The Gates Between Part 8

CHAPTER IX.

Struggling to bear the fate which I had met, I turned as manfully as I might, and retraced my steps down the thronging street, within whose limits I now learned that my freedom was confined. It was a sickening discovery. I had been a man of will so developed and freedom so sufficient that helplessness came upon me like a change of temperament; it took the form of hopelessness almost at once.

What was death? The secret of life. What knew I of the system of things on which a blow upon the head had ushered me all unready, reluctant, and uninstructed as I was? No more than the ruddiest live stockbroker in the street, whose blood went bounding, that fresh morning, to the antics of the Santa Ma. I was not accustomed to be uninformed; my ignorance appalled me. Even in the deeps of my misery, I found s.p.a.ce for a sense of humiliation; I felt profoundly mortified.

In that spot, in that way, of all others, why was I withheld? Was it the custom of the black country called Death, which we mark "unexplored" upon the map of life,--was it the habit to tie a man to the place where he had died? But this was not the spot where I had died. It was the spot where I had learned that I had died. It was the place where the consciousness of death had wrought itself, not upon the nerves of the body, but upon the faculties of the mind. I had been dead twelve hours before I found it out.

I looked up and down the street, where the living men scurried to and fro upon their little errands. These seemed immeasurably small. I looked upon them with disgust. Fettered to that pavement, like a convict to his ball-and-chain, I pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed in wretchedness whose quality I cannot express, and would not if I could.

"I am punished," I said; "I am punished for that which I have done.

This is my doom. I am imprisoned here."

Sometimes I broke into uncontrollable misery, crying upon my wife's dear name. Then I would hush the outbreak, lest some one overhear me; and then I would remember that no one could overhear. I looked into the faces of the people whom I met and pa.s.sed, with such longings for one single sign of recognition as are not to be described. It even occurred to me that among them all one might be found of whom my love and grief and will might make a messenger to Helen. But I found none such, or I gained no such power; and, sick at heart, I turned away.

Suddenly, as I threaded the thick of the press, beating to and fro, and up and down, as dead leaves move before the wind, some one softly touched my hand.

It was the St. Bernard, the broker's dog. This time, as before, he looked into my face with signs of pleasure or of pity, or of both, and made as if he would caress me.

"Lion!" I cried, "_you_ know me, don't you? Bless you, Lion!"

Now, at the dumb thing's recognition, I could have wept for pleasure.

The dog, when I spoke to him, followed me; and for some time walked up and down and athwart the street, beside me. This was a comfort to me.

At last his master came out upon the sidewalk and looked for him.

Brake whistled merrily, and the dog, at the first call, went bounding in.

Ordinary writers upon usual topics, addressing readers of their own condition, have their share of difficulties; at best one conquers the art of expression as a General conquers an enemy. But the obstacles which present themselves to the recorder of this narrative are such as will be seen at once to have peculiar force. Almost at the outset they dishearten me. How shall I tell the story unless I be understood? And how should I be understood if I told the story? Were it for me, a man miserable and erring, gone to his doom as untrained for its consequences, or for the use of them, as a drayman for the use of hypnotism in surgery,--were it for me to play the interpreter between life and death? Were it for me to expect to be successful in that solemn effort which is as old as time, and as hopeless as the eyes of mourners?

What shall I say? It is willed that I shall speak. The angel said unto me: Write. How shall I obey, who am the most unworthy of any soul upon whom has been laid the burden of the higher utterance? Sacred be the task. Would that its sacredness could sanctify the unfitness of him who here fulfils it.

The experience which I have already narrated was followed by an indefinite period of great misery. How long I remained a prisoner in that unwelcome spot I cannot accurately tell.

What are called by dwellers in the body days and nights, and dawns and darks, succeeded each other, little remarked by my wretchedness, or by the sense of remoteness from these things which now began to grow upon me. The life of what we call a spirit had begun for me in the form of a moral dislocation. The wrench, the agony, the process of setting the nature under its new conditions, took place in due order, but with bitter laggardness. The accident of death did not heal in my soul by what surgeons call "the first intention." I retained for a long time the consciousness of being an injured creature.

As I paced and repaced the narrow street where the money-makers and money-lovers of the town jostled and thronged, a great disgust descended upon me. The place, the springs of conduct, wearied me, something in the manner that an educated person is wearied by low conversation. It seemed to be like this:--that the moral motives of the living created the atmosphere of the dead therein confined. It was as if I inhaled the coa.r.s.e friction, the low aspiration, the feverishness, the selfishness, the dishonour, that the getting of gain, when it became the purpose of life, involved. I experienced a sense of being stifled, and breathed with difficulty; much as those live men would have done, if the gas-pipes had burst in the street.

It did not detract from this feeling of asphyxia that I was aware of having, to a certain extent, shared the set of moral compounds which I now found resolved to their elements, by the curious chemistry of death.

I had loved money and the getting of money, as men of the world, and of success in it, are apt to do. I was neither better nor worse than others of my sort. I had speculated with the profits of my profession, idly enough, but hotly, too, at times. I had told myself that I did this out of anxiety for the future of my family. I had viewed myself in the light of the model domestic man, who guards his household against an evil day. It had never occurred to me to cla.s.sify myself with the mere money-changers, into whose atmosphere I had elected to put myself.

Now, as I glided in and out among them, unseen, unheard, unrecognized, a spirit among their flesh, there came upon me a humiliating sense of my true relation to them. Was it thus, I said, or so? Did I this or that? Was the balance of motives so disproportionate after all? Was there so little love of wife and child? So much of self and gain? Was the item of the true so small? The sum of the false so large? Had I been so much less that was n.o.ble, so much more that was low?

I mingled with the ma.s.s of haggard men at a large stock auction which half the street attended. The panic had spread. Sleeplessness and anxiety had carved the crowding faces with hard chisels. The shouts, the scramble, the oaths, the clinched hands, the pitiful pus.h.i.+ng, affected me like a dismal spectacular play on some barbarian stage.

How shall I express the sickening aspect of the scene to a man but newly dead?

The excitement waxed with the morning. The old and placid Santa Ma throbbed like any little road of yesterday. The stock had gained 32 points in ten minutes, and down again, and up again to Heaven knows what. Men ran from despair to elation, and behaved like maniacs in both. Men who were gentlemen at home turned savages here. Men who were honourable in society turned sharpers here. Madness had them, as I watched them. A kind of pity for them seized me. I glided in among them, and lifted my whole heart to stay them if I could. I stretched the hands that no one saw. I raised the voice that none could hear.

"Gentlemen!" I cried, "count me the market value of it--on the margin of two lives! By the bonds wherewith you bind yourselves you shall be bound!... What is the sum of wealth represented within these walls to-day? Name it to me.... The whole of it, for the power to leave this place! The whole of it, the whole of it, for one half-hour in a dead man's desolated home! A hundred-fold the whole of it for"--

But here I lost command of myself, and fleeing from the place where my presence and my misery and my entreaty alike were lost upon the attention of the living throng as were the elements of the air they breathed, I rushed into the outer world again; there to wander up and down the street, and hate the place, and hate myself for being there, and hate the greed of gain I used to love, and hate myself for having loved it; and yet to know that I was forced to act as if I loved it still, and to be the ghost before the ghost of a desire.

"It is my doom," I said. "I am punished. I am fastened to this worldly spot, and to this awful way of being dead."

Now, while I spoke these words, I came, in the stress of my wretchedness, fleeing to the head of the street; and there, I cannot tell you how, I cannot answer why, as the arrow springs from the bow, or the conduct from the heart, or the spirit from the flesh,--in one blessed instant I knew that I was free to leave the spot, and crying, "Helen, Helen!" broke from it.

CHAPTER X.

But no. Alas, no, no! I was and was not free. All my soul turned toward her, but something stronger than my soul constrained me. It seemed to me that I longed for her with such longing as might have killed a live man, or might have made a dead one live again. This emotion added much to my suffering, but nothing to my power to turn one footstep toward her or to lift my helpless face in her direction. It was not permitted to me. It was not willed.

Now this, which might in another temperament have produced a sense of fear or of desire to placate the unknown Force which overruled me, created in me at first a stinging rage. This is the truth, and the truth I tell.

In my love and misery, and the shock of this disappointment--against the unknown opposition to my will, I turned and raved; even as when I was a man among men I should have raved at him who dared my purpose.

"You are playing with me!" I wailed. "You torture a miserable man.

Who and what are you, that make of death a bitterer thing than life can guess? Show me what I have to fight, and let me wrestle for my liberty,--though I am a ghost, let me wrestle like a man! Let me to my wife! Give way, and let me seek her!"

Shocking and foreign as words like these must be to many of those who read these pages, it must be remembered that they were uttered by one to whom faith and the knowledge that comes by way of it were the leaves of an abandoned text-book. For so many years had the tenets of the Christian religion been put out of my practical life, even as I put aside the opinions of the laity concerning the treatment of disease, that I do not over-emphasize; I speak the simplest truth in saying that my first experience of death had not in any sense revived the vividness of lost belief to me. As the old life had ended had the new begun.

Where the tree had fallen it did lie. What was habit before death was habit after. What was natural then was natural now. What I loved living I loved dead. That which interested Esmerald Thorne the man interested Esmerald Thorne the spirit. The incident of death had raised the temperature of intellect; it had, perhaps, I may say, by this time quickened the pulse of conscience; but it had in no wise wrought any miracle upon me, nor created a religious believer out of a worldly and indifferent man of science. Dying had not forthwith made me a devout person. Incredible as it may seem, it is the truth that up to this time I had not, since the moment of dissolution, put to myself the solemn queries concerning my present state which occupy the imaginations of the living so much, while yet death is a fact remote from their experience.

It was the habit of long years with me, after the manner of my kind, to settle all hard questions by a few elastic phrases, which, once learned, are curiously pliable to the intellectual touch. "Phenomena,"

for instance,--how plastic to cover whatever one does not understand!

"Law,"--how ready to explain away the inexplicable! Up to this point death had struck me as a most unfortunate phenomenon. Its personal disabilities I found it easy to attribute to some natural law with which my previous education had left me unfamiliar. Now, standing baffled there in that incredible manner half of tragedy, half of the absurd,--even the petty element of the undignified in the position adding to my distress,--a houseless, homeless, outcast spirit, struck still in the heart of that great town, where in hundreds of homes was weeping for me, where I was beloved and honoured and bemoaned, and where my own wife at that hour broke her heart with sorrow for me and for the manner of my parting from her,--then and there to be beaten back, and battered down, and tossed like an atom in some primeval flood, whithersoever I would not,--what a situation was this!

Now, indeed, I think for the first time, my soul lifted itself, as a sick man lifts himself upon his elbows, in his painful bed. Now, flas.h.i.+ng straight back upon the outburst of my defiance and despair, like the reflex action of a strong muscle, there came into my mind, if not into my heart, these impulsive and entreating words:--

"What art Thou, who dost withstand me? I am a dead and helpless man.

What wouldst Thou with me? Where gainest Thou Thy force upon me? Art Thou verily that ancient Myth which we were wont to call Almighty G.o.d?"

Simultaneously with the utterance of these words that blast of Will to which I have referred fell heavily upon me. A Power not myself overshadowed me and did environ me. Guided whithersoever I would not, I pa.s.sed forth upon errands all unknown to me, rebelling and obeying as I went.

"I am become what we used to call a spirit," I thought, bitterly, "and this is what it means. Better might one become a molecule, for those, at least, obey the laws of the universe, and do not suffer."

Now, as I took my course, it being ordered on me, it led me past the door of a certain open church, whence the sound of singing issued. The finest choir in the city, famous far and near, were practising for the Sunday service, and singing like the sons of G.o.d, indeed, as I pa.s.sed by. With the love of the scientific temperament for harmony alert in me, I lingered to listen to the anthem which these singers were rendering in their customary great manner. With the instinct of the musically educated, I felt pleasure in this singing, and said:--

"Magnificently done!" as I went on. It was some moments before the words which the choir sang a.s.sumed any vividness in my mind. When they did I found that they were these;--

"_For G.o.d is a Spirit. G.o.d is a Spirit: and they that wors.h.i.+p Him must wors.h.i.+p Him in spirit_"--

Now it fell out that my steps were directed to the hospital; and to the hospital I straightway went. I experienced some faint comfort at this improvement in my lot, and hurried up the avenue and up the steps and into the familiar wards with eagerness. All the impulses of the healer were alive in me. I felt it a mercy for my nature to be at its own again. I hastened in among my sick impetuously.

The hospital had been a favourite project of mine; from its start, unreasonably dear to me. Through the mounting difficulties which blockade such enterprises, I had hewn and hacked, I had fathered and doctored, I had trusteed and collected, I had subscribed and directed and persisted and prophesied and fulfilled, as one ardent person must in most humanitarian successes; and I had loved the success accordingly. I do not think it had ever once occurred to me to question myself as to the chemical proportions of my motives in this great and popular charity. Now, as I entered the familiar place, some query of this nature did indeed occupy my mind; it had the strangeness of all mental experiences consequent upon my new condition, and somewhat, if I remember, puzzled me.