The Gates Between Part 11

"It is a foreign country," I said sadly.

"Is it, Doctor? Poor Doctor! Why, I feel so much at _home_!"

She lifted a radiant face to me; it was touching to see her expression, and marvellous to behold the idealization of health on features for so many years adjusted to pain and patience.

"Dear Doctor!" she cried joyously, "you never thought to see me _well_!

They call this death. Why, I never knew what it was to be _alive_ before!"

"I must make you acquainted with some of the people who live here," she added, quickly recalling herself from her own interests to mine, with her natural unselfishness, "it is pitiful to come into this place--as you have done. You always knew so many people. You had such friends about you. I never saw you walk alone in all your life before."

"I wish to be alone," I answered moodily. "I care nothing for this place, or for the men who live here. It is all unfamiliar to me. I am not happy in it. I am afraid I have not been educated for it. It is the most unhomelike place I ever saw."

Her eyes filled; she did not answer me at once; when she did it was to say:

"It will be better. It will be better by and by. Have you seen"--

She stopped and hesitated.

"Have you seen the Lord?" she asked, in a low voice. She was wont, I remember, to use this word in a way peculiarly her own; as if she were referring to some personal acquaintance, near to her heart. I shook my head, looking drearily upon her.

"Don't you _want_ to see Him?"

"I want to see my wife!"

"Oh, I am sorry for you," she said, with forbearing gentleness. "It is pretty hard. But I wish you _wanted_ Him."

"I want to see my wife! I want to see my wife!" I interrupted bitterly. And with this I turned away from her and hid my face, for I could speak no more. When I lifted my eyes, she had gone from me, and I was again alone. When it was thus too late, it occurred to me that I had lost an opportunity which might not easily return to me, and I sought far and wide for Mrs. Faith. I did not find her, though I aroused myself to the point of accosting some of the inhabitants of the country, and making definite inquiries for her. I was answered with great courtesy and uncommon warmth of manner, as if it were the custom of this place to take a genuine interest in the affairs of strangers; but I was not able, by any effort on my part, to bring myself in proximity to her. This trifling disappointment added to my sense of helplessness in the new life on which I had entered; and I was still as incredulous of helplessness and as galled by it as I should have been by the very world of woe which had formed so irritating a dogma to me in the theology of my day on earth, and which I had regarded as I did the nightmares of a dyspeptic patient.

In this state of feeling, it was the greatest comfort to me when, at some period of time which I have no means of defining, but which could not have been long afterward, Mrs. Faith came suddenly again across my path. She radiated happiness and health and beauty, and when she held out both her hands to me in greeting they seemed to glitter, as if she had stepped from a bath of delight.

"Oh," she said joyously, "have you seen Him _yet_?" It embarra.s.sed me to be forced to answer in the negative; it gave me a strange feeling, as if I had been a convict in the country, and denied the pa.s.sport of honourable men. I therefore waived her question as well as I might, and proceeded to make known to her the thought which had been occupying me.

"_You_ have the _entree_ of the dear earth," I said sadly. "They do not treat you in the--in the very singular manner with which I am treated. It is important beyond explanation that I get a message to my wife. A beggar in the street may be admitted to her charity,--I saw one at the door the night I stood there. I, only I, am forbidden to enter. Whatever may be the natural laws which are sot in opposition to me, they have extraordinary force; I can do nothing against them. I suppose I do not understand them. If I had an opportunity to study them--but I have no opportunities at anything. It is a new experience to me to be so--so disregarded by the general scheme of things. I seem to be of no more consequence in this place than a bootblack was in the world, or a paralytic person. It seems useless for me to fly in the face of fate, since this is fate. I have no hope of being able to reach my wife. You have privileges in this condition which are evidently far superior to mine. I have been thinking that possibly you may be able--and willing--to approach her for me?"

"I don't think it would succeed, Doctor," replied my old patient quickly. "I'd _do_ it! You know I would! But if I were Helen--She is a very reserved person; she never talks about her husband, as different women do; her feeling is of such a sort; I do not think she would _understand_, if another woman were to speak from you to her."

"Perhaps not," I sighed.

"I am afraid it would be the most hopeless experiment you could make,"

said Mrs. Faith. "She loves you too much for it," she added, with the divination of her s.e.x. Comforted a little by Mrs. Faith, I quickly abandoned this project; indeed, I soon abandoned every other which concerned itself with Helen, and yielded myself with a kind of desperate lethargy, if I may be allowed the expression, to the fate which separated me from her. Of resignation I knew nothing. Peace was the coldest stranger in that strange land to me. I yielded because I could not help it, not because I would have willed it; and with that dull strength which grows into the sinews of the soul from necessity, sought to adjust myself in such fas.h.i.+on as I might to my new conditions. It occurred to me from time to time that it would have been an advantage if I had felt more interest in the conditions themselves; that it would even have spared me something if I had ever cultivated any familiarity with the possibilities of such a state of existence. I could not remember that I had in the old life satisfactorily proved that another _could_ not follow it. It seemed to me that if I had only so much as exercised my imagination upon the possible course of events in case another did, it would have been of some practical service to me now. I was in the position of a man who is become the victim of a discovery whose rationality he has contemptuously denied. It was like being struck by a projectile while one is engaged in disproving the existence of gunpowder.

If a soul may properly be said to be stunned, mine at this time, was that soul.

In this condition solitude was still so natural to me that I made no effort to approach the people of the place, and contented myself with observing them and their affairs from a distance. They seemed a very happy people. There could be no mistake about that. I did not see a clouded countenance; nor did I hear an accent of discomfort, or of pain. I wondered at their joyousness, which I found it as impossible to share as the sick find it impossible to share what has been called "the insolence of health." It did, indeed, appear to me as something almost impertinent, as possession always appears to denial. But I had never been denied before. I perceived, also, that the inhabitants of this country were a busy people. They came and went, they met and parted, with the eagerness of occupation; though there was a conspicuous absence of the fretful haste to which I had been used in the conduct of business. I looked upon the avocations of this strange land, and wondered at them. I could not see with what they were occupied, or why, or to what end. They affected me perhaps something as the concerns of the human race may affect the higher animals. I looked on with an unintelligent envy.

One day, as I was strolling miserably about, a child came up and spoke to me. He, like myself, was alone. He was a beautiful child,--a little boy; he seemed scarcely more than an infant. He appeared to be in search of some one or of something; his brilliant eyes roved everywhere; he had a n.o.ble little head, and carried himself courageously. He gave no evidence of fear or sadness at his isolated position but ran right on,--for he was running when I saw him,--as if he had gone forth upon some happy, childish errand.

But at sight of me he paused; regarded me a moment with the piercing candour of childhood, as if he took my moral measure after some inexplicable personal scale of his own; then came directly and put his hand into my own.

I grasped it heartily,--who could have helped it?--and lifting the little fellow in my arms kissed him affectionately, as one does a pretty stranger child. This seemed to gratify him rather than to satisfy him; he nestled in my neck, but moved restlessly, slipping to the ground, and back again into my arms; jabbering incoherently and pleasantly; seeming to be diverted rather than comforted; ready to stay, but alert to go; in short, behaving like a baby on a visit.

After awhile the child adjusted himself to the situation; grew quiet, and clung to me; and at last, putting both his arms about my neck, he gave the long, sweet sigh of healthy infant weariness, and babbling something to the general effect that Boy was tired, he dropped into a sound and happy sleep.

Here, indeed, was a situation! It drew from me the first smile which had crossed my lips since I had died. What, pray, was I, who seemed to be of no consequence whatever in this amazing country, and who had more than I knew how to do in looking after myself, under its mysterious conditions,--what was I to do with the spirit-baby gone to sleep upon my neck?

"I must go and find the Orphan Asylum," I 'thought; "doubtless they have them in this extraordinary civilization. I must take the little fellow to some women as soon as possible." At this juncture, my friend Mrs. Faith appeared, making a mock of being out of breath, and laughing heartily.

"He ran away from me," she merrily explained. "I had the care of him, and he ran on; he came straight to you. I couldn't hold him. What a comfort he will be to you!... Why, Doctor! Do you mean to say you don't know who the child _is_?"

"It seems to me," she added, with a mother's sublime superiority, "_I_ should know my own baby! If I were so fortunate as to find one here!--How much less you know," she proceeded naively, "than I used to think you did!"

"Did the child _die_?" I asked, trembling so that I had to put the little fellow down lest he should fall from my startled arms. "Did something really ail him that night when his mother--that miserable night?"

"The child died," she answered gravely. "Dear little Boy! Take him up again, Doctor. Don't you see? He is uneasy unless you hold him fast."

I took Boy up; I held him close; I kissed him, and I clung to him, and melted into unintelligible cries above him, never minding Mrs. Faith, for I quite forgot her.

But what I felt was for my child's poor mother, and all my thought was for her, and my heart broke for her, that she should be so bereft.

"I should like to know if you suppose for one minute that she wouldn't _rather_ you would have the little fellow, if he is the least bit of comfort to you in the world?"

Mrs. Faith said this; she spoke with a kind of lofty, feminine scorn.

"Why, Helen _loves_ you!" she said, superbly.

CHAPTER XIII

"I believe," said my old patient, "I believe that was the highest moment of your life."

A man of my sort seldom comprehends a woman of hers. I did not understand her, and I told her so, looking at her across the clinging child.

"There was no self in it!" she answered eagerly.

"Oh," I said indifferently, "is that all?"

"It is everything," replied the wiser spirit, "in the place that we have come to. It is like a birth. Such a moment has to go on living.

One is never the same after as one was before it. Changes follow. May the Lord be in them!"

"But stay!" I cried, as she made a signal of farewell, "are you not going to help me--is n.o.body going to help me take care of this child?"

She shook her head, smiling; then laughed outright at my perplexity; and with a merry air of enjoyment in my extraordinary position, she went her ways and left me.

There now began for me a singular life. Changes followed, as Mrs.

Faith had said. The pains and the privileges of isolation were possible to me no longer. Action of some sort, communion of some kind with the world in which I lived, became one of the imperative necessities about which men do not philosophize. For there was the boy! Whatever my views about a spiritual state of existence, there always was the boy. No matter how I had demonstrated the unreasonableness of living after death, the child was alive. However I might personally object to my own share of immortality, I was a living father, with my motherless baby in my arms.

Up to this time I had lived in an indifferent fas.h.i.+on; in the old world, we should have called it "anyhow." Food I scarcely took, or if at all, it was to s.n.a.t.c.h at such wild fruits as grew directly before me, without regard to their fitness or palatableness; paying, in short, as little attention to the subject as possible. Home I had none. I wandered till I was weary of wandering, and rested till I could rest no more; seeking such shelter as the country afforded me in lonely and beautiful spots; discontented with what I had, but desiring nothing further; with my own miserable thoughts for housemates and for neighbours, and the absence of hope forbidding the presence of energy.