needn't tell her anything unless you want to. She has performed some perfectly wonderful cures."

"What can Mrs. Johns do for me?" asked Eugene bitterly, his lip set in an ironic mould. "Cure me of gloom? Make my heart cease to ache? What's the use of talking? I ought to quit the whole thing." He stared at the floor.

"She can't, but God can. Oh, Eugene, I know how you feel! Please go. It can't do you any harm. I'll bring you the book tomorrow. Will you read it if I bring it to you?"

"No."

"Oh, Eugene, please for my sake."

"What good will it do? I don't believe in it. I can't. I'm too intelligent to take any stock in that rot."

"Eugene, how you talk! You'll change your mind some time. I know how you think. But read it anyhow. Will you please? Promise me you will. I shouldn't ask. It isn't the way, but I want you to look into it. Go and see Mrs. Johns."

Eugene refused. Of asinine things this seemed the silliest. Christian Science! Christian rot! He knew what to do. His conscience was dictating that he give up Suzanne and return to Angela in her hour of need—to his coming child, for the time being anyhow, but this awful lure of beauty, of personality, of love—how it tugged at his soul! Oh, those days with Suzanne in the pretty watering and dining places about New York, those hours of bliss when she looked so beautiful! How could he get over that? How give up the memory? She was so sweet. Her beauty so rare. Every thought of her hurt. It hurt so badly that most of the time he dared not think—must, perforce, walk or work or stir restlessly about agonized for fear he should think too much. Oh, life; oh, hell!

The intrusion of Christian Science into his purview just now was due, of course, to the belief in and enthusiasm for that religious idea on the part of Myrtle and her husband. As at Lourdes and St. Anne de Beau Pré and other miracle-working centres, where hope and desire and religious enthusiasm for the efficacious intervention of a superior and non-malicious force intervenes, there had occurred in her case an actual cure from a very difficult and complicated physical ailment. She had been suffering from a tumor, nervous insomnia, indigestion, constipation and a host of allied ills, which had apparently refused to yield to ordinary medical treatment. She was in a very bad way mentally and physically at the time the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures," by Mrs. Eddy, was put into her hands. While attempting to read it in a hopeless, helpless spirit, she was instantly cured—that is, the idea that she was well took possession of her, and not long after she really was so. She threw all her medicines, of which there was quite a store, into the garbage pail, eschewed doctors, began to read the Christian Science literature, and attend the Christian Science church nearest her apartment, and was soon involved in its subtle metaphysical interpretation of mortal life. Into this faith, her husband, who loved her very much, had followed, for what was good enough for her and would cure her was good enough for him. He soon seized on its spiritual significance with great vigor and became, if anything, a better exponent and interpreter of the significant thought than was she herself.

Those who know anything of Christian Science know that its main tenet is that God is a principle, not a personality understandable or conceivable from the mortal or sensory side of life (which latter is an illusion), and that man (spiritually speaking) in His image and likeness. Man is not God or any part of Him. He is an idea in God, and, as such, as perfect and indestructible and undisturbably harmonious as an idea in God or principle must be. To those not metaphysically inclined, this is usually dark and without significance, but to those spiritually or metaphysically minded it comes as a great light. Matter becomes a built-up set or combination of illusions, which may have evolved or not as one chooses, but which unquestionably have been built up from nothing or an invisible, intangible idea, and have no significance beyond the faith or credence, which those who are at base spiritual give them. Deny them—know them to be what they are—and they are gone.

To Eugene, who at this time was in a great state of mental doldrums—blue, dispirited, disheartened, inclined to see only evil and destructive forces—this might well come with peculiar significance, if it came at all. He was one of those men who from their birth are metaphysically inclined. All his life he had been speculating on the subtleties of mortal existence, reading Spencer, Kant, Spinoza, at odd moments, and particularly such men as Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, Lord Avebury, Alfred Russel Wallace, and latterly Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir William Crookes, trying to find out by the inductive, naturalistic method just what life was. He had secured inklings at times, he thought, by reading such things as Emerson's "Oversoul," "The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius," and Plato. God was a spirit, he thought, as Christ had said to the woman at the well in Samaria, but whether this spirit concerned itself with mortal affairs, where was so much suffering and contention, was another matter. Personally he had never believed so—or been at all sure. He had always been moved by the Sermon on the Mount; the beauty of Christ's attitude toward the troubles of the world, the wonder of the faith of the old prophets in insisting that God is God, that there are no other Gods before him, and that he would repay iniquity with disfavor. Whether he did or not was an open question with him. This question of sin had always puzzled him—original sin. Were there laws which ante-dated human experience, which were in God—The Word—before it was made flesh? If so, what were these laws? Did they concern matrimony—some spiritual union which was older than life itself? Did they concern stealing? What was stealing outside of life? Where was it before man began? Or did it only begin with man? Ridiculous! It must relate to something in chemistry and physics, which had worked out in life. A sociologist—a great professor in one of the colleges had once told him that he did not believe in success or failure, sin, or a sense of self-righteousness except as they were related to built-up instincts in the race—instincts related solely to the self-preservation and the evolution of the race. Beyond that was nothing. Spiritual morality? Bah! He knew nothing about it.

Such rank agnosticism could not but have had its weight with Eugene. He was a doubter ever. All life, as I have said before, went to pieces under his scalpel, and he could not put it together again logically, once he had it cut up. People talked about the sanctity of marriage, but, heavens, marriage was an evolution! He knew that. Someone had written a two-volume treatise on it—"The History of Human Marriage," or something like that and in it animals were shown to have mated only for so long as it took to rear the young, to get them to the point at which they could take care of themselves. And wasn't this really what was at the basis of modern marriage? He had read in this history, if he recalled aright, that the only reason marriage had come to be looked upon as sacred, and for life, was the length of time it took to rear the human young. It took so long that the parents were old, safely so, before the children were launched into the world. Then why separate?

But it was the duty of everybody to raise children.

Ah! there had been the trouble. He had been bothered by that. The home centered around that. Children! Race reproduction! Pulling this wagon of evolution! Was every man who did not inevitably damned? Was the race spirit against him? Look at the men and women who didn't—who couldn't. Thousands and thousands. And those who did always thought those who didn't were wrong. The whole American spirit he had always felt to be intensely set in this direction—the idea of having children and rearing them, a conservative work-a-day spirit. Look at his father. And yet other men were so shrewd that they preyed on this spirit, moving factories to where this race spirit was the most active, so that they could hire the children cheaply, and nothing happened to them, or did something happen?

However, Myrtle continued to plead with him to look into this new interpretation of the Scriptures, claiming that it was true, that it would bring him into an understanding of spirit which would drive away all these mortal ills, that it was above all mortal conception—spiritual over all, and so he thought about that. She told him that if it was right that he should cease to live with Angela, it would come to pass, and that if it was not, it would not; but anyhow and in any event in this truth there would be peace and happiness to him. He should do what was right ("seek ye first the Kingdom of God"), and then all these things would be added unto him.

And it seemed terribly silly at first to Eugene for him to be listening at all to any such talk, but later it was not so much so. There were long arguments and appeals, breakfast and dinner, or Sunday dinners at Myrtle's apartment, arguments with Bangs and Myrtle concerning every phase of the Science teaching, some visits to the Wednesday experience and testimony meetings of their church, at which Eugene heard statements concerning marvelous cures which he could scarcely believe, and so on. So long as the testimonies confined themselves to complaints which might be due to nervous imagination, he was satisfied that their cures were possibly due to religious enthusiasm, which dispelled their belief in something which they did not have, but when they were cured of cancer, consumption, locomotor-ataxia, goitres, shortened limbs, hernia—he did not wish to say they were liars, they seemed too sincere to do that, but he fancied they were simply mistaken. How could they, or this belief, or whatever it was, cure cancer? Good Lord! He went on disbelieving in this way, and refusing also to read the book until one Wednesday evening when he happened to be at the Fourth Church of Christ Scientist in New York that a man stood up beside him in his own pew and said:

"I wish to testify to the love and mercy of God in my case, for I was hopelessly afflicted not so very long ago and one of the vilest men I think it is possible to be. I was raised in a family where the Bible was read night and morning—my father was a hidebound Presbyterian—and I was so sickened by the manner in which it was forced down my throat and the inconsistencies which I thought I saw existing between Christian principle and practice, even in my own home, that I said to myself I would conform as long as I was in my father's house and eating his bread, but when I got out I would do as I pleased. I was in my father's house after that a number of years, until I was seventeen, and then I went to a large city, Cincinnati, but the moment I was away and free I threw aside all my so-called religious training and set out to do what I thought was the most pleasant and gratifying thing for me to do. I wanted to drink, and I did, though I was really never a very successful drinker." Eugene smiled. "I wanted to gamble, and I did, but I was never a very clever gambler. Still I did gamble a bit. My great weakness was women, and here I hope none will be offended, I know they will not be, for there may be others who need my testimony badly. I pursued women as I would any other lure. They were really all that I desired—their bodies. My lust was terrible. It was such a dominant thought with me that I could not look at any good-looking woman except, as the Bible says, to lust after her. I was vile. I became diseased. I was carried into the First Church of Christ Scientist in Chicago, after I had spent all my money and five years of my time on physicians and specialists, suffering from locomotor ataxia, dropsy and kidney disease. I had previously been healed of some other things by ordinary medicine.

"If there is anyone within the sound of my voice who is afflicted as I was, I want him to listen to me.

"I want to say to you tonight that I am a well man—not well physically only, but well mentally, and, what is better yet, in so far as I can see the truth, spiritually. I was healed after six months' treatment by a Christian Science practitioner in Chicago, who took my case on my appealing to her, and I stand before you absolutely sound and whole. God is good."

He sat down.

While he had been talking Eugene had been studying him closely, observing every line of his features. He was tall, lean, sandy-haired and sandy-bearded. He was not bad-looking, with long straight nose, clear blue eyes, a light pinkish color to his complexion, and a sense of vigor and health about him. The thing that Eugene noted most was that he was calm, cool, serene, vital. He said exactly what he wanted to say, and he said it vigorously. His voice was clear and with good carrying power. His clothes were shapely, new, well made. He was no beggar or tramp, but a man of some profession—an engineer, very likely. Eugene wished that he might talk to him, and yet he felt ashamed. Somehow this man's case paralleled his own; not exactly, but closely. He personally was never diseased, but how often he had looked after a perfectly charming woman to lust after her! Was the thing that this man was saying really true? Could he be lying? How ridiculous! Could he be mistaken? This man? Impossible! He was too strong, too keen, too sincere, too earnest, to be either of these things. Still—But this testimony might have been given for his benefit, some strange helpful power—that kindly fate that had always pursued him might be trying to reach him here. Could it be? He felt a little strange about it, as he had when he saw the black-bearded man entering the train that took him to Three Rivers, the time he went at the call of Suzanne, as he did when horseshoes were laid before him by supernatural forces to warn him of coming prosperity. He went home thinking, and that night he seriously tried to read "Science and Health" for the first time.