Part 31 (1/2)
It came over me to-day almost with a sense of dismay how old I seem to the young girls. They treated me with a sort of respect which couldn't be put into words exactly, I suppose, but which I felt. Somehow I believe the breaking of my engagement has made me seem older to them.
Perhaps it is my foolish fancy, but I seem to see that while I was engaged I had still for them a hold on youth which I have now lost. I suppose they never thought it out, but I know they feel now that I am very much their senior.
At a time like this, too, I realize how true it is that I am somehow a little outside of the life of the village. I have lived here almost all my life. Except for the years I was at school, and a winter or two in Boston or abroad I have been generally at home. I know almost everybody in town, by sight at least. Yet I always find when I am among Tuskamuck people in this way that I am looking at them as if I were a spectator. I wonder if this means that I am egotistical or queer, or only that my life has been so much more among books and intellectual things than the life of most of them. I am sure I love the town and my neighbors.
The thing I wish to put down, however, has nothing to do with my feelings toward the town. It is that I am ashamed of the way I wrote the other day about Mr. Saychase. He entered the hall this afternoon just as old Mrs. Oliver came limping in to see the decorations; and the lovely way in which he helped the poor old lame creature made me blush for myself. I almost wanted to go to him and apologize then and there. It would have been awkward, however, first to explain that I had made fun of him in my diary, and then apologize! But he is a good soul, even if he did think I was a sort of nineteenth century Zorahida, to give up Mohammedanism for the sake of wedding a Christian chief.--And here I go again!
August 15. I have been reading to-night a book about the East, and it has stirred me a good deal. The speculations of strange peoples on the great mystery of life and death bring them so close to us. They show how alike all mankind is, and how we all grope about after some clue to existence. On the whole it is better, I think, not to give much thought to what may come after death,--no more thought, that is, than we cannot help. We can never know, and we must either raise vague hopes to make us less alive to the importance of life, the reality of life--I do not know how to say it. Of course all religion insists on the importance of life, but rather as a preparation for another existence. I think we need to have it always before us that what is important is not what will happen after we are dead and gone, but what is happening now because we are alive and have a hand in things. I see this is not very clear, but I am sure the great thing is to live as if life were of value in itself. To live rightly, to make the most out of the life we can see and feel, is all that humanity is equal to, and it is certainly worth doing for its own sake.
The idea which has struck me most in what I have been reading to-night is the theory that each individual is made up of the fragments of other lives; that just as the body is composed of material once part of other bodies, so is the spirit built up of feelings, and pa.s.sions, and tendencies, and traits of temperament formerly in other individuals dead and gone. At first thought it does not seem to me a comfortable theory.
I should not seem to belong to myself any more, if I believed it. To have the temper of some bygone woman, and the affections of another, and the tastes of a third,--it is too much like wearing false hair! It does not seem to me possible, but it may be true. At least it is a theory which may easily be made to seem plausible by the use of facts we all know. If it is the true solution of our characters here, it is pleasant to think that perhaps we may modify what for the present is our very own self so it shall be better stuff for the fas.h.i.+oning of another generation. I should like to feel that when this bunch of ideas and emotions goes to pieces, the bits would make sweet spots in the individuals they go to make part of. I suppose this is what George Eliot meant in the ”Choir Invisible,” or something like this. As one thinks of the doctrine it is not so cold and unattractive as it struck me in the reading. One could bear to lose a conscious future if the alternative was happiness to lives not yet in being. I should like, though, to know it. But if there weren't any me to know, I should not be troubled, as the old philosophers were fond of saying, and the important thing would be not for me to know but for the world to be better. I begin to see how the doctrine might be a fine incentive to do the best with life that is in any way possible; and what more could be asked of any doctrine?
August 17. Baby was ill night before last, and we three women were smitten to the heart. Hannah went for Dr. Wentworth, and when he came he laughed at our panic, and a.s.sured me nothing serious was the matter. It was only a little indigestion caused by the excessive heat. I do not know how I should have behaved if it had not been that Rosa was in such a panic I had to give all my spare attention to keeping her in order. It came to me then what an advantage an officer must have in a battle; he cannot break down because he has to look to his men. Last night I wished greatly Tom were in reach; it would have been dreadful if anything really serious had happened to baby, and he not to know it until it was too late. Yet he could have done nothing if the worst had been true and he had been here. It would have been no comfort to poor little sick Tomine to have one person by her more than another, so long as her nurses were not strangers. A father is nothing to her yet. I wonder when he will be.
Yesterday Tomine was better, and to-night she seems as well as ever; but it will take time for me to be rid entirely of fear. I wonder if she had gone whether her little bunch of vitality would have been scattered through new lives. She can hardly have much personality or individuality yet. Sometimes the universe, the power that keeps going on and on, and which is so unmoved by human pain, strikes me as too terrible for thought; but I cling desperately to Father's idea that nature is too great to be unkind, and that what looks to us like cruelty is only the size of things too big for us to grasp. It is a riddle, and the way I put it is neither so clear nor wise, I suppose, as the theories of countless religious teachers, they and I alike guessing at things human insight is not equal to. I doubt much if it is profitable to speculate in this vein. ”Think all you can about life as a good and glorious thing,” Father wrote to me once when I had expressed in a school-letter some trouble or other about what comes after death, ”but keep in mind that of what came before we were born or will happen after we are dead we shall never in this life know anything, no matter how much we speculate, so dreaming about it or fretting about it is simply building air-castles.” I have said over to myself ever since I began to be perplexed that to speculate about another life is to build air-castles.
Baby is well again and I will not fret or dream of what it would mean if she had slipped away from us.
August 20. I must settle myself a little by writing, or I shall be like old Mrs. Tuell, who said that for years she never slept a wink because her nerves wiggled like angleworms all over her inside. I have certainly been through an experience which might make anybody's nerves wiggle.
About half past two o'clock Rosa brought me a note, and said:--
”That Thurston girl left it, and told me not to give it to you till three o'clock; but if I don't give it to you now, I know I'd forget it.”
I opened the note without thinking anything about the time. It was written in Kathie's uneven hand, and blotched as if it had been cried over. This is what it said:--
Dear Miss Ruth,--This letter is to bid you good-by. You are the only one in the world I love, and n.o.body loves me. I cant stand you to love that baby better than me, and G.o.d is so angry it dont make any difference what I do now. When you read this I shall be in torment forever, because I am going down to Davis Cove to drownd myself because I am so wicked and n.o.body loves me. Dont tell on me, because it would make you feel bad and father wouldnt like it to get round a child of his had drownd herself and mother would cry.
Yours truly and with a sad and loving good-by forever,
Kathie Thurston.
P. S. If they get me to bury will you please put some flowers on my coffin. No more from yours truly
K. T.
My first impulse was to laugh at this absurd note, but it came over me suddenly that there was no knowing what that child will do. Even now I am bewildered. I cannot get it out of my mind that there is a good deal of the theatrical in Kathie, but I may be all wrong. At any rate I reflected how she has a way of acting so that apparently she can herself take it for real.
I thought it over a while; then I got my hat and started down the street, with the notion that at least it would do no harm to go down to Davis Cove, and see if Kathie were there. As I walked on, recalling her incomprehensible actions, a dreadful feeling grew in my mind that she might have meant what she said, and she would be more likely to try to drown herself because she had told me. A sort of panic seized me; and just then the town clock struck three.
I had got down just opposite the Foot-bridge, and when I remembered that three was the time when I was to have the note, I feared I should be too late, and I began to run. Fortunately, there was n.o.body in sight, and as I came to the bend in the street I saw George coming, leading Kathie by the arm. She was dripping wet, and half staggering, although she kept her feet. I hurried up to them, too much out of breath with haste and excitement to be able to speak.
”Hullo!” George called out, as I came up to them, ”see what a fish I've caught.”
”Why, Kathie,” gasped I, with a stupidity that was lucky, for it kept George from suspecting, ”you've been in the water.”
She gave me a queer look, but she said nothing.
”A little more and she'd have stayed there,” George put in.