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Title: Tom Clark and His Wife
Their Double Dreams, And the Curious Things that Befell
Them Therein; Being the Rosicrucian's Story
Author: Paschal Beverly Randolph
Release Date: February 23, 2011 [EBook #35366]
Language: English
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TOM CLARK AND HIS WIFE,
THEIR DOUBLE DREAMS, AND THE CURIOUS THINGS THAT BEFELL THEM THEREIN;
BEING THE ROSICRUCIAN'S STORY.
BY DR. P. B. RANDOLPH,
"THE DUMAS OF AMERICA,"
AUTHOR OF "WAA, GU-MAH," "PRE-ADAMITE MAN," "DEALINGS WITH THE DEAD,"
"IT ISN'T ALL RIGHT," "THE UNVEILING OF SPIRITISM," "THE GRAND SECRET,"
"HUMAN LOVE--A PHYSICAL SUBSTANCE," ETC., ETC., ETC.
NEW YORK:
SINCLAIR TOUSEY, 121 NASSAU STREET.
1863.
DEAR CHARLES T----s:
Since we parted at the "Golden Gate," the weight of a world has rested
on your shoulders, and I have suffered much, in my journeyings up and
down the world, as wearily I wandered over Zahara's burning sands and
among the shrines and monuments of Egypt, Syria, and Araby the blessed;
separated in body, but united in soul, we have each sought knowledge,
and, I trust, gained wisdom. _Our work_ is just begun. One portion of
that work consists in the endeavor to unmask villainy, and vindicate the
sanctity and perpetuity of marriage. In this little work I have tried to
do this, and believe that if the magic talisman herein recommended as a
sovereign balm for the strifes and ills of wedlock, be faithfully used,
that the great married world will adopt your motto and my own, and
become convinced that in spite of much contrary seeming "WE MAY BE HAPPY
YET!"
To you, and to such this book is
Affectionately dedicated by your friend and the world's,
P. B. RANDOLPH.
THE ROSICRUCIAN'S STORY.
PART I.
THE MAN.
He used to pace rapidly up and down the deck for a minute or two, and
then, suddenly striking his forehead, as if a new thought were just
pangfully coming into being at the _major foci_ of his soul, he would
throw himself prone upon one of the after seats of the old "Uncle Sam,"
the steamer in which we were going from San Francisco to Panama, and
there he would lie, apparently musing, and evidently enjoying some sort
of interior life, but whether that life was one of reverie, dream, or
disembodiedness, was a mystery to us all, and would have remained so,
but that on being asked, he very complaisantly satisfied our doubts, by
informing us that on such occasion he, in spirit, visited a place not
laid down in ordinary charts, and the name of which was the realm of
"Wotchergifterno," which means in English, "Violinist's Meadow" (very
like "Fiddler's Green"). When not pacing the deck, or reclining, or
gazing at the glorious sunsets on the sea, or the still more gorgeous
sun-risings on the mountains, he was in the habit of--_catching flies_;
which flies he would forthwith proceed to dissect and examine by means
of a microscope constructed of a drop of water in a bent broom wisp.
Gradually the man became quite a favorite with both passengers and
officers of the ship, and not a day passed but a crowd of ladies and
gentlemen would gather around him to listen to the stories he would not
merely recite, but compose as he went along, each one containing a moral
of more than ordinary significance. It was apparent from the first that
the man was some sort of a mystic, a dreamer, or some such
out-of-the-ordinary style of person, because everything he said or did
bore an unmistakable ghostly impress. He was sorrowful withal, at times,
and yet no one on the ship had a greater or more humorous flow of
spirits. In the midst, however, of his brightest sallies, he would
suddenly stop short, as if at that moment his listening soul had caught
the jubilant cry of angels when God had just pardoned some sinful,
storm-tossed human soul.
One day, during the progress of a long and interesting conversation on
the nature of that mysterious thing called the human soul, and in which
our fellow passenger had, as usual, taken a leading part, with the
endeavor to elicit, as well as impart, information, he suddenly changed
color, turned almost deathly pale, and for full five minutes, perhaps
more, looked straight into the sky, as if gazing upon the awful and
ineffable mysteries of that weird Phantom-land which intuition
demonstrates, but cold reason utterly rejects or challenges for
tangible proof. Long and steadily gazed the man; and then he
shuddered--shuddered as if he had just received some fearful solution of
the problem near his heart. And I shuddered also--in pure sympathy with
what I could not fairly understand. At length he spoke; but with bated
breath, and in tones so low, so deep, so solemn, that it seemed as
though a dead, and not a living man, gave utterance to the sounds:
"Lara! Lara! Ah, Lovely! would that I had gone _then_--that I were with
thee now!" and he relapsed into silence.
Surprised, both at his abruptness, change of manner and theme--for ten
minutes before, and despite the solemnity of the conversational topic,
he had been at a fever heat of fun and hilarity--I asked him what he
meant. Accustomed, as we had been, to hear him break in upon the most
grave and dolorous talk with a droll observation which instantly
provoked the most unrestrainable, hilarious mirth; used, as we had been
to hear him perpetrate a joke, and set us all in a roar in the very
midst of some heart-moving tale of woe, whereat our eyes had moistened,
and our pulses throbbed tumultuously, yet I was not, even by all this,
prepared for the singular characteristic now presented. In reply to my
question, he first wiped away an involuntary tear, as if ashamed of his
weakness; then raised his head, and exclaimed:
"Lara! Lara! The Beautiful One!"
"What of her?" asked Colbert, who sat opposite him, and who was deeply
moved at his evident distress, and whose curiosity, as that of us all,
was deeply piqued.
"Listen," said he, "and I will tell you;" and then, while we eagerly
drank in his words, and strove to drink in their strange and wondrous
meaning (first warning us that what he was about to say was but the text
of something to be thereafter told), he leaned back upon the taffrail,
and while the steamer gently plowed her way toward Acapulco and far-off
Panama, said:
"Fleshless, yet living, I strode through the grand old hall of a mighty
temple. I had been compelled to climb the hills to reach the wall that
bars the Gates of Glory, and now within my heart strange pulses beat the
while. I found myself upon the verge of a vast extended plain,
stretching out to the Infinitudes, as it seemed, through the narrow
spaces wherein the vision was not obstructed by certain dense,
convolving vapor-clouds that ever and anon rose from off the murky
breast of the waters of the river of Lethe, that rolled hard by and
skirted the immense prairie on and over which I proposed to travel, on
my way from Minus to Plus--from Nothing to Something, from Bad to Good,
and from Better to BEST--travelling toward my unknown, unimagined
Destiny--travelling from the _Now_ toward the _Shall Be_. And I stood
and mutely gazed--gazed at the dense, dark shadows rolling murkily,
massily over the plain and through the spaces--dim shadows of dead
worlds. No sound, no footfall, not even mine own--not an echo broke the
Stillness. I was alone!--alone upon the vast Solitude--the tremendous
wastes of an unknown, mysterious, unimagined Eterne--unimagined in all
its fearful stillitude! Within my bosom there was a heart, but no pulse
went from it bounding through my veins; no throb beat back responsive
life to my feeling, listening spirit. I and my Soul were there alone; we
only--the Thinking self, and the Self that ever knows, but never
thinks--were there. My heart was not cold, yet it was more: it was, I
felt, changed to solid stone--changed all save one small point, distant,
afar off, like unto the vague ghost of a long-forgotten fancy; and this
seemed to have been the penalty inflicted for things done by me while on
the earth; for it appeared that I was dead, and that my soul had begun
an almost endless pilgrimage--to what?--to where? A penalty! And yet no
black memory of red-handed crime haunted me, or lurked in the
intricacies of the mystic wards of my death-defying soul; and I strode
all alone adown the uncolumned vistas of the grand old temple--a temple
whose walls were builded of flown Seconds, whose tesselated pavements
were laid in sheeted Hours, whose windows on one side opened upon the
Gone Ages, and on the other upon the Yet to Be; and its sublime turrets
pierced the clouds, which roll over and mantle the hoary summits of the
grey Mountains of Time! And so I and my Soul walked through this temple
by ourselves--alone!
"With clear, keen gaze, I looked forth upon the Vastness, and my vision
swept over the floors of all the dead years; yet in vain, for the things
of my longing were not there. I beheld trees, but all their leaves were
motionless, and no caroling bird sent its heart-notes forth to waken the
dim solitudes into life and music--which are love. There were stately
groves beneath the arching span of the temple's massy dome, but no
amphian strains of melody fell on the ear, or filled the spaces, from
their myriad moveless branches, or from out their fair theatres. All was
still. It was a palace of frozen tones, and only the music of Silence
(which is vocal, if we listen well) prevailed; and I, Paschal the
Thinker, and my Thought--strange, uncouth, yet mighty but moveless
thought--were the only living things beneath the expansive dome. Living,
I had sacrificed all things--health, riches, honor, fame, ease, even
Love itself, for Thought, and by Thought had overtopped many who had
started on the race for glory long ere my soul had wakened to a
consciousness of itself--which means Power. In life I had, so it seemed,
builded stronger than I thought, and had reached a mental
eminence--occupied a throne so lofty--that mankind wondered, stood
aloof, and gazed at me from afar off; and by reason of my thought had
gathered from me, and thus condemned the Thinker to an utter solitude,
even in the most thronged and busy haunts of men; and I walked through
earth's most crowded cities more lonely than the hermit of the desert,
whose eyes are never gladdened by the sight of human form, and through
the chambers of whose brain no human voice goes ringing. Thus was it on
earth; and now that I had quitted it forever, with undaunted soul,
strong purpose, and fearless tread, assured of an endless immortality,
and had entered upon the life of Thinking, still was I alone. Had my
life, my thinking, and my action on thought been failures? The
contemplation of such a possibility was bitter, very bitter--even like
unto painful death--and yet it seemed true that failure had been
mine--failure, notwithstanding men by thousands spoke well of me and of
my works--the children of my thought--and bought my books in thousands.
Failure? My soul rejected the idea in utter loathing. For a moment the
social spirit, the heartness of my nature over-shadowed Reason, and
caused me to forget that, even though confined by dungeon walls,
stricken with poverty, deformity, sin or disease--even though left out
to freeze in the cold world's spite--yet the thinker is ever the world's
true and only King. I had become, for a moment, oblivious of the fact
that failure was an impossibility. _Rosicrucians never fail!_"
* * * *
"But now, as I slowly moved along, I felt my human nature was at war
with the God-nature within, and that Heart for a while was holding the
Head in duress. I longed for release from Solitude; my humanity yearned
for association, and would have there, on the breast of the great
Eterne, given worlds for the company of the lowliest soul I had ever
beheld--and despised, as I walked the streets of the cities of the
far-off earth. I yearned for human society and affection, and could even
have found blissful solace with--a dog! just such a dog as, in times
past, I had scornfully kicked in Cairo and Stamboul. Even a dog was
denied me now--all affection withheld from me--and in the terrible
presence of its absence I longed for death, forgetting again that Soul
can never die. I longed for that deeper extinguishment which should
sweep the soul from being, and crown it with limitless, eternal
Night--forgetful, again, that the Memories of Soul must live, though the
rememberer cease to be, and that hence Horrors would echo through the
universe--children mourning for their suicidal parent, and that parent
myself!
"And I lay me down beneath a tree in despair--a tree which stood out all
alone from its fellows, in a grove hard by--a tree all ragged and
lightning-scathed--an awful monument, mute, yet eloquently proclaiming
to the wondering on-looker that God had passed that way, in fierce,
deific wrath, once upon a time, in the dead ages, whose ashes now
bestrewed the floors of the mighty temple of Eterne.
"It was dreadful, very dreadful, to be all alone. True, the pangs of
hunger, the tortures of thirst, the fires of ambition, and the raging
flames of earthly passion no longer marred my peace. Pain, such as
mortals feel, was unknown; no disease racked my frame, or disturbed the
serenity of my external being--for I was immortal, and could laugh all
these and Death itself to scorn; and yet a keener anguish, a more
fearful suffering, was mine. I wept, and my cries gave back no outer
sound, but they rang in sombre echoes through the mighty arches, the
bottomless caverns, the abyssmal deeps of Soul--my soul--racking it with
torments such as only thinking things can feel. Such is the lot, such
the discipline of the destined citizens of the Farther Empyrean--a
region known only to the Brethren of the Temple of Peerless Rosicrucia!"
* * * *
"Sleep came--sweet sleep--deep and strange; and in it I dreamed.
Methought I still wandered gloomily beneath the vast arches of the grand
old hall, until at last, after countless cycles of ripe years had been
gathered back into the treasury of the _Etre Supreme_, I stood before a
solid, massive door, which an inscription thereabove announced as being
the entrance to the Garden of the Beatitudes. This door was secured by a
thousand locks, besides one larger than all the rest combined. Every one
of these locks might be opened, but the opener could not pass through
unless he unfastened the master-lock having ten thousand bolts and
wards.
"Once more despair seized on my soul, in this dream which was not all a
dream; for to achieve an entrance through the gate without the
master-key was a task, so said the inscription, that would defy the
labors of human armies for periods of time utterly defying man's
comprehension--so many were the difficulties, so vastly strong the
bolts.
"Sadly, mournfully, I turned away, when, as if by chance--forgetting
that there is no such thing as Chance--my eye encountered a rivetless
space upon the solid brazen door--a circular space, around the periphery
of which was an inscription running thus: 'MAN ONLY FAILS THROUGH
FEEBLENESS OF WILL!' Within this smooth circle was the semblance of a
golden triangle, embracing a crystalline globe, winged and beautiful,
crowned with a Rosicrucian cypher, while beneath it stood out, in fiery
characters, the single word, 'TRY!' The very instant I caught the magic
significance of these divine inscriptions, a new Hope was begotten in my
soul; Despair fled from me, and I passed into
"A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM.
"What a change! During my slumber it seemed that I had been transported
to the summit of a very lofty mountain, yet still within the Temple. By
my side stood an aged and saintly man, of regal and majestic presence.
He was clad in an oriental garb of the long-gone ages, and his flowing
robes were bound to his waist by a golden band, wrought into the
similitude of a shining serpent--the sacred emblem of eternal wisdom.
Around his broad and lofty brow was a coronet of silver, dusted with
spiculæ of finest diamond. On the sides of the centre were two scarabei,
the symbol of immortality; and between them was a pyramid, on which was
inscribed a mystical character which told, at the same time, that his
name was Ramus the Great.[1]
[Footnote 1: The same known historically as Thothmes, or Thotmor the
Third, King of all Egypt, in the 18th dynasty, and sixty-ninth Chief or
Grand Master of the Superlative Order of Gebel Al Maruk--since known, in
Christian lands, as the Order of the Brethren of the Rosie Cross, and
now known in America and Europe, where it still thrives, as the Imperial
Order of Rosicrucia.]
"This royal personage spake kindly to me, and his soft tones fell upon
the hearing of my soul like the words of pardon to the sense of sinners
at the Judgment Seat. 'Look, my son,' said he, at the same time pointing
toward a vast procession of the newly-risen dead--a spectral army on the
sides of the mountain, slowly, steadily, mournfully wending their way
toward the part of the temple I had quitted previous to the commencement
of this dream within a dream. Said the man at my side: 'Yonder host of
pilgrims are men and women who are seeking, as thou hast sought, to
unbar the Gates of Glory, that they may pass through them into the
delightful Garden of the Beatitudes. It is one thing to be endowed with
Intellectual Strength, Knowledge and Immortality; it is another to be
Wise and Happy. The first is a boon granted to all the children of earth
alike; the last can only be attained by integral development--by
self-endeavor, by innate goodness and God-ness continually
manifested--and this in material and aromal worlds alike. Man is man and
woman is woman, wherever they may be! The true way to the garden lies
not through Manifestation Corridor, but through the Hall of Silence! and
each Aspirant must open the door for himself alone. Failing to enter, as
thou hast failed, each must turn back, and, like thee, come hither to
Mount Retrospect, and entering into the labyrinths within its sides,
must search for the triple key, which alone can unbar the Gate, and
admit to the Beautiful Garden! Remember! Despair not! Try!' and in an
instant the Phantom-man turned from me, and with outstretched arms, and
benignance beaming from every feature, hied him toward the ascending
army.
"Again I stood alone, not now in despondency and gloom, but in all the
serene strength of noble, conscious Manhood--not the actual, but the
certain and glorious possibility thereof. My soul had grown. It was
aware of all its past short-comings, failures, and its hatreds toward
two men who had done me deadly wrong. This feeling still
survived--stronger than ever, now that I was across the Bridge of
Hours, and had become a citizen of the inner land--a wanderer through
Eternity. That hate was as immortal as my deathless soul. Will it ever
be? And yet I had ever meant well. All was calm in my spirit, save this
single awful thing. In this spirit, with this consciousness--not of deep
malignance, but of outraged Justice--I began to look for the mysterious
key; and as I looked, an instinct told me that the key must consist of
certain grand human virtues, and corresponding good deeds, held and done
before I left the shores of time and embarked upon the strange and
mystic sea whereon my soul's fortunes were now cast.
"And so I searched, and at last seemed to have found what I sought; and
thereupon I wished myself once more before the brazen Gate. Instantly,
as if by magic, the wish was realized, and I stood before at, on the
same spot formerly occupied. The first inscription, the symbols and
circle had disappeared, and in their stead was another circle,
containing these lines: 'Speak, for thou shalt be heard! Tell what thou
hast done to elevate thy fellow men, and to round out the angles of
thine own soul. Whom hast thou uplifted, loved, hated? Speak, and when
the words containing the key are spoken, the door will yield, and thou
mayest pass the Threshold.'
"The writing slowly faded, and left naught but a surface, but that
surface as of molten gold. I spoke aloud my claim to entrance, and, to
my astonishment, my voice rang out shrill and clear, through the vaults
and arches of the mighty dome towering far above my head. 'I have
suffered from infancy--been opposed from the cradle to maturity--been
hated, robbed, slandered on all sides, yet pushed forward in defiance of
all, until I reached all that I desired--all that earth could give me.
Self-educated, I achieved triumphs where others failed; have reaped
laurels and grasped the keys of fame, and laughed at my folly
afterwards, because what is fame? A canker, gnawing out one's life when
living, disturbing his repose when dead--not worth a straw! But, in all
this, despite the ending, I have set an example, by following which man
might elevate himself, society be improved, and its constituents realize
the bliss of moving in loftier spheres of usefulness!' While giving
voice to these truths, I firmly expected to see the gate fly open at
their conclusion. But what was my horror and dismay to see that it moved
not at all, while the echoes of my speech gave back in frightfully
resonant waves of sound the last word, 'USEFULNESS!'
"Not being able to think of any nobler achievements, I cast my eyes
groundward, and, on again raising them, I beheld, across the clear space
on the door, the single word, 'TRY!'
"Taking heart again, I said, 'Alone I sought the secret of restoring
health to the sick, and gave it freely to the world, without money,
without price. I have made grand efforts to banish sloth, sin,
ignorance; have ever upheld the honor of the Cross, and the sweet
religion it symbolizes. Striving ever to upraise the veil that hides man
from himself, in the effort I have been misapprehended, my motives
impugned, and my reward has been poverty, slander, disgrace. In the
strife, I have been heedless to every call save that of human duty,
and, in obeying the behests of a nobler destiny, have been regardless of
all worldly distinction; have ignored wealth, fame, honorable place in
the world's esteem, and even been deaf to the calls of love!'
"I ceased, and again the vault threw back my last word, and all the
arches echoed 'LOVE!'
"The gate moved not, but once more appeared upon the golden lozenge on
the door the word 'TRY!' in greater brightness than before, while it
seemed to the hearing sense of my spirit that a thousand velvet
whispers--low, _so_ low, gently cadenced back 'LOVE!'
"'I have rebuked the immoral, humbled the lofty and overbearing, exposed
deception, comforted the mourner, redeemed the harlot, reformed the
thief, fed the orphan and upheld the rights and dignity of Labor!'
"Still the door moved not, but again the echoes gave back the last word,
'LABOR!'
"'I have preached immortality to thousands, and prevailed on them to
believe it; have written of, and everywhere proclaimed its mighty
truths. I have beaten the sceptic, confirmed the wavering, reassured the
doubting, and through long and bitter years, in both hemispheres of the
globe, have declared that if a man die, he shall live again; thus
endeavoring to overthrow error, establish truth, banish superstition,
and on their ruins lay the deep and broad foundations of a better
faith!'
"As if a myriad voices chimed out my last syllable, there rang through
the spacious halls and corridors of the Temple, the sublime word,
'FAITH!' and instantly the bolts appeared to move within their iron
wards. Continuing, I said: 'I have ever endeavored, save in one single
instance, to foster, and in all cases have a spirit of forgiveness.'
"This time there was no mistake. The thousand bolts flew back, the
ponderous brazen gate moved forward and back, like a vast curtain, as if
swayed by a gentle wind; while a million silvery voices sang gloriously,
'IN ALL CASES HAVE A SPIRIT OF FORGIVENESS!'
"Joyously I tried again, intuition plainly telling me that only one
thing more was necessary to end my lonely pilgrimage, and exalt me to
the blessed companionship of the dear ones whom I so longed to join in
their glory-walks adown the celestial glades and vistas of God's Garden
of the Beatitudes. I spoke again:
"'I have fallen from man's esteem in pursuance of what appeared to be my
duty. A new faith sprung up in the land, and unwise zealots brought
shame and bitter reproach against and upon it. Lured by false reasoning,
I yielded to the fascinations of a specious sophistry, and for awhile my
soul languished under the iron bondage of a powerful and glittering
falsehood. At length, seeing my errors, I strove to correct them, and to
sift the chaff from the true and solid grain; but the people refused to
believe me honest, and did not, would not understand me; but they
insisted that in denouncing Error, I ignored the living truths of God's
great economy; yet still I labored on, trying to correct my faults, and
to cultivate the queen of human virtues, Charity!' Scarcely had this
last word escaped my lips, than the massive portals flew wide open,
disclosing to my enraptured gaze such a sight of supernal and celestial
beauty, grandeur, and magnificence, as human language is totally
inadequate to describe; for it was such, as it stood there revealed
before my ravished soul; and I may not here reveal the wondrous things I
saw and heard.... Lara, Lara, my beautiful one, the dear dead maiden of
the long agone, stood before me, just within the lines of Paradise. She
loved me still--aye, the dear maiden of my youth had not forgotten the
lover of her early and her earthly days--
"'When I was a boy, and she was a girl,
In the city by the sea,'
ere the cruel Death had snatched her from my arms, and love, a long,
long time ago; for the love of the Indian, as _his hatred, survives the
grave_.... And she said, 'Paschal, my beloved--lone student of the weary
world--I await thy entrance here. But thou mayest not enter now, because
no hatred can live inside these gates of Bliss. Wear it out, discard it.
Thou art yet incomplete, thy work is still unfinished. Thou hast found
the keys! Go back to earth, and give them to thy fellow-men. Teach,
first _thyself_, and _then_ thy brethren, that Usefulness, Love, Labor,
Forgiveness, Faith and Charity, are the only keys which are potent to
cure all ill, and unbar the Gates of Glory.'
"'Lara! Beautiful Lara, I obey thee! Wait for me, love. I am coming
soon!' I cried, as she slowly retreated, and the gate closed again. 'Not
yet, not yet,' I cried, as with extended arms I implored the beauteous
vision to remain--but a single instant longer. But she was gone. I fell
to the ground in a swoon. When I awoke again, I found the night had
grown two hours older than it was when I sat down in the chair in my
little chamber in Bush street, the little chamber which I occupied in
the goodly city of the Golden Gate."
Thus spake the Rosicrucian. We were all deeply moved at the recital, and
one after the other we retired to our rooms, pondering on the story and
its splendid moral. Next day we reached Acapulco, and not till we had
left and were far on our way toward Panama, did we have an opportunity
of listening to the sermon to the eloquent text I have just recounted.
At length he gave it, as nearly as it can possibly be reproduced, in the
following words:
PART II.
THE DOUBLE DREAM.
----"and saw within the moonlight of his room----
An angel, writing in a book of gold."--Leigh Hunt.
"And so you like the text, do you? Very well, I will now see how much
better you will be pleased with the sermon. Listen:
"'I cannot and will not stand this any longer. Here am I, yet a young
man--in the very prime and heyday of life, and I do believe that I shall
be a regular corpse in less than no time, if a change for the better
don't very soon take place in my family; that's just as certain as "open
and shut." She, ah, _she_, is killing me by inches--the vampire! Would
that I had been thirty-five million of miles the other side of nowhere
the day I married her. Don't I though, Betsey--Betsey Clark is killing
me! No love, no kindness, not a soft look, never a gentle smile. Oh,
don't I wish somebody's funeral was over; but not mine; for I feel quite
capable of loving, of being happy yet, and of making somebody's daughter
happy likewise. People may well say that marriage is a lottery--a great
lottery; for, if there's one thing surer than another, then it is
perfectly certain that I have drawn the very tallest kind of a blank;
and hang me, if it wasn't for the disgrace of the thing, if I wouldn't
run off and hitch myself for life to one of the Hottentots I have read
about; for anything would be better than this misery, long strung out.
Oh, don't I wish I was a Turk! When a fellow's a Turk he can have ever
so many wives--and strangle all of 'em that don't suit him or come to
Taw--as they ought to. Bully for the Turks! I wish I knew how to turn
myself into one. If I did, I'd be the biggest kind of a Mohammedan afore
mornin'!'
"Such was the substance of about the thousandth soliloquy on the same
subject, to the same purport, delivered by Mr. Thomas W. Clark, during
the last seven years of his wedded life.
"The gentleman named delivered himself of the contented and
philanthropic speech just recited, on the morning of a fine day, just
after the usual morning meal--and quarrel with his--wife, _de
jure_--female attendant would better express the relation _de facto_.
Mr. Clark was not yet aware that a woman is ever just what her husband's
conduct makes her--a thing that some husbands besides himself have yet
to learn.
"Every day this couple's food was seasoned with sundry and divers sorts
of condiments other than those in the castor. There was a great deal of
pickle from his side of the gay and festive board, in the shape of
jealous, spiteful innuendoes; and from her side much delicate _sauce
piquante_, in the form of sweet allusions to a former husband, whom she
declared to have been 'the very best husband that was ever sent to'--a
premature grave by a vixen--she might have added, truthfully, but did
not, finishing the sentence with, 'to be loved by a tender, gentle
wife'--like her! The lady had gotten bravely over all her amiable
weaknesses long ago. Gentle! what are tigresses? Tender! what is a
virago? So far the man. Now for his mate.
"Scarcely had her lord--'Mr. Thomas W.,' as she was wont to call
him--gone out of the house, and slammed the door behind him, at the same
time giving vent to the last bottleful of spleen distilled and concocted
in his soul, than 'Mrs. Thomas W.,' or poor Betsey Clark, as I prefer to
call her--for she was truly, really pitiable, for more reasons than one,
but mainly because she had common sense and would not exercise it
sufficiently to make the best of a bad bargain--threw herself upon the
bed, where she cried a little, and raved a good deal, to the self-same
tune as of yore. Getting tired of both these delightful occupations very
soon, she varied them by striking an attitude before a portrait of the
dear defunct--badly executed--the portrait, not the man--whose name she
bore when she became Mistress Thomas W. This picture of a former husband
Tom Clark had not had courage or sense enough to put his foot through,
but did have bad taste sufficient to permit to hang up in the very room
where he lived and ate, and where its beauties were duly and daily
expatiated upon, and the virtues of its original lauded to the skies, of
course to the intense delight of Mr. Clark.
"Madam had a tongue--a regular patent, venom-mounted, back-spring and
double-actioned tongue, and, what is more, knew well how to use it when
the fit was on, which, to do her justice, was not more than twenty-three
hours and a half each day. Never did an opportunity offer that she did
not avail herself of to amplify the merits of the deceased, especially
in presence of such visitors as chance or business brought to their
house, all to the especial delectation of her living spouse, Mr. Thomas
W. Clark.
"Just look at her now! There she is, _kneeling_ at her shrine, my lady
gay, vehemently pouring forth the recital of her wrongs--forgetful of
any one else's, as usual with the genus grumbler--dropping tears and
maledictions, now on her own folly, then on the devoted head of him she
had promised to love, honor, and obey, Mr. Clark, fruit-grower, farmer,
and horse-dealer. Exhausted at length, she winds up the dramatic scene
by invoking all the blessings of all the saints in all the calendars on
the soul of him whose counterfeit presentment hangs there upon the wall.
"If this couple did not absolutely hate each other, they came so near it
that a Philadelphia lawyer would have been puzzled to tell t'other from
which, and yet nobody but themselves had the least idea of the real
state of things--those under-currents of married life that only
occasionally breach through and extensively display themselves in the
presence of third parties. In the very nature of the case, how absurd it
is for outsiders to presume to know the real _status_ of affairs--to
comprehend the actual facts which exist behind the curtains of every or
any married couple in the land. Hymen is a fellow fond of wearing all
sorts of masks and disguises; and it often happens that tons of salt
exist where people suppose nothing but sugar and lollypops are to be
found.
"Tom and his wife--the latter, especially--pretended to a vast deal of
loving-kindness--oh, how great--toward each other--and they were
wise--in the presence of other people. You would have thought, had you
seen them billing and cooing like a pair of 'Turkle Doves'--to quote the
'Bard of Baldwinsville'--that there never was so true, so perfect a
union as their own; and would not have entertained the shadow of a doubt
but that they had been expressly formed for each other from the
foundations of the world, if not before. No sooner did they meet--before
folks, even after the most trifling absence--than they mutually fell to
kissing and 'dearing,' like two swains just mated, all of which made
fools wonder, but wise people to grieve. Physical manifestations are not
quite Love's methods; and it is a safe rule that those who most ape love
externally, have less of it within--and in private, so great a
difference is there between Behind and Before, in these matters of the
heart. Billing and cooing before folks acts as a nauseant upon sensible
men and women, and in this case it did upon a few of the better class of
the city of Santa Blarneeo, within a few miles of which Clark lived.
"Betsey Clark gave a last, long, lingering look at the portrait, saying
the while: 'Don't I wish you were alive and back here again, my love, my
darling, my precious duck?' Lucky for him was it that such could not be;
for had it been possible, and actualized, he would have been finely
plucked, not to say roasted, stewed, perpetually broiled, and in every
way done brown. 'If you were here, I should be happy, because you _was_
a man; but this one (meaning Tom), bah!' and the lady bounced upon her
feet and kicked the cat by way of emphasis. She resumed: 'I can't stand
it, and I won't, there! that's flat! I'm still young, and people of
sense tell me I am handsome--at least, good-looking. I'm certain the
glass does, and no doubt there are plenty who would gladly link their
lot with mine if he was only dead!' And she shuddered as the fearful
thought had birth. 'Dead! I wish he was; and true as I live, I've a
great good mind to accomplish my wish!' And again she shuddered. Poor
woman, she was indeed tempted of the devil! As the horrible suggestion
flashed across the sea of her soul, it illumined many a deep chasmal
abyss, of whose existence, up to that moment she had been utterly
unaware.
"The human soul is a fearful thing, especially when it stands bare
before the Eternal Eye, with myriad snake-forms--its own abnormal
creation, writhing round and near it. A fearful thing! And Betsey Clark
trembled in the ghastly presence of Uncommitted Murder, whose glance of
lurid flame set fire to her heart, and scorched and seared it with
consuming heat. Its flashful light lasted but for a moment; but even
that was a world too long, for it illumined all the dark caverns of her
soul, and disclosed to the horrified gaze of an aërial being
which that instant chanced to pass that way--an abyssmal deep of
Crime-possibility, so dense, black and terrible, that it almost
shrivelled the eyeballs and shrouded the vision of the peerless citizen
of the upper courts of Glory.
"Suddenly the radiant Heaven-born ceased its flight through the azure,
looked pityingly earth and heaven-ward, heaved a deep and soul-drawn
sigh, and stayed awhile to gaze upon the Woman and the Man. Long it
gazed, at first in sorrow, but presently a smile passed across its face,
as if a new and good thought had struck it, and then it darted off into
space, as if intent upon discovering a cure for the desperate state of
things just witnessed. 'Did it succeed?' Wait awhile and see.
"Human nature is a very curious and remarkable institution; so is woman
nature, only a great deal more so--especially that of the California
persuasion. Still it was not a little singular that Tom's wife's mind
should have engendered (of Hate and Impatience) the precise thought that
agitated his own at that very minute--that very identical crime-thought
which had just rushed into being from the deeps of his own spirit--twin
monsters, sibilating 'Murder!' in both their ears.
"There is as close a sympathy between opposites and antagonists, indeed
far greater, than between similarities--as strong attractions between
opposing souls as in those fashioned in the same mould. True, this
affirmation antagonizes many notions among current philosophies and
philosophers; but it is true, notwithstanding, and therefore so much the
worse for the philosophers.
"The same fearful thought troubled two souls at the same time, and each
determined to do a little private killing on their own individual and
separate accounts. As yet, however, only the intent existed. The plans
were yet crude, vague, immature, and only the crime loomed up
indistinctly, like a grim, black mountain through a wintry fog.
"The day grew older by twelve hours, but when the sunset came, ten years
had fastened themselves upon the brows of both the Woman and the Man
since last they had parted at rosy morn.
"Bad thoughts are famous for making men grow old before the weight of
years has borne them earthward. They wrinkle the brow and bring on
decrepitude, senility and grey hairs faster than Time himself can
possibly whirl bodies graveward. The rolling hours and the circling
years are less swift than evil thoughts of evil doing. Right doing,
innocence, and well-wishing make us young; bad thoughts rob us of youth,
vivacity, and manhood! Let us turn to Mr. and Mrs. Thomas W.:
"'Night was on the mountain,
Darkness in the valley,
And only stars could guide them now
In the doubtful rally.'
"There _was_ a star hung out in the sky, and she had already determined
to watch their destinies; with what success, and in what manner, will be
apparent before finishing my story, every word of which is true in one
sense, if not precisely in another.
The sun had set, and slowly the moon was uprising--blessed moon! God's
Left Eye, wherewith He at night overlooketh the thoughts and deeds of
solitary men and solitary women--for only such are capable of
crime--those only who are, and live alone--and many such there be, even
at their own firesides, surrounded by their own families, own flesh, own
blood--fathers, mothers, wives (as times go), husbands (as they are
conventionally called). Many there be who exist in dreadful solitudes in
the very midst of human crowds--who live alone and pass through life,
from the cradle to the grave, perfect strangers, perfect hermits, wholly
unknowing, totally unknown, like interlopers on the globe, whose very
right to be here all the world disputes. Friends, I have seen many
such--have you? These lonely people, these exotics, these insulars in
the busy haunts of men--the teeming hives of commerce--alone in earth's
well-paced market-towns--in the very saturnalia of TRADE'S gala days;
and they are to be pitied, because they all have human, yearning hearts,
filled to the brim with great strangling sorrows; and they have high and
holy aspirations, only that the world chokes them down--crushes out the
pure, sweet life God gave them. These are the Unloved ones; yet ought
not to be, for are they not somebody's sons and daughters? Yes! Then
they have rights; and the first, greatest, highest right of all is the
right of being loved--loved by the people of the land--our
world-cousins, for what we do, are doing, or have done; and to be loved,
for the sake of the dear soul within, by somebody else's son or
daughter.
"So think we of the Rosicrucian Order; so, one day, will think the
world."
At this point of the Rosicrucian's narrative, Captain Jones, one of his
auditory, interrupted him with:
"Why, I thought the Rosicrucian system had been dead, buried, and
forgotten two centuries ago."
He replied: "The false or pseudo-Rosicrucian system has ceased to be.
Truth herself is deathless. I cannot now stop to explain what interests
you concerning the revived system of Rosicrucianism. You will now please
to allow me to proceed with my story," said he, and then resumed,
saying:
"I repeat that only those who live alone, unloved, unloving, are they
who, becoming morbid, having all their kindly feelings driven back upon
themselves, daily, hourly eating up their own hearts--brooding over
their wrongs, their social and other misfortunes--at length engender
crime, if not against their fellow-men, then against themselves.
"Oh, for something to love, and be loved by, if but a little pet dog!
The unloved ever are wrecked, the unloving ever wreck others. It is
sweet to be loved by even a dumb brute! But, ah, how inexpressibly, how
infinitely better to be endeared for yourself alone!--for your integral
wealth of soul--by a Man, a full, true Man; by a Woman, a full,
gushing-hearted Woman; or, sweeter, dearer still, a child--some glorious
hero of a hobby-horse, some kitten-torturing Cora! Ah, what a chord to
touch! I am very fond of children--dear little Godlings of the Ages.
Those who reciprocate affection truly, are too full of God to keep a
devil's lodging-house. It is a dear thing to feel the great truth--one
of Rosicrucia's truths--that nothing is more certain than that
somewhere, perhaps on earth, perhaps in some one of the innumerable
aromal worlds--star-spangles on God's diadem--or from amidst the
mournful monodies in material creation--some one loves us; and that
there goeth up a prayer, sweet-toned as seraph-harps, to Him for you, my
weary brother, for you, my sister of the dark locks turning prematurely
grey; for all of us whose paths through life have been thickly strewn
with thorns and rocks, sharp boulders and deep and frightful
pit-falls--great threatening, yawning gulfs:
"'Oh, the little birds sing east, and the little birds sing west,
Toll slowly.
And I smile to think God's greatness flows around our incompleteness,
Round our restlessness His rest.'
"Somebody loves us for ourselves' sake. Thank God for that!
"And the pale, silver shield of the moon hangs out in the radiant blue,
and myriad gods look down, through starry eyes, upon this little world,
as it floats, a tiny bubble, on Space's vast ocean; and they speak
through their eyes, and bid us all love the Supreme, by loving one
another; and they say, 'Love much! Such is the whole duty of man.' The
moon, God's night-eye, takes note of all ye do, and is sometimes forced
to withdraw behind cloud-veils, that ye may not behold her sweet
features while she weeps at the sad spectacle of thy wrong doing! Luna,
gentle Luna, does not like to peer down into human souls, and there
behold the slimy badness, which will ere long breed deeds of horror to
make her lovely face more pale--things which disfigure the gardens of
man's spirit, and transform them into tangled brakes, where only weeds
and unsightly things do grow. And Luna has a recording angel sitting on
her shield, whose duty is to flash all intelligence up to His deific
brain, in whose service she hath ever been. He is just, inexorably just,
ever rewarding as man sinneth or obeys. And so it is poor policy to sin
by night. It is equally so to sin by day; for then the Sun--God's Right
Eye--fails not to behold you, for he is always shining, and his rays
pierce the clouds and light up the world, even though thick fogs and
dense vapors conceal his radiant countenance from some. He sees man,
though man beholds him not; and he photographs all human thoughts and
deeds upon the very substance of the soul, and that, too, so well and
deeply, that nothing will destroy the picture; no sophistical 'All
Right' lavements can wash it away, no philosophic bath destroy it. They
are indelible, these sun-pictures on the spirit, and they are, some of
them, very unsightly things to hang in the grand Memory-Galleries of the
imperishable human soul; for, in the coming epochs of existence, as man
moves down the corridors of Time, these pictures will still hang upon
the walls, and if evil, will peer down sadly and reproachfully, and
fright many a joy away, when man would fain be rid, but cannot, of
pain-provoking recollections, when his body shall be stranded on the
shores of the grave, and his spirit is being wafted over strange and
mystic seas on the farther brink of Time!
"Night had come down, and Mr. and Mrs. Thomas W. retired to bed, each
with thoughts of murder rankling in their hearts. Not a word was spoken,
but they lay with throbbing pulses, gazing out upon the night, through a
little window at the foot of the bed, whose upper sash was down--gazing
out upon the starry lamps that skirt the highways of the sky, beacons of
safety placed there to recall and guide all stray and wandering souls
back on their way to Heaven! and they silently looked at the stars as
they twinkled and shimmered in the azure.
"The stars shone; and strange, horrible, ghastly thoughts agitated the
woman and the man. 'Tom _might_ get sick, and he might _die_! Isn't it
possible to feed him with a little arsenic, or some other sort of
poison, and not get caught at it? I think it _is_. He, once dead, I
shall be free--free as the air, and happy as the birds!' Happy! Think of
it!
"'Is it not possible to push Betsey over the cliff, _accidentally_, of
course, and thus rid myself of her and misery together, and forever!'
Forever! Picture it! And thus they lay as the night wore on, two
precious immortal souls, with rank Murder for a bed-fellow.
"At the end of an hour's cogitation, both had reached the desperate
resolution to carry their wishes into execution, and attempt the fearful
crime.
"'Come down in thy profoundest gloom--
Without one radiant firefly's light,
Beneath thine ebon arch entomb
Earth from the gaze of Heaven, O Night.
A deed of darkness must be done,
Put out the moon, roll back the sun.'
"Betsey was to 'season' Tom's coffee; he was very fond of coffee. Tom
was to treat Betsey to a ride in a one-horse shay, and topple the shay,
horse, and Mrs. Thomas W.--all except his mother's only son--over a most
convenient and inviting little precipice, a trifle over four hundred
feet deep, with boulders at the bottom rather thicker than autumn leaves
in Vallambrossa, and a good deal harder. All this was to be the result
of 'accident,' and 'inscrutible Providence,' as a matter of course.
Afterwards he was to buy a 'slashing suit' of mourning, bury what was
left of her in grand style, erect a fine headstone of marble, announcing
that--
"'The Lord gave, and the Lord took away,
Blessed be the name of the Lord!'
an inscription many a spouse would like to read in their own cases!
"The proposed locality of the fall of woman 'luckily' lay right on the
road between their house and Santa Blarneeo. Each thought, 'I may not be
able to achieve the exploit upon which I am bent, but one thing is
certain, which is, that it shall not fail for want of trying. Once
fairly accomplished, freedom comes, and then for a high old time!' So
thought the woman; so thought the man.
"Night has various and strange influences, which are altogether unknown
to the day. The Magi, on the plains of Chaldea, the astrologers of early
Egypt, and the whole ancient world duly acknowledged the power of the
astral bodies. The whole interest of Bulwer's 'Zanoni' hinges on the
soul-expanding potentiality of a star upon Clarence Glyndon, one of the
heroes of that Rosicrucian story. Indeed, the whole august fraternity,
from the neophyte of last week to Ross and Henri More, down to
Appolonius of Tyanæ, and away through the Ages to Thothmes, and down
beyond all the Egyptian dynasties to Zytos, and still away into the very
heart of the Pre-Adamite Eras, we know, held strange doctrines
concerning stars; and if the historian of the Order, the great
Mirandolo, be not mistaken, our Brotherhood possesses the key that
reveals the nature of the starry influences, and how they may be gained.
Of my own knowledge--for I am but in the fifth degree, therefore do not
know all these mysteries--there are Destinies in the stars. Well, on
this particular night, the star known as Hesper, she of the pale mild
eye, was looking straight into the room where lay the precious pair, and
it shone through the little window at the foot of the bed. The night was
sultry--a little window--summer was in the ascendant--and the upper sash
was down. Remember this, _the upper sash_ was down.
"And now a strange thing occurred, a very strange and mysterious thing.
Just as Tom Clark and his wife had been magnetized into a sort of
restless sleep from gazing at the star--an uneasy, disturbed, nervous,
but dreamless sleep--as if a heavy, thick and murky cloud just floated
off a stagnant marsh, there descended upon the house a pestilent, slimy
mist, and it gathered over and about the roof; and it entered, rolling
heavily, into the chamber, coming through that little window at the foot
of the bed.
"It was a thick, dense, iron-greyish mist, approaching blackness, only
that there was a sort of turgid redness, not a positive color, but as if
it had floated over the depths of hell, and caught a portion of its
infernal luminosity. And it was thick and dark, and dense and very
heavy; and it swept and rolled, and poured into the room in thick,
voluminous masses--into the very room, and about the couch where tossed
in uneasy slumber the woman and the man. And it filled the apartment,
and hung like a pall about their couch; and its fetor oppressed their
senses; and it made their breath come thick, and difficult, and wheezing
from their lungs. It was dreadful! And their breath mingled with the
strange vapor, apparently endowing it with a kind of horrid life, a sort
of semi-sentience; and gave it a very peculiar and fearful
movement--orderly, systematic, gyratory, pulsing movement--the quick,
sharp breath of the woman, the deep and heavy breath of the man. And it
had come through the window at the foot of the bed, for the upper sash
was down.
"Slowly, and with regular, spiracular, wavy motion, with gentle
undulations, like the measured roll of the calm Pacific Sea, the gentle
sea on which I am sailing toward the Pyramids and my Cora--six years
old, and so pretty! Pyramids ten thousand years old, and so grand! Like
the waves of that sea did the cloud begin to move gyrally around the
chamber, hanging to the curtains, clinging to the walls, but as if
dreading the moonlight, _carefully_ avoiding the window through which it
had come, the little window at the foot of the bed--whose upper sash was
down.
"Soon, very soon, the cloud commenced to change the axis of its
movement, and to condense into a large globe of iron-hued nebulæ; and it
began a contrary revolution; and it floated thus, and swam like a
dreadful destiny over the unconscious sleepers on the bed, after which
it moved to the western side of the room, and became nearly stationary
in an angle of the wall, where for a while it stood or floated, silent,
appalling, almost motionless, changeless, still.
"At the end of about six minutes it moved again, and in a very short
time assumed the gross but unmistakable outline of a gigantic human
form--an outline horrible, black as night--a frowning human form--cut
not sharply from the vapor, but still distinctly human in its
_shapeness_--but very imperfect, except the head, which was too
frightfully complete to leave even a lingering doubt but that some black
and hideous devilry was at work in that little chamber. And the head was
infamous, horrible, gorgonic; and its glare was terrible, infernal,
blasting, ghastly--perfectly withering in its expression, proportions
and aspect.
"The THING, this pestilent thing was bearded with the semblance of a
tangled mass of coarse, grey iron wire. Its hair was as a serried coil
of thin, long, venom-laden, poison-distilling snakes. The nose, mouth,
chin and brows were ghastly, and its sunken cheeks were those of Famine
intensified. The face was flat and broad, its lips the lips of incarnate
hate and lust combined. Its color was the greenish blue of corpses on a
summer battle-field, suffused with the angry redness of a demon's spite,
while its eyes--great God!--_its_ eye--for there was but one, and that
one in the very centre of its forehead, between the nose and brow--was
bloodshot and purple, gleaming with infernal light, and it glamored down
with more than fiendish malignance upon the woman and the man.
"Nothing about this Thing was clearly cut or defined, except the
head--its hideous, horrible head. Otherwise it was incomplete--a sort of
spectral Formlessness. It was unfinished, as was the awful crime-thought
that had brought it into being. It was on one side apparently a male, on
the other it looked like a female; but, taken as a whole, it was neither
man nor woman, it was neither brute nor human, but it was a monster and
a ghoul--born on earth of human parents. There are many such things
stalking our streets, and invisibly presiding over festal scenes, in
dark cellars, by the lamp, in the cabinet and camp; and many such are
daily peering down upon the white paper on the desks where sit grave and
solemn Ministers of State, who, for Ambition's sake and greed of gold,
play with an Empire's destiny as children do with toys, and who, with
the stroke of a pen, consign vast armies to bloody graves--brave men,
glorious hosts, kept back while victory is possible--kept back till the
foeman has dug their graves just in front of his own stone walls and
impenetrable ramparts--and then sent forward to glut the ground with
human blood. Do you hear me, Ministers of State? I mean you! you who
practically regard men's lives as boys regard the minnows of a brook. I
mean you who sit in high places, and do murder by the wholesale--you who
treat the men as half foes, half friends, tenderly; men whose hands are
gripped with the iron grip of death around the Nation's throat--the
Nation's throat--do you hear?--and crushing out the life that God and
our fathers gave it. Remember Milliken's Bend, Port Hudson, Fort Wagner,
and the Black Heroes of the war--Noble men--Black, too, but the bravest
of the brave--yet treated not as heroes ought to be. Forget not
Fredericksburg! and bear in mind that this gorgon of your own creation
will not quit you, day or night--not even on your dying day, when it
will hiss into your ears, 'Father, behold, embrace me!'--and its slime
will fall upon and choke you, as you have choked our country. And the
sheeted ghosts of six hundred thousand heroes, slaughtered by a whim,
will mournfully upbraid, and--perhaps--forgive you. Will the weeping
widows and the countless orphans--pale, blue-cast women, pale with
grief, blue with want; orphans, poor little shrivelled, half-starved
orphans--will they forgive you? will your own conscience? will the
Eternal God of Heaven? Why did you sacrifice these six hundred thousand
men? Why did you not put your guns and swords in the hands of six
hundred thousand men--men who had God's best gifts to fight for and
maintain--Liberty and their wives? Black men, too--brawny, brave,
strong-hearted, Freedom-nerved, God-inspired black men. _No black man
yet ever sold his country!_ Why don't you first remove their
disabilities here in the North? Why don't you bid them rise and be men?
Why grudge freemen the pay of other free men; the bounty, the pension,
of other heroes of the same rank? Do this, let the Negro understand that
you concede his manhood, and appreciate his prowess; let him once know
that you are grateful for all he does for the country, and proclaim it
to the world, and Black men will flock to your standard, not only from
your own soil, but from every spot on earth where civilized black men
exist.
"See, yonder is a plain, miles in extent. In its centre there stands an
obelisk. Go, Ministers of State, and plant on its top a banner, upon
which shall be emblazoned this magic sentence: 'Freedom--Personal,
Political, and Social, to the Black man--and protection of his Rights
forever,' and there will be more magnetic power in it than in ten
thousand Ministers, with their little whims; ten thousand 'Fancy
Generals,' with their 'pretty little games,'--and such would be
History's record when she handed you down the ages. If you would live in
the sacred page, and have your names shine brightly, act, act at once,
cut the cords that now bind the Black man. Say to him: 'Come as a man,
not as a chattel! Come with me to Enfranchisement and Victory! Let us
save the Nation!' and the swift-winged winds will bear the sound from
pole to pole, from sea to sea, and from continent, island, and floating
barks, from hills, valleys, and mountains, from hut, hovel, and dismal
swamps, will come a vast and fearful host, in numbers like unto the
leaves of the forest; and they will gather in that plain around that
obelisk, rallying around that banner, and before their victorious march
Rebellion will go down as brick walls before the storm of iron; and if
France, or England, or Austria, or all, combine against them--they, too,
will go out of the battle, nevermore to enter it again.
"This is possible destiny! Think of it, O Ministers of State!
* * * *
"And so the fearful spectre in Tom Clark's room had its origin then and
there--had been created by the morning's wicked thought--a creature
fashioned by their human wills, and drawing its vitality from their life
and pulses--drawing its very soul from out those two beating human
hearts. Tell me not that I am painting a picture, limning the creature
of a distorted fancy. I know better, you know better, we all know that
just such hideous creatures, just such monstrosities, move, viewless,
daily, up and down the crowded streets of Santa Blarneeo, up and down
the streets of the Empire City and Puritanic Boston; but there are
crowds of them in Pennsylvania Avenue, and they wear phantom epaulettes
upon their spectral shoulders! You and I know that just such and other
"'Monstrous, horrid things that creep
From out a slimy sea,'
exist all over the land--but principally in high places begotten of
Treason and lust of Gold.
"Soon the lips began to move; it spoke: 'Father! mother! I am yet weak;
be quick; make me strong! feed me; I am hungry; give me blood--hot
streams--great gouts of blood! It is well. Kill, poison, die; it is
well! Ha! ha! It is well; ho! ho!' and then the Thing began to dissolve
into a filmy mist, until at last only the weight of its presence was
felt, for it floated invisibly but heavily through the room, and, except
the gleam--the fiery gleam of its solitary eye--nothing else of it was
discernible.
"Ten minutes elapsed after it had found voice, and faded away, when
suddenly a fleecy cloud that had for some time past obscured the sky in
the direction of Hesper, shutting out her silvery smiles, broke away,
and permitted her beams and those of the moon to once more enter the
chamber and flood it with a sheeted silver glory--the room where still
lingered the hateful Thing, and where still slept the woman and the man.
"Simultaneously with this auspicious event there came sighing over the
landscape, the musical notes of such a song as only seraphs sing--came
over the wastes like the mystical bells that I have heard at sunset
often while sailing on the Nile--mystical bells which thousands have
heard and marvelled at--soft bells, silvery bells, church bells--bells,
however, not rung by human hands. I have often heard them chiming over
Egypt's yellow, arid sands, and I believe they are rung by angel hands
on the other side of Time. And such a sound, only sweeter, came
floating o'er the lea, and through the still air into the little
chamber. Was it a call to the angels to join in prayer--midnight prayer,
for the sinful souls of men? But it came. Low it was, and clear; pure it
was, and full of saintly pity, like unto the dying cadence of the prayer
that was prayed by the Sufferer on the stony heights of Calvary; that
same Calvary where I have stood within a year, 'midst devout lovers of
their Lord, and the jeering scoffs of Mussulmans! And the music came--so
sweetly, as if 'twould melt the stony heart of Crime itself. And it
proclaimed itself the overture of another act of the eventful drama then
and there performing. And see! look there! the curtain rises. Woman,
Man, behold! Alas! they slumber insensibly on. Gaze steadily at that
upper sash--above it--for it is down; see, the clear space is again
obscured by a cloud; but this time it is one of silver, lined with
burnished gold, and flecked and edged with amethyst and purple. Look
again! What is that at the window? It is a visible music--a glorious
sheet of silvery vapor, bright, clear, and glittering as an angel's
conscience! It is a broad and glowing mantle of woven gossamer, suffused
with rose-blushes, and sprinkled with star-beams; and it flows through
the space, and streams into the chamber, bathing all things in holy
tremulous light, soft, sweet, balmy, and pure as the tears of virgin
innocence weeping for the early dead! That light! It was just such a
light as beamed from your eyes, Woman--beamed from out your soul, when,
after your agony, your eye first fell upon the angel you had borne--the
man-child whom God gave to your heart a little while ago; just such a
light as flashed fitfully from your soul, and fell upon the cradle, O
father of the strong and hopeful heart, wherein the little stranger lay;
just such light as beamed from your eyes, in pride, and hope, and
strange, deep prophecies, as you bent over her languishing form,
heartfully pressing her first-born to her dear woman's bosom, when you
looked so tenderly, kindly, lovingly down through her eyes into
her spirit--the true heart beating for you and it, beneath
folded--contentedly folded, arms--contented, too, through all the deep
anguish, such, O man, as only a woman and a mother can undergo. That
light! It was like that which fell upon the babe she had given you, and
the great Man-wanting world--given first for its coming uses, and then
to Him who doeth all things very well--well, even when He taketh the
best part of our souls away, and transplants the slips in His eternal
and infinite gardens, across the deep dark gulfs that hide the dead;
just such a light as gleamed from her eyes and thine own, when your
hearts felt calm and trustful once more, after the great, deep grief
billows had rolled over them--grief for the loss of one who stayed but a
little while on earth--all too coarse and rough for her--some little,
cooing Winnie--like mine--whose soul nestles afar off, on His breast, in
the blue sky, and whose body they laid in the cold grave, there in
Utica, after they--_he_--had let her starve, perish sadly for want of
proper food and medicine, while I was on the deep--winsome Winnie! child
of my soul, gone, lost, but not forever!--just such a light played in
that little room as streams from angel eyes when God takes back at the
hands of Azrael and Sandalphon, the beautiful angels of Death and of
Prayer, the things you had learned to love too well--to forgetfulness of
God and all true human duty. But they will give back what they took:
they will give back all, more in the clear sunshine of a brighter and a
purer day, than these earthly ones of ours!
"And the light streamed through and into the chamber where lay the woman
and the man; and it radiated around, and bathed every object in a
crystalline luminescence; and it carried a sadness with it--just such a
sadness as we feel when parting from those who love us very well; as I
felt on the day I parted from ----, Brother of my soul! when we parted
at the proud ship's side--the ocean courser, destined to bear me over
the steaming seas to Egypt's hoary shrines. It bore a sadness with it
like unto that which welled up from my soul, tapping the fountains of
friendship--and tears upon its way, in the memorable hour wherein I left
the Golden Gate, and began my perilous journey to the distant
Orient--across the bounding seas. What an hour!--that wherein our bodies
move away, but leave our sorrowing souls behind!
"Well, a holy light, sadness-bearing light, like this now rested on the
bodies of the sleeping pair. At first, this silvery radiance filled the
room, and then the fleecy vapor began to condense slowly. Presently it
formed into a rich and opalescent cloud-column, which speedily changed
into a large globe, winged, radiant and beautiful. Gradually there
appeared in the centre of this globe a luminous spot, momentarily
intensifying its brilliance, until it became like unto a tiny sun, or as
the scintillæ of a rare diamond when all the lamps are brightly shining.
Slowly, steadily, the change went on in this magic crystal globe, until
there appeared within it the diminutive figure of a female, whose
outlines became more clear as time passed on, until, at the end of a few
minutes, the figure was perfect, and stood fully revealed and
complete--about eighteen inches high, and lovely--ah, how lovely!--that
figure; it was more than woman is--was all she may become--_petite_, but
absolutely perfect in form, feature and expression; and there was a
love-glow radiating from her presence sufficiently melting to subdue the
heart of Sin itself, though robed in Nova Zembla's icy shroud. Her
eyes!--ah, her eyes!--they were softer than the down upon a ring-dove's
breast!--not electric, not magnetic--such are human eyes; and she was
not of this earth--they were something more, and higher--they were
tearful, anxious, solicitous, hopeful, tender, beaming with that snowy
love which blessed immortals feel. Her hair was loose, and hung in
flowing waves adown her pearly neck and shoulders. Such a neck and
shoulders!--polished alabaster, dashed with orange blossoms, is a very
poor comparison; it would be better to say that they resembled petrified
light, tinted with the morning blush of roses! Around her brow was a
coronet of burnished, rainbow hues; or rather the resplendent tints of
polarized light. In its centre was the insignia of the Supreme Temple of
the Rosie Cross--a circle inclosing a triangle--a censer on one side, an
anchor fouled on the other, the centre-piece being a winged globe,
surmounted by the sacred trine, and based by the watchword of the Order,
'TRY,' the whole being arched with the blazon, 'ROSICRUCIA.' To attempt
a minute description of this peerless fay, on my part, would be
madness:--her chin, her mouth, her bust, her lips! No! I am not so vain
as to make the essay. I may be equal to such a task a century or two
from this, but am not equal to it now.
"There, then, and thus stood the crowned beauty of the Night, gazing
down with looks of pity upon the restless occupants of that humble
couch; for during all these transactions they had been asleep. She stood
there, the realization and embodiment of Light; and there, directly
facing her, glowered, and floated the eye of that hateful, scowling,
frowning Thing--scowling with malignant joy upon the woman and the man.
Thus stood the Shadow: thus stood the Light. But soon there came a
change o'er the spirit of the scene; for now an occurrence took place of
a character quite as remarkable as either of those already recounted;
for in a very short time after the two Mysteries had assumed their
relative positions, there came through the window--the same little
window at the foot of the bed--the tall and stately figure of a man--a
tall and regal figure, but it was light and airy--buoyant as a summer
cloud pillowed on the air--the figure of a man, but not solid, for it
was translucent as the pearly dew, radiant as the noontide sun, majestic
as a lofty mountain when it wears a snowy crown!--the royal form of a
man, but evidently not a ghost, or wraith, or a man of these days, or
of this earth, or of the ages now elapsing. He was something more than
man; he was supramortal; a bright and glorious citizen of a starry land
of glory, whose gates I beheld, once upon a time, when Lara bade me
wait; he was of a lineage we Rosicrucians wot of, and only we!--a
dweller in a wondrous city, afar off, real, actual--whose gates are as
the finest pearl--so bright and beautiful are they.... The stately
figure advanced midway of the room until he occupied the centre of a
triangle formed by the shadowy Thing, the female figure, and the bed;
and then he waved his hand, in which was a staff or truncheon--winged at
top and bottom; and he spake, saying:
"'I, Otanethi, the Genius of the Temple, Lord of the Hour, and
servant of the Dome, am sent hither to thee, O Hesperina,
Preserver of the falling; and to thee, dark Shadow, and to
these poor blind gropers in the Night and gloom. I am sent to
proclaim that man ever reacheth Ruin or Redemption through
himself alone--strengthened by Love of
Him--self-sought--reacheth either Pole of Possibility as he,
fairly warned, and therefore fully armed, may elect! Poor, weak
man!--a giant, knowing not his own tremendous power!--Master
both of Circumstance and the World--yet the veriest slave to
either!--weak, but only through ignorance of himself!--forever
and forever failing in life's great race through slenderness of
Purpose!--through feebleness of Will! Virtue is not virtue
which comes not of Principle within--that comes not of will
and aspiration. That abstinence from wrong is not virtue which
results from external pressure--fear of what the speech of
people may effect! It is false!--that virtue which requires
bolstering or propping up, and falls when left to try its
strength alone! Vice is not vice, but weakness, that springs
not from within--which is the effect of applied force. Real
vice is that which leaves sad marks upon the soul's escutcheon,
which the waters of an eternity may not lave away or wash out;
and it comes of settled purpose--from within, and is the thing
of Will. The virtue that has never known temptation--and
withstood it, counts but little in the great Ledger of the Yet
to Be! True virtue is good resolve, better thinking, and action
best of all! That man is but half completed whom the world has
wholly made. They are never truly made who fail to make
themselves! Mankind are not of the kingdom of the Shadow, nor
of the glorious realm of Light, but are born, move along, and
find their highest development in the path which is bounded on
either side by those two eternal Diversities--the Light upon
this side--the Shadow upon that:
"'The road to man and womanhood lies in the mean:
Discontent on either side--happiness between.'
"'Life is a triangle, and it may be composed of Sorrow, Crime,
Misery; or Aspiration, Wisdom, Happiness. These, O peerless
Hesperina, are the lessons I am sent to teach. Thou art here to
save two souls, not from loss, assailings or assoilings from
without, but from the things engendered of morbid
thought--monstrous things bred in the cellars of the soul--the
cesspools of the spirit--crime-caverns where moral newts and
toads, unsightly things and hungry, are ever devouring the
flowers that spring up in the heart-gardens of man--pretty
flowers, wild--but which double and enhance in beauty and aroma
from cultivation and care. We are present--I to waken the wills
of yonder pair; thou to arouse a healthy purpose and a normal
action; and the Shadow is here to drag them to Perdition. Man
cannot reach Heaven save by fearlessly breasting the waves of
Hell! Listen! Thou mayest not act directly upon the woman or
the man, but are at liberty to effect thy purpose through the
instrumentality of DREAM! And thou,' addressing the Thing,
'thou grim Shadow--Angel of Crime--monstrous offspring of man's
begetting--thou who art permitted to exist, art also allowed to
flourish and batten on human hearts. I may not prevent
thee--dare not openly frustrate thee--for thus it is decreed.
Thou must do thy work. Go; thou art free and unfettered. Do thy
worst; but I forbid thee to appear as thou really art--before
their waking senses, lest thy horrible presence should strike
them dumb and blind, or hurl Will and Reason from their
thrones. Begone! To thy labor, foul Thing, and do thy work also
through the powerful instrumentality of DREAM!'
"Thus spoke the genius of the Order and the Hour; and then,
turning him toward the couch, he said, yearningly, with tearful
mien and outstretched arms: 'Mortals, hear me in thy
slumber--let thy souls, but not thy senses, hear and
understand. Behold, I touch thee with this magic wand of
Rosicrucia, and with it wake thy sleeping wills--thus do I
endow thee with the elements, Attention, Aspiration,
Persistence--the seeds of Power--of resistless Might, which,
will--if such be thy choice, enable thee to realize a moral
fortress, capable of defying the combined assaults of all the
enginery Circumstance can bring to bear against thee. The
citadel is Will. Intrenched within it, thou art safe. But
beware of turning thy assaulting power against thyselves. Will,
normal, ever produceth Good: Abnormal, it hurls thee to the
Bad! Remember! Wake not to the external life, but in thy
slumber seize on the word I whisper in thine ears; it is a
magic word--a mighty talisman, more potent than the seal of
Solomon--more powerful than the Chaldean's wand--but it is
potential for ill as for Good. See to it, therefore, that it is
wisely used. The word is,
"TRY!" As thou shalt avail thyselves of its power, so be it
unto thee. I now leave thee to thy fate, and the fortunes that
may befall thee. TWO dreams each shalt thou have this night;
one of them shall be overruled by thy good, the other by thy
evil genius. God help thee! Farewell!' and in another instant,
the tall and stately figure passed through the moonlight, out
upon the deep bosom of the Night; and he floated, accompanied
by the same soft music heard before, away off into the blue
empyrean; and he passed through the window--the little window
at the foot of the bed, whose upper sash was down.
PART III.
THE MAGIC SPELL.
"In the Kingdom of Dream strange things are seen,
And the Fate of the Nations are there, I ween."
_From_ "_The Rosie Cross_," _an unpublished Poem by_
P. B. RANDOLPH.
"The regal being was scarcely gone from the chamber ere Hesperina and
the Shadow--which had once more become visible, approached the sleeping
pair--drew nigh unto the woman and the man; and the Fay gently breathed
upon their heads, as if to establish a magnetic _rapport_ between
herself and them. She then calmly took her stand near the bedside, and
folded her beautiful arms across her still more beautiful bosom, and
awaited the action of the tempter. She had not long to wait, for
straightway the Black Presence advanced, and hovered over the
bed--hovered scowlingly over them, glaring down into their souls, as
doth the vampire upon the man she would destroy--the spirit of Wrong
peering wistfully at all beautiful things, and true! Such was the
posture of affairs; and thus they remained until the Thing had also
established some sort of connection with the sleepers. It soon became
evident, from their nervous, uneasy movements and postures, that the
twain were rapidly crossing the mystic boundaries that divide our own
from Dream-land--that they were just entering the misty mid-region--the
Shadow, the Thing, the monstrous IT, ruling the hour, and guiding them
through the strange realm--
"'That lieth sublime, out of Space and out of Time.'
"The man who says that dreams are figments is a fool. Half of our
nightly experiences are, in their subsequent effects upon us, far more
real and positive than our daily life of wakefulness. Dreams are, as a
general thing, save in rare instances, sneered at by the wise ones of
this sapient age. Events, we of Rosicrucia hold, are pre-acted in other
spheres of being. Prophetic dreaming is no new thing. Circumstances are
constantly occurring in the outer life that have been pre-viewed in
Dream-land. Recently, while in Constantinople, I became acquainted with
a famous Dongolese negro, near the Grand Mosque of St. Sophia, in one of
the narrow streets on the left, as you enter the square from toward the
first bridge, and this man had reduced the interpretation of dreams to a
science almost; and many a long hour have I rapidly driven the pen, in
the work of recording what was translated to me from Dongolese and
Arabic into Turkish and English, from his lips, obtaining in this way
not merely the principles upon which his art was founded, but also
explicit interpretations of about twenty-nine hundred different dreams.
"THE DREAM OF THOMAS W.
"Tom Clark was dreaming; and, lo! great changes had taken place in the
fortunes of the sleeping man. No longer a toiler at the anvil or the
plow, he had become a rich and, as times go, therefore an honored
man--honored by the crowd which, as a general thing, sees the most
virtue in the heaviest sack of dollars.
"The wealth of Mr. Thomas W. had come to him in a very singular and
mysterious manner, all since he had become a widower; for Mrs. Thomas
was dead, poor woman, having some time previously met her fate through a
very melancholy accident. An extract from the 'Daily Truth-Teller,' of
Santa Blarneeo, a copy of which paper Tom Clark carried in his pocket
all the time, and which pocket I shall take the liberty of picking of
the journal aforesaid, and of quoting, will tell the story--sad
story--but not the whole of it, quite:
"'FEARFUL AND FATAL CATASTROPHE!--We learn with deep, sincere,
and very profound regret, that another of those fearful
calamities, which no human prudence can guard against, no
foresight prevent, has just occurred, and by means of which a
most estimable woman, an exemplary and loving wife, an
excellent Christian, firm friend, and esteemed person, has been
suddenly cut off in her prime, and sent prematurely to her
final account. It appears that the late heavy rains have
rendered all the roads leading from Santa Blarneeo nearly
impassable, by reason of the rifts, rocks, boulders, and
slides of clay--very dangerous and slippery clay--which they
have occasioned.
"'Especially is this the case along the cliff road, and more
particularly where it skirts the side of the Bayliss Gulch. Of
late it has been exceedingly unsafe to pass that way in broad
daylight, and much more so after dark.
"'At about ten o'clock yesterday morning, as Mr. Ellet, the
Ranchero, was passing that road, along the brink of what is
known as the Scott ravine, his horse shied at some objects in
the path, which proved to be a man's hat and woman's shawl, on
the very edge of the precipice--a clear fall of something like
four hundred feet. It immediately occurred to Farmer Ellet,
that if anybody had tumbled over the cliff, that there was a
great probability that whoever it was must have been
considerably hurt, if nothing more, by the time they reached
the bottom, as he well remembered had been the case with a yoke
of steers of his that had run off at the same spot some years
before, and both of which were killed, very dead, indeed, by
the accident. So, at least, he informed our reporter, who took
down the statement phonographically. Mr. Ellet discovered the
remains of a horse and buggy at the bottom of the ravine, and
at a little to the left, about ten feet down the bank, where he
had, by a miracle, been thrown when the horse went over, Mr.
Ellet found the insensible body of a man, desperately hurt, but
still breathing. His fall had been broken by some stout young
trees and bushes, amidst the roots of which he now lay. Mr. E.
soon rescued the sufferer, who proved to be Mr. Thomas W.
Clark, a well-known, honest, sober man, and a neighbor as well.
Mr. Clark's injuries are altogether internal, from the shock of
falling, otherwise he is almost unscathed. His pains inwardly
are very great, besides which he is nearly distracted and
insane from the loss of his wife and horse, but mainly for the
former. It seems that they had been riding out on a visit to a
sick friend, and the horse had slipped on the wet clay, had
taken fright, and leaped the bank, just as Clark was hurled
from the buggy, and landed where Ellet found him. The horse,
carriage, and the precious freight, instantly plunged headlong
down through four hundred feet of empty air.
"'We learn that the couple were most devotedly attached to each
other, as is notorious from the fact, among others, that
whenever they met, after a day's absence, and no matter where,
nor in what company, they invariably embraced and kissed each
other, in the rich, deep fullness of their impassioned and
exhaustless conjugal love. Poor Clark's loss is irreparable.
His wife had been twice married, but her affection for her
first husband was but as a shallow brook compared to the deep,
broad ocean of love for him who now mourns, most bitterly
mourns, her untimely fate!'
"There! What d'ye think o' that, my lady?--what d'ye think o' that, my
man? That's a newspaper report, the same that Tom Clark carried in his
pocket, and read so often in his dream. Singular, isn't it, that the
ruling passion triumphs, especially Reporters'--even in Death or
Dream-land.
"At the end of two days Mr. Clark recovered sufficiently to go to the
foot of the cliff, and when there his first work was to carefully bury
what was left of his wife--and her first husband's portrait at the same
time--for he had placed that canvas across the backs of two chairs, and
amused himself by jumping through it--like a sensible man.
"There is--do you know it?--an almost uncontrollable fascination in
Danger. Have you never been seized with the desire to throw yourself
down some yawning chasm, into some abyss, over into the ready jaws of a
shark, to handle a tiger, play with a rattlesnake, jump into a foundery
furnace, write a book, edit a paper, or some other such equally wise and
sensible thing? Well, I know many who have thus been tempted--and to
their ruin. Human nature always has a morbid streak, and that is one of
them, as is also the horrible attraction to an execution--to visit the
scene of a homicide or a conflagration--especially if a few people have
been burnt up--and the more the stronger the curiosity; or to look at
the spot where a score or two of Pat-landers have been mumified by the
weakness of walls--and contractors' consciences. With what strange
interest we read how the monarch of some distant lovely isle dined with
his cabinet, off _Potage aux têet de missionaire_--how they banqueted on
delicate slices of boiled evangelist, all of which _viandes_ were
unwillingly supplied by the Rev. Jonadab Convert-'em-all, who had a call
that way to supply the bread of life, not slices of cold missionary--and
did both! So with Tom Clark. One would have thought that the last scene
he would willingly have looked upon, would have been the bottom of the
ravine. Not a bit of it. An uncontrollable desire seized him, and for
his life he could not keep away from the foot of the cliff. He went
there, and day by day searched for every vestige of the poor woman,
whose heart, and head likewise, he at last had succeeded in breaking
into very small fragments. These relics he buried as he found them, yet
still could not forsake his daily haunt. Of course, for a time the
people observed his action, attributed it to grief and love, forbore to
watch or disturb, and finally cared nothing about the matter whatever.
Such things are nothing in California. Well was it for Clark that it was
so--that they regarded him as mildly insane, and let his vagaries have
full swing, for it gave him ample time and opportunity to fully improve
one of the most astounding pieces of good luck that ever befell a human
being since the year One.
"It fell out upon a certain day, that, after attending to other duties,
Tom Clark, as usual, wound his way, by a zig-zag and circuitous path, to
the foot of the hill, and took his accustomed seat near by the rock
where it was evident Mrs. C. had landed--the precise spot where her
flight had been so rudely checked. There he sat for a while, like
Volney, in deep speculative reverie and meditation--not upon the ruins
of Empires, but upon those of his horse, his buggy, and his wife.
Suddenly he started to his feet, for a very strange fancy had struck
upon his brain. I cannot tell the precise spot of its impingement, but
it hit him hard. He acted on the idea instantly, and forthwith resolved
to dig up all the soil thereabouts, that had perchance drank a single
drop of her blood. It was not conscience that was at work, it was
destiny. This soil, that had been imbrued with the blood of the horse
and buggy--no, the woman, I mean--he resolved to bury out of sight of
man and brute, and sun and moon, and little peeping stars; for an
instinct told him that the gore-stained soil could not be an acceptable
spectacle to anything on earth, upon the velvet air, or in the blue
heaven above it; and so he scratched up the mould and buried it out of
sight, in a rift hard by, between two mighty rocks, that the earthquake
had split asunder a million years before.
"And so he threw it in, and then tried to screen it from the sun with
leaves and grass, great stones and logs of wood; after which he again
sat down upon the rock to rest.
"Presently he arose to go, when, as he did so, a gleam of sunshine
flashed back upon his eyes from a minute spiculæ of, he knew not what.
He stooped; picked up the object, and found, to his utter astonishment,
that he held in his hand a lump of gold, solid gold--an abraded,
glittering lump of actual, shining gold.
"Tom Clark nearly fainted! The lump weighed not less than a pound. Its
sides had been scratched by him as he dug away the earth at the foot of
the cliff where his wife had landed, after a brief flight through four
hundred feet of empty air--a profitable journey for him--but not for
her, nor the horse, nor buggy!
"For a minute Clark stood still, utterly bewildered, and wiping the
great round beads of sweat from off his brow. He wept at every pore. But
it was for a minute only: in the next he was madly, wildly digging with
the trowel he always carried with him, for Tom was Herb-Doctor in
general for the region roundabout, and was great at the root and herb
business, therefore went prepared to dig them wherever chance disclosed
them.
"Five long hours did he labor like a Hercules, in the soft mould, in the
crevices of the rocks--everywhere--and with mad energy, with frantic
zeal. Five long hours did he ply that trowel with all the force that the
hope of sudden wealth inspired, and then, exhausted, spent, he sank
prostrate on the ground, his head resting on a mass of yellow gold--gold
not in dust, or flecks, or scales, but in great and massy lumps and
wedges, each one large enough for a poor man's making.
"That morning Thomas Clark's worldly wealth, all told, could have been
bought thrice over for any five of the pieces then beneath his head, and
there were scores of them. His brain reeled with the tremendous
excitement. He had struck the richest 'Lead' ever struck by mortal man
on the surface of the planet, for he had already collected more than he
could lift, and he was a very strong and powerful man. There was enough
to fill a two-peck measure, packed and piled as close and high as it
could be; and yet he had just begun. Ah, Heaven, it was too much!
"Alas, poor Tom! poor, doubly poor, with all thy sudden, boundless
wealth! Thou art even poorer than Valmondi, who, the legends say, gave
his soul to the service of the foul fiend--for he, like thee, had riches
inexhaustible; but, unlike Valmondi, and the higher Brethren of the
Rosie Cross, thou hast not the priceless secret of Perpetual youth. Thou
wilt grow old, Tom Clark--grow old, and sick, and grey hairs and
wrinkles will overtake thee. And see! yonder is an open grave, and it
yearns for thee, Tom Clark, it yearns for thee! And there's Blood upon
thy hands, Tom Clark, red gouts of Blood--and gold cannot wash it off.
"Valmondi repented, and died a beggar, but thy heart is cased in golden
armor, and the shafts of Mercy may not reach its case, and wake thee up
to better deeds, and high and lofty daring for the world and for thy
fellow-men. Gold! Ah, Tom, Tom, thou hadst better have been a humble
Rosicrucian--better than I, for weakness has been mine. It is better to
labor hard with brain and tongue and hands, for mere food and raiment,
than be loaded down with riches, that bear many a man earthward, and
fill untimely graves! It is better to live on bread, and earn it, than
to be a millionaire. Better to have heaped up wealth of Goodness, than
many bars of Gold. Poor Tom! Rich you are in what self-seeking men call
wealth; but poor, ah, how poor! in the better having, which whetteth the
appetite for knowledge, and its fruitage, Wisdom, and which sendeth man,
at night, to Happy Dream land, upon the viewless pinions of sweet and
balmy Sleep! Every dollar _above_ labor brings ten thousand evils in its
train.
"Well, night was close at hand, and Tom buried his God, and went home.
Home, did I say? Not so. He went to his bed, to sleep, and in that sleep
he dreamed that it was raining double eagles, while he held his hat
beneath the spout. But he was not home, for home is where the heart is,
and we have seen the locality of Clark's.
"For days, weeks, months, he still worked at his 'Lead,' studiously
keeping his own counsel, and managing the affair, from first to last,
with the most consummate tact; so that no one even suspected that the
richest man in California, and on the entire continent, was Mr. Thomas
W. By degrees he conveyed to, and had vast sums coined at the mint, as
agent for some mining companies. A few hogsheads he buried here and
there, and sprinkled some dozens of barrels elsewhere about the ground.
This he continued to do until at last even _his_ appetite for gold was
doubly, _triply_ glutted; and then he sprung the secret, sold his claim
for three millions, cash in hand, and forthwith moved, and set up an
establishment close under Telegraph Hill, in the best locality in all
Santa Blarneeo.
"And now everybody and his wife bowed to Mr. Thomas W., and did homage
to--his money. Curious, isn't it, how long some gods _will_ live? About
three thousand years ago a man of Israel fashioned one out of borrowed
jewelry, fashioned it in the form of a _veal_, after which he proclaimed
it, and all the human calves fell down straightway, and a good many are
still bent on worshipping at the self-same shrine. That calf has
retained to this day '_eleven-tenths_' of earth's most zealous
adoration! So now did men reverence Clark's money. Women smiled upon
him, ambitious spinsters ogled, and hopeful maidens set their caps to
enthrall him. He could carry any election, gave tone to the Money
Market, reigned supreme and undisputed king on ''Change,' and people
took him for a happy man; and so he was, as long as daylight lasted, and
he was steadily employed; but, somehow or other, his nights were
devilishly unpleasant! He could not rest well, for in the silence of the
night, when deep sleep falleth upon man, an unsheeted ghost passed
before his face, bearing a most damnably correct similitude to a former
female acquaintance of his, now, alas! deceased; and not unfrequently,
as he hurried along the streets, did he encounter persons who bore
surprising and unmistakable resemblances to the 'dear departed.'
"'Black clouds come up, like sinful visions,
To distract the souls of solitary men.'
"Was Tom Clark mistaken? Was it Fancy? Was it Fear?... One night he went
to a theatre, but left it in a hurry, when the actor, who was playing
Macbeth, looked straight into his private box and said:
"'The times have been that, when the brains were out
The man would die--and there an end;
But _now_ they rise again, with twenty mortal murders
On their crowns, to push us from our seats!'
And the words pushed Clark out of the house, deadly sick--fearfully
pale; for the avenging furies, roused at last, were at that very moment
lashing his guilty soul to madness--and Shakspeare's lines, like
double-edged daggers, went plunging, cutting, leaping, flying through
every vault and cavern of his spirit. He rushed from the place, reached
his house, and now: 'The bowl, the bowl! Wine, give me wine, ruby wine.'
They gave it, and it failed! Stronger drink, much stronger, now became
his refuge, and in stupefying his brain he stultified his conscience.
His torture was not to last forever, for by dint of debauchery his
sensitive soul went to sleep, and the brute man took the ascendant.
Conscience slept profoundly. His heart grew case-hardened, cold and
callous as an ice-berg. He married a Voice, and a Figure, as heartless
as himself; became a politician--which completely finished him; but
still, several handsome donations to a fashionable church--just think of
it!--had the effect of procuring him the reputation of sanctity, which
lie he, by dint of repetition, at last prevailed upon himself to
believe. Thus we leave him for awhile, and return to the chamber in
which was the little window whose upper sash was down.
PART IV.
THE DREAM OF BETSEY CLARK.
"Madame, awake, it will be remembered, had come to the conclusion to
settle Tom's coffee--and hash, at the same time, with a dose or two of
ratsbane, or some similar delicate condiment; and now, in her dream, she
thought all her plans were so well and surely made as to defy detection,
and laugh outright at failure.
"In California there is a small but very troublesome rodent known to
Science as '_Pseudo-stoma bursarius_,' and to the vulgar world as
'gopher'--a sort of burrowing rat, nearly as mischievous and quite as
wicked, for the little wretches have a settled and special penchant for
boring holes in the ground, particularly in the vicinity of fruit trees.
My friend, Mr. Rumford, who has a very fine orchard in Fruit Vale,
Contra Costa, just across the bay from Santa Blarneeo, recently assured
me that the rascals make it a point to destroy young trees, not only
without compunction, but even without saying, 'By your leave.' Now it so
happened that Clark's place was overstocked with the pestilent animals
alluded to, and the proprietors had, time and again, threatened the
whole race with extermination, by means of arsenic, phosphor-paste, or
some other effective poison, but had never carried the resolution into
practice. This fact was seized on by Mrs. Clark, as a capital _point
d'appui_. Accordingly, with a dull hand-saw, the lady hacked a few dozen
of the very choicest young trees, in such a way as to make them look
like unmistakable gopher-work, thus subjecting the brutes to charges
whereof they were as innocent as _two_ unborn babes. Gophers and the
Devil have to answer for a great deal that properly belong to other
parties. Her act was a grand stroke of policy. She meant that Tom should
voluntarily get the poison, which she intended he--not the
gophers--should take at the very earliest possible opportunity. _She_
didn't mean to purchase arsenic--oh, no, she knew too much for _that_!
The ravage was speedily discovered by Clark. He raved, stamped his foot
in his wrath, turned round on his heel, pulled his cap over his eyes,
ejaculated, 'Dod dern 'em!' started for the city, and that very night
returned, bearer of six bits' worth of the strongest and deadliest kind
of poison--quite as deadly, almost as strong, as that which stupid fools
drink in corner stores at six cents a glass.
"That night about half the poison was mixed and set. Twelve hours
thereafter there was great tribulation and mourning in Gopherdom; for
scores of the little gentry ate of it, liked the flavor, tried a little
more--got thirsty--they drank freely (most fools do!), felt
uncomfortable, got angry, swelled--with indignation and poisoned meal!
and not a few of them immediately (to quote Mr. Clark), 'failed in
business; that is to say, they burst--burst all to thunder! Alas, poor
rodents!
"Next morning Tom's coffee was particularly good. Betsey fairly
surpassed herself, in fact she came it rather too strong. About ten
o'clock he felt thirsty, and inclined toward cold water; for the weather
was hot, and so were his 'coppers,' to quote the Ancient Mariner. He
would have taken much water, only that Betsey dissuaded him, and said:
'It was just like him, to go and get sick by drinking ever so much cold
water! Why didn't he take switchel, or, what was much better, cold
coffee, with plenty of milk in it--and sugar, of course;' and so he
(Tom) tried her prescription, liked it, took a little more, and that
night followed the Gophers!
"Three days afterwards a kindly neighbor handed Mrs. Clark a fresh copy
of the 'Santa Blarneeo Looking Glass,' wherein she read, with tearful
eyes, the following true and veracious account of
"'A MOST DISTRESSING AND FATAL SUICIDE!
"'We regret to announce the fearful suicide, while laboring
under a fit of temporary insanity, caused by the bite of a
gopher, of Mr. Thomas W. Clark. It appears, that in order to
destroy the vermin, he purchased some arsenic, gave some to the
animals, got bitten by them, ran stark mad in consequence, and
then swallowed the balance (about a pound) himself. His
unfortunate wife now lies at the point of death, by reason of
the dreadful shock. She is utterly distracted by the
distressing and heart-rending event, which is all the more
poignant from the fact, that probably no married pair that ever
lived were more ardently and devotedly attached than were they.
The coroner and a picked jury of twelve men sat for two hours
in consultation, after which they found a verdict of "Death by
his own act, while insane from the bite of a gopher!"'
* * * *
"In due time the body of the victim who had been killed so exceedingly
dead, by cruel, cold poison--(if it had been warm he might have stood
it, but cold!)--was consigned to the grave--and forgetfulness at the
same time; and after a brief season of mourning, materially assisted
before company by a peeled onion (one of the rankest kind) in a
handkerchief, applied to the eyes--my Lady Gay, our disconsolate
relict--fair, forty, and somewhat fat--gave tokens, by change of dress,
that she was once more in the market matrimonial,
"'With her tacks and sheets, and her bowlines, too,
And colors flying--red, white, and blue,'
She was once more ready to dare and do for husband number three. To do
her justice, she _was_ good-looking--all women are, when they choose to
be. Her face was fair and intelligent; she possessed a voluptuous degree
of what Monsieur de Fillagre calls 'om-bong-pong' (_embonpoint_), could
sing--at a mark; and if not O fat! was _au fait_--a little of both,
perhaps--on the light, fantastic toe--of the California Order; while as
an invaluable addition, there was no woman on the coast who could equal
her in getting up either linen, a dinner, or a quarrel. She excelled all
rivals in the really divine art of cooking a husband--beefsteak, I mean.
Her pastry and bread were excellent, her tea was fine, and her coffee
was all that man could wish, and more so, for it was good--perfectly
killing--as we have seen.
"Betsey took matters coolly; was in no apparent hurry, for she had
resolved to shoot only at high game, and, accordingly, after a time,
deigned to smile upon the Reverend Doctor Dryasdust, the honored head of
the new sect recently sprung up in the land, and which was known as the
'Wotcher Kawlums,' and who rejoiced in repudiating everything over five
years old in the shape of doctrine, tenet and discipline, but who went
in strongly for Progress and pantaloons--for women; for Honduras and the
_naked_ truth; for Socialism and sugar estates; mahogany and
horticulture--a patent sort.
"Now, the pastor of this promising body felt that it was not good for
man to be alone, and therefore cast about for a rib whereof to have
fashioned a help meet unto him. He saw the widow, fell in love,
proposed, was accepted, and in due time she became the wife of the
Newlight preacher. I like the old lights best; she didn't.
"Betsey achieved a 'position'--a thing for which her sex almost
proverbially sacrifice all they have on earth--happiness, health, long
life, usefulness. She enjoyed herself quite well, and only two things
disturbed her peace of mind: First, she could not bear the smell or
sight of coffee, which drink her new lord was strongly addicted to, and
insisted on her making for him with her own hands; thereby inflicting
daily tortures upon her, compared to which all physical pain was
pleasure. The second disturbing cause was this: by a very strange
fatality their house was overrun with rats, and their garden fairly
swarmed with gophers--which, with infernal malice and pertinacity,
became quite tame, semi-domesticated, and intruded themselves upon her
notice a dozen times a day, thereby fetching up from memory's storehouse
fearful reminiscences of other days--horrible recollections of the
gophers of the long-agone. It is hard to be weaned of your fears;
nevertheless, after a while she conquered herself, brazened down her
horrors, weighed herself, applied a false logic, tried herself by it,
and returned a clear verdict of 'Justifiable all the way,' and concluded
that her present happiness, what there was of it, fairly outweighed the
crime by which it had been reached. She was materially justified in her
conclusions by an accidental development of character on the part of her
present husband, who had, in a fit of petulance, unfolded a leaf from
the inner volume of the soul within.
"Not caring to recapitulate the whole story (for reticence is sometimes
wisdom), I will merely observe that at the end of a somewhat heated
controversy, her husband had smashed a mirror, with one of Webster's
quarto dictionaries, and roundly declared that he 'preached for pay.
Hang it, Madame, the salary's the thing!--you _Bet_! How can souls be
saved without a salary? That's a plain question. They are not now, at
all events, whatever may have been the case with the Old Lights, who
had a great deal more zeal than discretion--more fools they! It can't be
done in these days of high prices and costly raiment--with the
obligation of feeding well and dressing better. What's life without
money? What's talent without brass? What's genius without gold? They
won't pay! No, no, Madame; in the game of life, diamonds are always
trumps, and hearts are bound to lose. What's the result?
"'Listen! Five years ago, up in the mountains, I thought I had
a call. I did, and went--and preached the new doctrines of
Do-as-you-feel-a-mind-to-provided-you-don't-get-catched-at-it-ism--the
regular out and out All-Right-ite-provided-you-don't-tread-on-my-corns
religion. Well, I preached it, had large houses, converted many--and
nearly starved! What's the consequence? Why, I left, and now hear only
the loudest kind of calls! What's the loudest call? Why, the biggest
salary! that's what's the matter! Do you see the point--the place where
the laugh comes in? It's as plain as A B C to me, or any other man! and
all the rest is leather and prunella--stuff, fudge--Hum!'
"Honest, out-spoken Dryasdust! How many of the world's teachers sail in
the same boat! His eloquence--not all false, perhaps--was not lost upon
his wife. The Dryasdusts are not all dead; there's a few more left of
the same sort--only they keep their own counsel, even from their wives.
New Lights!
"As a result of this conversation, Madame became a sort of cross between
an Atheist and--God knows what; for she was neither one thing nor
'tother, but a sort of pseudo-philosophical nondescript, without any set
principle of belief whatever. Her conscience froze.
"'Who knoweth the spirit of a man that it goeth upward, or of a beast
that it goeth downward? The Spiritualists?--a pack of fanatics! I don't
believe in ghosts'--but she shuddered as she gave utterance to the
words, and her hair crawled upon her head as if touched with spectral
fingers. No man disbelieves his immortality--the thing is impossible,
_per se_; for although he may differ with that class of people who
pretend to very extensive ghostly acquaintanceship and commerce, as many
do--yet he doubtless always whistles as he passes a graveyard in the
night! I certainly do! Why? Because I disbelieve in ghosts!--of course.
"She resumed her soliloquy: 'I'm nervous--that's all! I mean to eat,
drink and be merry, for to-morrow I die--DIE! What of it--isn't Death an
eternal sleep? My husband says that it is, to all except the New Lights;
but he's a fool, in some things, that's certain.... And after death the
_Judgement_!' And she shuddered again, for a cold wind passed by her,
and she thought it best to light two more candles and run her fingers
over the piano, and take a glass of Sainsevain's best Angelica. 'Bah!
who knows anything about a judgment? There's no such thing. He's dead.
What of it? He can't talk! If he could, what of it? Ghosts can't testify
in court! Besides, it was to be--and it's done. Fate is responsible, not
I
"'In spite of Reason, erring Reason's spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever _is_ is right.'
"'Tom was to die. The conditions that surrounded him were just such as
had determined the results that followed. I was but the proxy of eternal
Fate. Am I to blame? Certainly _not_, for I acted in precise accordance
with the conditions that surrounded me--that made me do as I
did--tempted me beyond my strength; and, for that reason, the crime, if
crime it be, was a foregone conclusion from the foundation of the world!
Hereafter?
"'Come from the grave to-morrow with that story,
And I may take some softer path to glory.'
"'Parrhasius was a true philosopher--or Willis. Pshaw! I guess I'll take
another drop of Angelica!'
"Poor Betsey! she had been reading Pope and Leibnitz, and Ben
Blood--bad, worse and worst, unfairly interpreted; good, better and
best, rightly understood--and as the respective writers probably meant.
Weak people read a book as children do Swift's Gulliver--on the surface;
others read the great book whose letters are suns, whose words are
starry systems, in the self-same manner; and there is still a greater
volume--the first edition, to be continued--the Human Soul--which they
never read at all. All of these must go to school; they will graduate
by-and-by, when Death turns over a new leaf. It is best to study
now--there may not be so good a chance presently.
"Betsey Clark believed, or thought she did, that because God made all
things, therefore there could be no wrong in all the world. She accepted
Pope's conclusions literally, misread them, and totally overlooked the
sublime teachings of the third author named; and her mind went to rest,
and her conscience slumbered under the sophisms--for such they are, from
one point of view. The opiate acted well. And so she slept for
years--long years of peace, wealth, all the world could give her--slept
in the belief that there would never be a waking. Was she right? Wait.
Let us see.
"We are still in the little chamber, near the window--the little window
at the foot of the bed--whose upper sash was down."
PART V.
TOM CLARK DREAMS AGAIN.
"And now the Shadow--the terrible, monstrous Thing, that had so
strangely entered the room through the window--the little window at the
foot of the bed, whose upper sash was down--hovered no longer over the
heads of the woman and the man--the unhappy woman, the misery-laden man,
who, when the last sun had set, went to bed with Murder and Revenge--and
Hatred--this wretched couple, who had contemplated such dreadful crimes,
and who, within the past two hours, had had such strange and marvellous
dreams! Only two hours! and yet in that space had been crowded the
events of a lifetime. They say there are no miracles! What, then, is
this? What are these strange experiences of soul which we are constantly
having--fifty years compressed in an hour of ordinary Dream!--thirty
thousand ages in a moment of time, while under the accursed spells of
Hasheesh? The soul flying back over unnumbered centuries; scanning the
totality of the Present, and grasping a myriad Futurities--sweeping the
vortex of unborn epochs by the million!--and all in an instant of the
clock, while under the influence of the still more accursed Muust. What
are the frogs and bloody waves of Egypt, compared to these miracles of
the human soul--these Dream-lives that are not Dreams?
"And so the Thing took the glare of its horrible Eye from off the woman
and the man. Its mission--its temptations were over. And it floated from
off the bed, frown-smiling at Hesperina as it did so; and it passed
lazily, gloomily, scowlingly through the window at the foot of the bed,
through which it had a little previously entered; and it moved through
the starlight with a rush and a roar--a sullen rush and roar--as if each
star-beam stabbed it with a dagger of flame; and the Thing seemed
consciously angry, and it sullenly roared, as doth the wintry blast
through the tattered sails of a storm-tossed bark, toilsomely laboring
thro' the angry deep: a minute passed, and IT was gone; thank God! IT
was gone--at last--that horrible Incubus--that most fearful Thing!
"Simultaneously the sleepers evinced by their movements that their
souls, if not their senses, had been relieved by the presence of its
absence; and they were apparently on the point of waking, but were
prevented by the magic, or magnetic action of the angelic figure at that
moment leaning o'er their couch; for she gently, soothingly waved her
snowy hands, and, in a voice sweeter than the tones of love, whispered:
'Sleep on; still sleep--softly--sweetly sleep--and dream. Peace,
troubled hearts! Peace; be still!' and they slumbered on.
"Tom Clark's dream had changed. All the former troubled and exciting
scene had vanished into thin air, leaving only vague, dim memories
behind, to remind his soul of what it had been, and what it had seen and
suffered. In the former dream he had been on dry, solid land; but now
all this was strangely altered, and he found himself tossed on a rough,
tumultuous sea; his lot was cast upon the deep--upon a wild and dreary
waste of waters. In his dream the rain--great round and heavy drops of
rain--fell in torrents; the mad winds and driving sleet--for the rain
froze as it fell--raved and roared fiercely, fitfully; and the good ship
bent and bellied to the hurricane, and she groaned as if loath to give
up the ghost. And she drove before the blast, and she plunged headlong
into the foaming billows, and ever and anon shook her head--brave ship!
as if she knew that ruin was before her, and had determined to meet it
as a good ship should--bravely, fairly in the face.
"I have yet to disbelieve that every perfect work of man--ship, watch,
engine--has a semi-conscious life of its own--a life derived from the
immortal soul that gave its idea birth--for all these things--these
ships, watches, engines, are ideas, spiritual, subtle, invisible, till
man hides their nakedness with wood, iron, steel, brass--the fig-leaves
of the Ideal World. Some people cannot feel an idea, or be introduced to
one, unless it be dressed up in matter. Sometimes we lay it on paper or
canvas, and draw pencil lines around, or color it, and then it can be
seen; else we take one and plant it out of doors, and then put brick and
iron, marble and glass sides to it, rendering the spirit visible, and
then the people see the Idea's Clothing, and fancy they behold the thing
itself, just as others, when looking at a human body, imagine they
behold the man, the woman, or the child. A mistake! None but God ever
yet beheld a human Soul, and this it is, and not the body or its
accidents, that constitutes the Ego.
* * * *
"And the ship surged through the boiling seas, and her timbers strained
and cracked in the combat, and her cordage shrieked as the blast tore
through, and the tattered sails cried, almost humanly--like a man whose
heart is breaking because his wife loves him not, and all the world for
him is robed in mourning--and they cried, as if in deadly fear they were
craving mercy at the Storm-King's hands. He heard the cries, but he
laughed 'ho! ho!' and he laughed 'ha! ha!' and he tore away another sail
and hurled it in the sea, laughing madly all the while; and he blew, and
he rattled, and he roared in frightful glee; and he laughed 'ha! ha!'
and he laughed 'ho! ho!' as the bridegroom laughs in triumph.
"And still the storm came down; and the yards bent before the gale, and
then snapped asunder, like pipe-clay stems, and the billows leaped and
dashed angrily at her sides, like a trained blood-hound at the throat of
the mother, whose crime is being black--Chivalrous, well-trained
blood-hounds! And the waves swept the decks of the bark--swept them
clean, and whirled many a man into the weltering main, and sent their
souls to heaven by water, and their bodies to the coral caves of Ocean.
Poor Sailors! The Storm-King's spirit was roused, and his soul up in
arms; and the angry waves danced attendance; the lightning held high
revelry, and flashed its applause in the very face of heaven, and lit up
the night with terrible, ghastly smiles; and the sullen growl of distant
thunder was the only requiem over the dead upon that dismal deep.
"It was night. Day had long left the earth, and gone to renew his youth
in his Western bath of fire--as we all must--for death is our West--and
the gloomy eidolon had usurped Day's throne, arrayed in black garments,
streaked with flaming red, boding no good, but only ill to all that
breathed the upper air. And the turmoil woke the North, and summoned him
to the wassail; and he leaped from his couch of snow, with icebergs for
his pillow, and he stood erect upon his throne at the Pole, and he blew
a triumphant, joyous blast, and sent ten thousand icy deaths to
represent him at the grand, tempestuous revel. They came, and as the
waters leaped into the rigging, they lashed them there with
frost-fetters; and they loaded the fated ship with fantastic robes of
pearly, heavy, glittering ice--loaded her down as sin loads down the
transgressor.
"And still the noble ship wore on--still refused the bitter death.
Enshrouded with massy sheets and clumps of ice, the good craft nearly
toppled with the weight, or settled forever in the yawning deep; for
despite her grand endeavors--her almost human will and resolution--her
desperate efforts to save her precious freight of human souls--she
nearly succumbed, and seemed ready to yield them to the briny waters
below. Lashed to staunch timbers, the trembling remnant of the crew soon
found out, while terror crowned their pallid brows, that the tornado was
driving them right straight upon a rock-bound coast--foaming and
hopeless for them, notwithstanding that from the summit of the bold
cliffs, a light-house gleamed forth its eye coldly--cynically upon the
night--in mockery lighting the way to watery death and ruin. Steadily,
clearly it glimmered out upon the darkness, distinctly showing them the
white froth at the foot of the cliff--the anger-foam of the demon of the
storm. Ah, God! Have mercy! have mercy!
"Look yonder, at the stern of the ship! What frightful gorgon is that?
You know not! Well, that is Death sitting on the taffrail. See, he moves
about. Death is standing at the cabin door; he is gazing down below,
looking up aloft, glaring out over the bleak, into the farther night.
See! he is stalking about the deck--the icy deck--very slippery it is,
and where you fall you die, for he has trodden on the spot. Ah, me! ah,
me! Woe, woe, a terrible woe is here, Tom Clark! Tom Clark, don't you
hear? Death stands glamoring on you! Hark! he is whistling in the
rigging; he is swinging on the snapping ends of yonder loosened
halliards; if they strike you you are dead, for they are Whips, and
Death is snapping them! He is calling you, Tom Clark; don't you hear
him?--calling from his throne, and his throne is the Tempest, Tom
Clark--the Tempest. Now he is watching you--don't his glance trouble
you? Don't you know that he is gazing down into your eyes? How cold is
his glance! how colder his breath! It is very, very cold. Ah! I shiver
as I think--and Death is freezing you, Tom Clark;--he is freezing your
very heart, and turning your blood to ice. He is freezing you, and has
tried to freeze me, in various ways. But I bade him stand back--to stay
his breath--for, unlike you, Tom Clark, I am a Brother of the Rosie
Cross, and I have been over Egypt, and Syria, and Turkey; on the borders
of the Caspian, and Arabia's shores; over sterile steppes, and weltered
through the Deserts--and all in search of the loftier knowledge of the
Soul, that can only there be found; and I found what I sought, Tom
Clark--the nature of the Soul, its destiny, and how it may be trained to
any end or purpose. And the History and Mystery of Dream, Tom Clark,
from the lips of the Oriental Dwellers in the Temple--and Pul Ali
Beg--Tom Clark--our Persian Ramus and our lordly Chief--and I learned
the worth of Will, and how to say, and _mean_,--'I _will_ be well, and
not sick--alive, and not dead!' and achieve the purpose. How? That is
our secret--the Rosicrucians'--strange order of men; living all along
the ages, _till they are ready to die_--for Death comes only because man
will not beat him back. They DIE THROUGH FEEBLENESS OF WILL. But not so
with us, Tom Clark; we leave not until our work is done, and mine is not
yet finished. We exercise our power over others, too, but ever for their
good. Well do I remember, how, when I lived in Charlestown, there was an
old man dying, but I bade him live. He exists to-day. And long years
before that, there reached me--lightning borne, on the banks of the
Hudson, a message saying, 'Come, she is dying!' and I went, and stood
beside the bed of the sick child, and I prayed, and I invoked the Adonim
of the Upper Temple; and they came and bade her live. And she liveth
yet--but how ungrateful!
"Till our work is done! What work? you ask me, and from over the
steaming seas I answer, and I tell you through the boundless air that
separates us: Our work is to help finish that begun lang syne upon the
stony heights of Calvary; in the shade beneath the olive in Gethsemane,
where I have stood and wept--begun when Time was thousands of years
younger than to-day. Our work, Tom Clark, is to make men, by teaching
them to make themselves. We strive to impress a sense upon the world of
the priceless value of a MAN!
* * * *
"And the vessel drove before the gale straight upon the cliff. All hope
was at an end; all hope of rescue was dead. There was great sorrowing on
board that fated bark. Heads were downcast, hearts beat wildly, ears
drank in the mournful monody of the scene, and lo! the strong man lifted
up his voice and wept aloud. Did you ever see a man in tears--tears
tapped from his very soul? When they laugh at his misery, whose lives he
has saved? When he discovers that the man he has loved as a brother, and
for whom he has sacrificed his all during long years, was all the while
a traitor and a foe, a mean and conscienceless traitor, and a secret,
bitter Judas Iscariot, yet wearing a smile on his face continually? God
grant you never may.
"The strong man wept! the very man, too, who, a few brief hours before,
had heaped up curses, for trifling reasons, upon the heads of others;
but now, in this hour of agony and mortal terror, fell upon his knees in
the sublime presence of God's insulted majesty; who now, in the deadly
peril, lashed to the pump, trembling to his soul's deep centre, cried
aloud to Him for--Mercy! God's ears are never deaf! At that moment one
of His Angels--Sandalphon--the Prayer-bearer, in passing by that way,
chanced to behold the sublime and moving spectacle. And his eyes flashed
gladness, even through his tears; and he could scarcely speak for the
deep emotion that stirred his angel heart; but still he pointed with one
hand at the prostrate penitent, and with the other he placed the golden
trumpet to his lips, and blew a blast that woke the sleeping echoes
throughout the vast Infinitudes; and he cried up, cried up from his very
soul: 'Behold! he prayeth!' And the Silence of the upper courts of
Heaven started into Sound at the glad announcement, 'Behold! he
prayeth!' And the sentence was borne afar on the fleecy pinions of the
Light, from Ashtoreth to Mazaroth, star echoing to star. And still the
sound sped on, nor ceased its flight until it struck the pearly Gates of
Glory--where was an Angel standing--the Recording Angel--writing in a
Book; and, oh! _how_ eagerly he penned the sentence, right opposite Tom
Clark's name: 'Behold! he prayeth!' and the tears--great, hot, scalding
tears, such as, at this moment, I am shedding--rolled out from the
angel's eyes, so that he could scarcely see the book--mine own eyes are
very dim--but still he wrote the words. God grant that he may write
them opposite your name and mine--opposite everybody's, and everybody's
son and daughter--opposite ALL our names!
"'Behold! he prayeth!' And lo! the Angels and the Cherubim, the Seraphs
and the Antarphim, caught up the sound, and sung through the Dome; sung
it till it was echoed back from Aidenn's golden walls, from the East to
the West, and the North and South thereof; until it echoed back in low,
melodious cadence from the Veiled Throne, on which sitteth in majesty
the Adonai of Adonim, the peerless and ineffable Over Soul, the gracious
Lord of both the Living and the Dead! Are there any _Dead_? No! except
in sin and guiltiness!... And there was much joy in the Starry World
over one sinner that had in very truth repented.
"And still the ship drove on, and on, and on--great heaven! right on to
a shelving ledge of rock, where she was almost instantly dashed into a
million fragments; masts, hull, sails, freight, men, all, all swept and
whirled with relentless fury into one common gulf of waters; and yet,
despite the din and roar, there rose upon the air, high and clear, and
shrill:
"'The startling shriek--the bubbling cry
Of one strong swimmer in his agony.'
"And that swimmer was Tom Clark. Thrice had he been thrown by the surf
upon a jutting ledge of rock; thrice had he, with the strength of
despair, clung to it, and seized upon the sea-weed growing on its edges,
with all the energy of a drowning man. In vain; the relentless sea
swept him off again, broke his hold, and whirled him back into the
brine. His strength was almost gone; exhaustion was nigh at hand; and he
floated, a helpless, nerveless mass at the mercy of the tide. And yet,
so wonderful a thing is a human soul!--in that dreadful moment, when
Hope herself was dead, and he was about to quit forever and forever this
earth of sin and sorrow, and yet an earth so fair and bright, so lovely
and so full of love, teeming so with all that is heroic and true, so
friendly and so kind; his soul, even then, his precious and immortal
soul, just pluming its wings for a flight to the far-off regions of the
Living Dead--that soul for which God Himself had put forth all His
redemptive energy--had abundant time to assert its great prerogative,
and bid Death himself a haughty, stern defiance. With the speed of Light
his mental vision flashed back along and over the valley of the dead
years, and saw arrayed before it all the strange phasmaramas of the
foretime. Deeds, Thoughts, and Intuitions never die! They are as
immortal as the imperishable souls that give them life and being!
"And in that wondrous vision Tom Clark was young again; his childhood,
youth, maturity; his sins, sorrows, virtues, and his aspirations, all,
all were there, phototyped upon the walls of the mystic lane through
which his soul was gazing--a lane not ten inches long, yet stretching
away into the immeasurable deeps of a vast Infinitude. A Paradox! I am
speaking of the Soul!--a thing whereof we talk so much, and know so very
little.
"The spectres of all his hours were there, painted on the Wall of
Memory's curved lane; his joys, his weary days of grief--few of the
first, many of the latter--were there, like green and smiling oases,
standing out in quick relief against the desert of his life. His anxious
eyes became preternaturally acute, and seemed to take cognizance both of
fact and cause--effect and principle at the same glance. His marriage
life--even to its minutest circumstance--stood revealed before him. He
saw Betsey as she had been--a girl, spotless, artless, intelligent,
ambitious; beheld her married; then saw her as she was when she joined
her lot with his own. He beheld her as she had become--anything but a
true wife and woman, for only her surface had been reached by either
husband. There was a fountain they had neither tapped nor known. Her
heart had been touched, indeed; but her soul, never. He was amazed to
find that a woman can give more than a husband is supposed to seek and
find. More, did I say? My heaven! not one man in ten thousand can think
of a line and plummet long enough to fathom the vast ocean of a woman's
affection; cannot imagine the height and depths--the unfathomable riches
of a woman's Love. Not a peculiar woman's--but any, every woman's love;
your sister's, sir, or your wife's, sir, or mine, or anybody's sister or
wife--anybody's daughter.
"It appeared to Clark's vision that a vast deal of his time had been
worse than wasted, else had he devoted a portion of it to the attentive
study of the woman whom he had, in the presence of God and man, sworn to
love, honor, and protect; for no man is fit for Heaven who does not
love his wife, and no man can love his wife unless he carefully studies
her nature; and he cannot study her nature unless he renders himself
lovable, and thus calls out _her_ love; and until her love _is_ thus
called out, the office of husband is a suicidal sham. Thus saith the
canons of the Rosicrucian philosophy. Are they bad?
"And he gazed in the depths of her spirit, surprised beyond measure to
find that God had planted so many goodly flowers therein--even in virago
Betsey's soul! And he said to himself--as many another husband will,
before a hundred years roll by--'What a precious fool I've been!
spending all my time in cultivating thistles--getting pricked and
cursing them--when roses smell so very well, and are so easily raised?
fool! I wish'----and he blamed his folly for not having nurtured
roses--for not having duly cultivated the rich garden God had intrusted
him with; execrated himself for not having cherished and nursed this
garden, and availed himself of its golden, glorious fruitage. It was as
a man who had willfully left down the bars for the free entrance of his
neighbor's cattle, and then wondering that his harvest of hay was not
quite so heavy as desired.... Clark saw that it had been in his
power--as it unquestionably is in that of every married man--by a few
kind acts, a few tender, loving words, to have thawed and melted forever
the ice collected by ill-usage--and every woman is ill-used who is not
truly, purely, loyally loved! He saw that he might easily have warmed
her spirit toward himself, therefore toward the world, and consequently
toward the Giver. He might have made their life a constant
summer-time--that very life that had been by his own short-sighted
externalism, confirmed into freezing, stormy, chilling winter.
"Wheat and lentils I have seen in Egypt, taken from a mummy's hand,
where they had lain three thousand and four hundred years. Some of that
wheat I still possess; some of it I planted in a flower-pot, and it
forthwith sprung up, green and beautiful, into life and excellence. The
mummy's hand was crisp; the tombs of Beni-Hassan were not the places for
wheat to grow, for they are very dry. Do you see the point, the
place--the thing I am aiming at? It is to show that the ills of marriage
life are to be corrected not by a recourse to law-courts and referees,
but by each party resolutely trying to correct them in the heart, the
head, the home. Another thing I aim at is to seal the lips--to strike to
the earth the brawlers for Divorce--the breakers-up of families, who
preach--or prate of--what they have neither brains to comprehend, nor
manhood to appreciate--Marriage!
"Clark saw, in the soul of his wife, in an instant, that which takes me
an hour to describe; for the soul sees faster than the hand can indite,
or the lips utter. He beheld many a gem, pure and translucent as a
crystal, shut up in the caverns of her nature; shut up, and barred from
the light, all the while yearning for day. What seeds of good, what
glorious wheat was there. The milk of human kindness had been changed to
ice-froth--sour, and sugar-less, not fit to be tasted. Inestimable
qualities had been left totally unregarded, until they were covered up,
nearly choked out by noxious weeds. God plants excellent gardens, and it
is man's express business to keep them and dress them, and just as
surely as he neglects them, and leaves the bars down, or the gates open,
just so surely along comes the Tare-sower, whether his name be
'Harmonial Philosopher,' 'All-Right' preacher, Tom, Harry, Dick,
Devil--or something worse.
"Many good things, saw Tom, that might have been developed into Use and
Beauty, that had, in fact, become frightfully coarse and abnormal; and
all for want of a little Trying.
"'The saddest words of tongue or pen
Are these sad words: IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN!'
"But that he was not kind, tractable, and confiding; and that he was the
reverse of all this. Faults of his own--great and many; tremendous
faults they were. He had been curt, short, sarcastic, selfish, exacting,
petulant, _offish_, arbitrary, tyrannical, suspicious, peremptory--all
of which are contained in the one word MEAN!--and he _was_ mean. Too
late he realized that he might have brought to the surface all the
delicious, ripe sweets of her woman, and her human nature, instead of
the cruel and the bitter. He saw, what every husband ought to see--but
don't--that no woman can be truly known who is not truly loved!--and
that, too, not with mere lip-homage, nor with nervous, muscular,
demonstrative, show-love--for no female on the earth but will soon
detect all such--and reckon you up accordingly--at your proper
value--less than a straw! She demands true homage, right straight from
the heart; from the bottom of the heart--whence springs the rightful
homage due from man to woman--right straight from the heart--without
deflection. Mind this. Give her _that_, and ah, then, _then_, what a
heaven is her presence! and what a fullness she returns! compound
interest, a thousand-fold repeated!--a fullness of affection so great
that God's love only exceedeth it!--a love so rich and vast, that man's
soul can scarce contain the half thereof. _This truth I know._ This
truth I tell, because it is such. You will bless me for it by-and-by,
when I am Over the River--if not before--will bless and thank
me--despite of what 'They say.' Remember that!
"Tom Clark was drowning, yet he realized all this. He regretted that he
had treated his wife as if she were soulless, or a softer sort of man.
He could have so managed as to have been all the world to Betsey--all
the world, and something more and better, for there are leaves in
wedlock's book which only those can turn and read who truly love each
other. Marriage is, to some, a coarse brown paper volume, with rough
binding, bad ink, and worse type, poorly composed, and badly adjusted,
without a page corrected. It may be made a super-royal volume, on tinted
paper, gilt-edged, clear type, and rich and durable covers, the whole
constituting the History of two happy lives spent on Hymen Island:
Profusely illustrated, in full tints, with scenes of Joy in all its
phases. Price, The TRYING! Very cheap, don't you think so?
"He saw, as he floated there in the brine, that he had never done aught
to call out his wife's affection, in which he resembled many another
whiskered ninny, who insanely expect women to doat upon them merely
because they happen to be married. Dolts! Not one in a host comprehends
woman's nature; not one in two hosts will take the trouble to find it
out; consequently, not one man in three hosts but goes down to the grave
never having tasted life's best nectar--that of loving and being loved.
"'O Betsey, Betsey, I know you _now_! _What_ a stupid I have been, to be
sure!'
"Profound ejaculation!
"'I've been an out-and-out fool!'
"Sublime discovery!
"Thus thought the dying man, in the dreadful hour of his destiny--that
solemn hour wherein the soul refuses to be longer enslaved or deceived
by the specious warp and woof of the sophistical robe it may have
voluntarily worn through many a year, all the while believing it to be
Truth, as some people do Davis' and Joe Smith's 'Philosophy.' It is not
till a dose of Common Sense has caused us to eject from our moral
stomachs the nice philosophical sweetmeats we have indulged in for
years, until at last they have disturbed our digestion--sweets, very
pleasant to the palate--like the 'All Right-ism' of the 'Hub of the
Universe'--but which, like boarding-house hash, is very good in small
quantities--seldom presented--and not permanently desirable--that we
begin to have true and noble views of life, especially married life,
its responsibilities and its truly royal joys and pleasures. Clark had
reached this crisis, and in an instant the scales fell from his
eyes--the same that blinds so many of us during the heyday and vigor of
life.
"'If I could be spared, Betsey, I'd be a better man.'
"Bravo! Glorious Thomas Clark! Well said, even though the waters choke
thine utterance.
"'I would. O wife, I begin to see your value, and what a treasure I have
lost--lost--_lost_!'
"And the poor dying wretch struggled against the brine--struggled
bravely, fiercely to keep off the salt death--the grim, scowling Death
that had sat upon the taffrail; that had stalked about the deck, and
stood at the cabin door; the same fearful Death that had whistled
through the rigging, and ridden on the storm, and which had followed but
had not yet touched him with his cold and icy sceptre."
PART VI.
WHAT BECAME OF THOMAS CLARK.
Our entertainer ceased to speak, for the evening meal was nearly ready,
and the golden sun was setting in the West, and he rose to his feet to
enjoy the glowing scene. Never shall I forget the intense interest taken
by those who listened to the tale--and doubtless these pages will fall
in the hands of many who heard it reported from his own lips, on the
quarter-deck of the steamer "Uncle Sam," during the voyage begun from
San Francisco to Panama, on the twenty-first day of November, 1861. At
first his auditors were about ten in number, but when he rose to look at
the crimson glories of the sky, fifty people were raptly listening. We
adjourned till the next day, when, as agreed upon the night before, we
convened, and for some time awaited his appearance. At last he came,
looking somewhat ill, for we were crossing the Gulf of California, and
Boreas and Neptune had been elevating Robert, or in plainer English,
"Kicking up a bobbery," all night long. We had at least a thousand
passengers aboard, consisting of all sorts of people--sailors, soldiers,
and divers trades and callings, and yet not one of us appreciated the
blessing of the epigastrial disturbances--caused by the "bobbery"
aforesaid. Many could successfully withstand any amount of qualms of
conscience--but those of the stomach were quite a different thing
altogether! and not a few of us experienced strong yearnings toward "New
York," and many "reachings forth" went in that direction. Indeed the
weather was so rough, that scarce one of us in the cabin fully enjoyed
our breakfasts. As for me, I'm very fond of mush and molasses, but I
really _couldn't_ partake thereof on that occasion. No, _sir_! The
gentleman from Africa who stood behind us at table to minister to our
gustatory wants, found his office a perfect sinecure that morning; and
both I and the Rosicrucian, in whose welfare that official took an
especial interest--because, in a fit of enthusiasm, we had each given
him four bits (ten dimes)--seemed to challenge his blandest pity and
commiseration, for we both sat there, looking as if we had been
specially sent for and couldn't go. The waiter--kind waiter!--discerned,
by a wonderful instinct, that we didn't feel exactly "O fat," and he
therefore, in dulcet tones, tried to persuade us to take a little
coffee. Coffee! Only think of it! Just after Mrs. Thomas W. had poisoned
her husband through that delectable medium. He suggested pork! "Pork,
avaunt! We're sea-sick." "Beef." Just then I had a splendid proof of
Psychological infiltration and transmission of thought; for my friend
and I instantaneously received a strong impression--which we directly
followed--to arise from our seats, go on deck, and look over the lee
rail. Toward the trysting time, however, the sea smoothed its wrinkles,
and the waters smiled again. Presently the expected one came, took his
accustomed seat, and began the conclusion of
TOM CLARK'S DREAM
"There's a tide in the affairs of men, which,
Taken at the flood, leads on to fortune."
SHAKSPEARE.
"There's a tide in the affairs of women, which,
Taken at the flood, leads--God knows where."
BYRON.
"Neither do I! Last night, my friends, we left poor Tom in a desperate
situation, from which it seems necessary that I should relieve him, but
really without exactly knowing how--not feeling particularly well from
the motion of the ship last night, it is not easy to think under such
circumstances; still, believing as I do, in the sterling motto, Try,
why, I will endeavor to gratify your curiosity, especially as I perceive
we are honored with the presence of the ladies, and, for their sakes, if
not for our own, I feel it incumbent to do something for him.
"Tom Clark had, by the waves, been already taken in, and by this time
was nearly done for, so far as easy breathing was concerned. Slowly, but
surely, his vision was fading away, and he felt that he was fast sinking
into Night.
"'Deep the gulf that hides the dead--
Long and dark the road they tread.'
That road he felt that he was rapidly going; for his senses were
becoming numb, and a nauseant sensation proved that if he was not
sea-sick, he was remarkably sick of the sea, even to the point of
dissolution.
"All dying persons hear musical sounds: all dying persons see strange,
fitful gleams of marvellous light, and so did Thomas Clark--low, sweet
music and soft and pearly light it was, but while he drank it in, and
under its influence was being reconciled to Death, there suddenly rose
high and shrill above the midnight tempest, a loud and agonizing
shriek--the wild, despairing, woeful shriek of a woman--and it was more
shrill and piercing than the ziraleet of Egyptian dame or Persian houri;
and it broke upon the ear of the perishing man, like a summons back to
life and hope. Well and instantly did he recognize its tones. 'It must
be--yet no!--still it can be no other than _her_ v-voice! It cannot
be--and I am dy-ing!' and an angry wave dashed over him, drowning his
utterance, and hurling his body, like a wisp of straw, high upon the
ledge of rocks, whence the recoil, or undertow, was about to whirl it
out again into the foaming waters, when it was prevented by a most
wonderful piece of good fortune, which at that instant, intervened to
save him, at what certainly was the most interesting and critical
juncture of his entire earthly existence. Again that sharp voice rang
out upon the storm, and a hand, small, soft, yet nerved with all a
woman's desperate energy--desperate in Love! clutched him by the hair,
and dragged--triumphantly dragged him to the hard and solid land, just
over the ledge, on a winding path at the foot of the overhanging cliff.
It was Betsey Clark's voice; it was Betsey Clark's hand; it was she who
saved him; and thus he received a new lease of life at the hands of the
very woman whom, in a former dream, he had sent so gaily sailing down
the empty air--down through four hundred feet of unobstructed
space--with boulders at the bottom--solid boulders of granite and
quartz--gold-bearing quartz at that, and very rich, too, but still quite
solid and considerably harder than was agreeable to either the woman,
the buggy, or the horse, for not one of them was
'Soft as downy pillows are'--
not even Governor Downie's of California.
"It was, indeed, his wife's voice that he heard; it was she that rescued
him from what, in very truth, was a most unfortunate pickle--or
_brine_--as you choose, or _both_--but at all events one into which he
would never have got had he not been far greener than a cucumber.
"In a dream strange things come to pass. And in strict accordance with
the proprieties of that weird life and Realm--a life and Realm no less
real than weird--Tom was speedily cared for, and emptied of the overplus
of salt water he had involuntarily imbibed, while Mrs. Clark carefully
attended upon him, and a score or two of good people busied themselves
in saving all they could from the wreck. After this they all retreated
to a comfortable mansion, situated on the summit of this cliff, in the
regions of Dream, and there the following explanations took place: It
appeared that Betsey had been on a visit to her uncle, who kept the
light-house, and had for several days been on the look-out for the
arrival of the vessel--the wrecked one--in which, some time previous,
Tom had sailed on a voyage to Honey-Lu-Lu, the Bay of Fun-dee, or some
other such place that vessels trade to. The ship had at last been
descried, laboring in the midst of a violent storm, just before dark,
and under such circumstances as rendered it positively certain that she
would drive headlong upon the rocks at the foot of the very cliff on
which the light-house stood.
"But by a singular coincidence, perfectly unaccountable anywhere else,
save in Dream-land, Betsey Clark had learned to love Tom dearly, at the
precise instant that he had discovered, and repented his own great
error. At the instant that Tom had declared that, could he be spared, he
would be a better man, she saw his deadly peril; the icicles began to
melt around her heart--melt very fast--so that by the time she reached
him her soul was in a glow of pure affection for the man she had until
that moment hated. She now saw, with unmitigated astonishment, that,
with all his faults, there was a mine of excellent goodness; that God
had not made anything either perfect or imperfect; and that, after all
was said or done, he was of priceless consequence and value to her.
"Human nature and woman nature are very remarkable institutions,
especially the latter. We seldom value either a man or woman, until they
are either dead or a long way off, and then--'Who'd a'thought it?'
"When Clark awoke from the gentle sleep into which he had fallen after
the kind people had made him comfortable, he found his head pillowed on
a bosom a great deal softer than down or Downie's--that of his loving
and tender wife--for she was so now, and no mistake, in the full, true
sense--A Wife!
* * * *
"Tom Clark got well. He never grew rich, and never wanted to. He went to
Santa Blarneeo, and had both their pictures taken in a single frame, on
one canvas, and he hung it over the window in the little room--the
little window at the foot of the bed, whose upper sash was down.
* * * *
"Years rolled by. Long did they live in the enjoyment of a domestic
bliss too great for expression or description--a happiness unsullied by
an unworthy thought, unstained by any blot; for it was full, pure,
husbandly, wifely; and daily, hourly, did they bless and learn to love
each other more.
* * * *
"'Cease dreaming,' said Hesperina--the beautiful Hesperina, the Genius
of the Garden and the Star--'cease thy _dream_ of Perpetual Peace, and
live to actualize it on thy way through the World! Cease dreaming, but
awaken not. Remember the counsel of Otanethi, the radiant, Lord of the
Temple, the Spirit of the Hour; and when thou wakest, TRY to be a nobler
and a better man. Waken not yet, O frail and weak! but still
sleep--sweetly, soundly sleep, yet awhile, and only wake to be a full,
true, loving man, forgiving and forgiven!' And then the peerless being
waved her hand over the prostrate woman, and, lo! her movements gave
token that the strange and mighty magic was felt, and that she was
swiftly passing the mystic Threshold of that sphere of new and
marvellous activities where the Dream Fay reigns supreme."
At this point of the story, a lady, Mrs. V., invoked the narrator's
attention, saying: "Thus far, sir, your story is an excellent one, and
its moral is all that could be desired; yet how comes it that you, who
so strongly deprecate all human hatreds and unkindness, are yet, in a
measure, amenable to the very thing you decry? In the proem to the
remarkable story you have been reciting, you have admitted that there
was one man toward whom your soul felt bitter. Is this right? Is it just
to yourself, your foe, the world, or God? Answer me!"
The Rosicrucian studied awhile, and then replied: "It is _not_ right or
just, and yet it is very hard to forgive, much less to forget, a cool,
deliberate injury, such as I suffered at the pen, and hand, and tongue
of the man alluded to. It is hard to forget"----
"And still harder to forgive," said one of our company, a rather
young-looking man, who had been one of the speaker's most attentive
auditors. He spoke with much passion.
Said the Stranger: "It is hard to forgive or forget. Few people in the
world are capable of long-continued love in a single direction, unless
self-trained; fewer still of deliberate, long-continued hatred, and
fewer still are competent to full, free, unqualified forgiveness. _I am
not._ In all my experience, I never knew but one man in whom unqualified
Hatred was a paramount King-passion, over-riding and surviving all
others whatsoever. I will tell you that man's story as he told it to me,
for he was a friend of mine whom I dearly loved, and who loved me in
return. One day I asked him to open his heart to me, which, after a
while, he did as follows, saying: 'Listen, while I briefly sketch the
story of my life. There was a man who, because I differed with him on
questions of Philosophy--for he claimed to be Nature's private
secretary, which claim all sensible people laughed at, and only
weaklings listened to and believed--he, this man, for this cause, called
in question, not only my own, but the fair fame of the mother who bore
me--that mother being already dead; and for this I hate him, as roses
hate the foul malarious swamps of earth. The blazoned motto of that man
was--Let no man call God his Father, who calls not man his brother. I
rose in the world, and he hated me for the talent God gave me. Envy! I
was in a sense his rival, and as such, this man, snake-like, used his
very utmost influence and power, by tongue and pen, to injure me--and
did--for he took the bread from my children by depriving me of
employment. I wrote a pamphlet, under a _nom de plume_, and he joyfully
exposed my secret. Jealousy! He attacked me personally, grossly in his
paper, misrepresented well known facts--LIED! Robbing me of fair fame,
as he had my dead mother before me. It is impossible for A to forgive B
for a crime against C. I hated him for the dead one's sake; that hate I
once thought would survive my death, and be the thing next my heart
through all the Eternities. Perhaps it will not. He crushed me for a
time, but "_Je renais de mes cendres!_" We two are yet in the World. He
will not forget it! Will I? Never!--for the sake of my dead mother. I
can overlook his crimes toward me, but before the Bar I hold him ever
accountable for the injury to her--and to my little ones, who nearly
starved, while this fiend of hell, in the garb of heaven, triumphed in
_my_ misery, and gloated over _their_ wrongs. I am the watchful
proxy--the rightful Nemesis, of the living and the Dead! I put forth
books to the world. This demon in saint's garb, and his minions, howled
them down as blood-hounds do the panting slave. More bread lost to my
hungry ones, more stern calling for reprisals. All men have foes. I had;
and this man--this impostor, this conscienceless outrager of the dead
and starver of little children, listened gladly, and covertly published
their statements--and that when he morally knew them to be as false as
his own black, polygamous, scoundrel heart. More wrong done, more little
pale hands reaching vainly forth for bread; and more hatred laid up for
him and his minions at the bottom of my heart of hearts, the core and
centre of my soul!'
"Thus he spake, and the man's eyes flashed fire as the words escaped
him, proving that they were not the impulsive utterances of temper, but
the deep and cherished results of long and bitter years of feeling. Said
I: 'And does this feeling demand a physical atonement?' With a look of
ineffable scorn, he replied: 'Not for an empire's sceptre would I harm
a single hair of that man's head. Were his wife in a burning building, I
would rescue her, or perish in the trial; were his children--but, thank
God, he cannot propagate his species--Monsters never do!--but had he
such, and they were hungry, I would work till I fell from exhaustion, in
the effort to procure them bread: were the man himself in want or
danger, I would joyously risk my life to save or serve him. Why? Because
my revenge is one that could not be appeased by blood. It is too
vast--too deep--and I will wreak it in other worlds, a myriad ages from
now. To this I pledge my very soul; and when hereafter I point him to
what I am, and what he has brought me to, I will thunder, in the ears of
his spirit, in the very presence of the Judge, "THOU ART THE MAN!"
Wherever he may be, in the Vault, or in the Space, there will I be also.
Nor can this feeling die before he shall undo his doing, and--no matter
what. At length this feeling of mine grew strong. I loved. It drowned
all love. I was ambitious, and ambition paled before it. I had wealth
within my reach, and turned from the shining gold to the superior
brilliance of the pole star of my passion against the soul of this man,
not against his body. And then I said:--I will rise from my ashes. I
will win fame and name. I, the Angular Character, will rise, and in my
dealings with this fiend will be as remorseless and bitter as the
quintessence of Hate; I will suffer patiently, and mount the steeps of
fame, and I will ring the bells at the door of the world till all the
peoples wake, and then, _then_ will I launch him down the tide of time
in his own true colors--stripped to the centre, and show him to the
Ages for the monster that he is. This is a revenge worthy of an immortal
being; one that merely extends to the physical person is such as brutes
enjoy, but is not full, broad, deep and enduring enough for a man. As
for his minions they are too contemptible to engage my attention for a
moment; but in their master's soul will I fix my talons so deep, that an
eternity shall not witness their extraction; and henceforth I dedicate
all my life to the one purpose of _avenging the dead_!'
"Five years rolled by after this recital, when again, in a foreign land,
we met each other. In the meantime he had grown grey. His foe still
attacked him; he had never once replied, but his hatred had crystallized
in the centre of his soul, and, said he, 'I can wait a million years;
but revenged I will be yet, by the Life of God!' That is my story; I
believe my friend will keep his oath," said the young man as he turned
from the company on the quarter-deck, and slowly walked toward the bow
of the steamer.
The words he had spoken were bitter ones, and they were expressed with
such a _verve_--such a vehemence of vigor, intensity and passion, that
not one man or woman on the quarter-deck of the steamer doubted for an
instant that himself was the injured one, himself the vehement hater,
notwithstanding his implied disclaimer. We saw that he fully, deeply,
felt all he gave utterance to; and never, until that moment, did I
comprehend the awful depths and capacity of the human soul for either
love or hatred; nor had any of us, even the Rosicrucian, the faintest
idea but that every word of his awful threat came from his heart; nor
the slightest doubt that if there were a possibility of wreaking his
revenge in the World to come, that he would find that possibility, and
remorselessly execute it. Said the Rosicrucian, as the man finished his
terrible recital: "This episode comes in quite _apropos_ to my own
story's moral. It is well to beware, lest we, by some act or word of
ours, so deeply plant the germ of hatred, that in after years it spring
up to annoy us, and mar our peace of mind. Now, I have some knowledge of
the soul, and am firmly convinced that the man who has just left us
means all that he says; nor would I incur so dreadful a penalty as that
man's hatred, for all the diadems on the terraqueous globe. His passion
is not merely external, else he would, by an assault, or by slander,
seek its satisfaction. But his feeling is the offspring of a sense of
outraged justice. I have not the least doubt that the object of his
spleen laughs at the man. But Revenge will outlive laughter, wealth,
position, influence--all things, when of the nature of the present case.
Thus, Madame, your question, I hope, has been answered to your
satisfaction. Of course, I deprecate hatred, but demand justice.
"But see, the sun is setting again, and the conclusion of our story must
be deferred until after supper, when, if you will again assemble here
upon the quarter-deck, you shall learn what befell Mr. Thomas W., and
what other events transpired in the little chamber with a window at the
foot of the bed, whose upper sash was down."
PART VII.
BETSEY CLARK IN DREAM-LAND.
Could I with ink the ocean fill,
Were all the earth of parchment made;
Were every blade of grass a quill,
And every man a scribe by trade--
To tell the love of God above
Would drain the briny oceans dry:
Nor would a scroll contain the whole,
Though covering all the arching sky.
"I believe just as did the writer of these lines," said the Rosicrucian,
as he began his recital in the cabin of the "Uncle Sam," after partaking
of what the purveyors of that steamship line, in the rich exuberance of
their facetious imaginations were pleased to call a supper.
* * * *
"Betsey Clark was dreaming: It was morning, and the glorious face of the
sun shone in unclouded splendor over the world--this world, which, to
the good man and woman, is ever a world of Good and Beauty, viewed from
the God-side, whatever it may be from the human. All things were
praising Him--at least all dumb things were, for men so intently adore
their Lares and Penates--Dollars and Dimes--that they have scarcely
time to devote a worshipful thought to Him who is King of kings, and
regnant God of gods.
"Nature was arrayed in gala robes; she had put aside her frowns, and now
smiled sweetly on the world, decked gaily in pearls and light; she was
on her way to attend the weddings of the flowers and the birds. Betsey
Clark was a blythe young girl again. In her dream she was gaily tripping
o'er the lea, her happy heart swelling and palpitating with strange
emotions--she was a budding virgin now, and her heart overflowed with
innocence and love, accompanied with that pure, but strange, wild
discontent, and longing for, she knew not what, but something, which all
young women feel, and are conscious of, as they pass the golden barrier
that divides their youth from womanhood. It is, and was, the holy and
chaste desire to love, and be loved in return--from the heart, sir,
right straight from the heart! Ah, how I sometimes wish I had been
created a girl instead of a boy. Bah! What's the use of wishing?
especially when all the girls desire an opposite transmigration.
"Betsey's bloom outrivalled the blushes of the newly-wedded roses--roses
just married to sunlight, in the morning dew, with all the trees for
witnesses, and all the birds to swell the sounding chorus! And she was
happy; ah, how full of happiness! and yet it was slightly dashed with
bitterness--just a taste of gall in her cup of honey--for she imagined a
more perfect state, had vague dreamings of something still higher. So
have we all. We have it! and that is a certain sign that that higher
something is attainable, if we only try. Some one said he wanted to eat
his friend. Good! but I want to lose myself in another self--to make of
them twain a unit, which is better! or to thus blend, and then lose
_ourself_ in the great God-life, which is Best!
"And she gaily tripped over the lea. She was going with a pitcher of
cream, and a basket of fresh eggs, toward a hole in the rock, not a
great way off, to present them to the strange 'Hermit of the Silver
Girdle,' who dwelt within a little grotto just upon the edge of a forest
wild, hard by her girlhood's home.
"Now, be it henceforth known to everybody, and to everybody's son and
daughter--if the fact is not already patent unto them--that every female
between the ages of fifteen and twenty-three, is naturally,
spontaneously, and inevitably, in love; and all that is then wanting, is
a suitable, and worthy object to lavish it upon. If she finds such, well
and good; but whether she does, or not, still she must, and will pour it
out--either healthily, or otherwise--on a cat or a man; a poodle or
politics; marriage or a mirror. Between those ages the female heart is
just as full of love as an egg is full of meat; nor can she help it; it
is the birth of affection, love, romance--the endeared and endearing
spring-tide of life and emotion. Alas! that the tide too often ebbs,
never, never to rise again this side of the grave! Then, in the rich
exuberance of her innocence and purity, woman, unlike man at the same
age, thinks no wrong, fears no harm. Gentle, trustful, noble girl!
Blessed is he who then calls her to himself--who, in the morning of his
life, and her own, shall win, and worthily wear, her heart; and abased
indeed is he who then shall gaze upon her with unhallowed eyes, and seek
to lure her from the path of honorable womanhood!
"Presently the girl reached the hermit's abode, saluted the reverend
man, presented her welcome gift, and received on bended knee his
blessing in return.
"They conversed awhile, did that fair girl and that strange recluse; the
hermit stood on this side, the maiden stood on that. 'Daughter,' said
he, as he placed his white palms upon her beaming forehead, 'the world
and all it contains amounts to but little, if it, and they, be not
improved to the utmost--the attainment of the soul's aliment, knowledge,
which it assimilates and digests into Wisdom. I have partaken of that
food for fourscore years and ten--have converted it into wisdom, and
expect to be thus engaged during long centuries to come. Thou seest me
living here alone, dependent upon the charities of such as thou: poor in
California, where even the rocks are retained by golden wedges in their
places, and where diamonds sparkle in a hundred valleys. Thou seest me
shut out from the busy world, and drawing life from Charity--and Heaven.
Such an existence is suitable for me, but not for such as thee. I am a
student and professor of a strange and mighty magic, for I possess the
marvellous Mirror, and the still more wondrous Crystal Globe--both of
which are heirlooms of the early foretime, handed down the ages to me,
as I in turn shall bequeath them to the ages yet to be. But thou! thou
art a woman, and cannot afford to shut thyself out from life, society,
and pleasure, as Rosicrucians do, and must, if they would obtain the
kingdom, the password--that uplifts the sable curtains that hide a dozen
worlds--and the key, by which the doors of Mystery are opened. Child,
for thee there are more fitting things in store than the upper
knowing--better than solitude; higher charms than study, and abstruse
pondering over recondite lore, and subtle laws of Being and of Power.
Thou in thy way, I in mine, are, and must be, soldiers in the strife for
holy peace; toilers for the millions yet unborn; mechanics for
redemption of the world; active bees in the busy hive--thou of active
human life, I that of human destiny; together, marchers in the grand
army whose movement is ever onward, and which never looks behind. I
strive for the True; thy destiny tends toward the Beautiful; together,
we shall reach the goal of Good, moving over thorny roads, albeit, on
the way; for there are many dangerous pit-falls, deep morasses, dismal
swamps, gloomy forest-solitudes, and stony mountains, steep and
slippery, that bar man's path to happiness. "Prepare ye the way.... Make
His paths straight!" Such is thy business--and mine. To accomplish this
duty I am here; but a different field is thine to labor in. To achieve
thy destiny thou must place thine affections upon a son of man--thy
soul's great love on God alone. You must wed, bear children in great
agony, yet gloriously, to your husband, your country, and to Him.
"'I will now, by means of the higher magic, which I am able to use in
thy behalf, show the figure of a man whom you will hereafter marry. You
shall behold him _as he is; as he will be_, and _and as he may
become_--provided you choose to make him so; for a husband is _ever and
always just what a woman makes him_! I am now about to display a
phantarama of the future before you. Observe, and note well all thou
mayest behold. Speak not thereof to vain worldlings, who cannot
comprehend deep mysteries, such as these; above all, utter not one
single word while thou sittest at yonder table, gazing into the
Future-revealing Crystal Globe.'
"And so saying, the grey-clad hermit of the Silver Girdle, who dwelt in
a forest wild, led the way to a recess of the grotto, where the light
was very subdued, very dim, and exceedingly religious. There he seated
her before a tripod, supporting a triangular shelf or table, himself
taking a seat directly opposite. Upon this table he then placed a small,
square, dark-leathern box, opening on brass hinges across the sides and
top. He opened it, while reiterating his caution, and disclosed to the
enraptured gaze of the doubly-delighted girl--all girls are delighted
before they get their husbands--and many of them are considerably
delighted, if not more so, to get rid of them afterwards!--a magnificent
globe of pure crystal, clear as a dew-drop, radiant as a sunbeam. It was
not over four inches in diameter, was a perfect sphere, and was
altogether beautiful--in this respect, infinitely transcending that of a
soap-bubble of the same size--a humble comparison, but a just one--for
there are few things more beautiful than these self-same soap-bubbles!
"The first impulse of the girl was to handle this beautiful trinue--as
it was called; and she made a movement with that intent, but was
instantly prevented by the hermit in grey, who said: 'Not for a hundred
husbands, should mortal fingers touch that sphere; for such contact
would instantly rob it of its virtues, perhaps never to be regained!
Look, my daughter, look, but touch not!'
"She obeyed, and withdrew her hand, but reluctantly; for her fingers
itched severely--as what young woman's would not, under similar
circumstances. _Vide_ the Apple and Eve--by means of which, man
fell--but fell _up-hill_ nevertheless! A great trait is this curiosity.
It is woman's nature; it is her great prerogative! Eve looked into
matters and things generally, induced Adam to follow her example, and
thus was the main lever that lifted the race out of Barbarism, and into
civilization and decency. So much for this much-abused 'Female
curiosity.' But for it, man had remained a brute. With it, he has risen
to a position a long way below the angels, to be sure, but then he is
'Coming Up.'
"The twain now began to gaze steadily at the magic globe, maintaining
perfect silence for the space of ten minutes. All was still, hushed,
silent as the grave, and only the wild throbbings of the young girl's
heart could be heard. Presently the crystal began to change, and to emit
faint streams of pale light, which gradually became more pronounced and
distinct, until finally there was a most magnificent play of colors all
over its surface. Presently the rich, effulgent scintillas, the
concentric, iridescent flashings previously observed, ceased entirely,
and in their stead the girl began to notice two very strange and
extraordinary appearances, which, to her and to all save those who are
familiar with such mysteries (and which, although nearly unknown in this
country, are still quite common in the farther East), are totally
unaccountable. In the first place, she became conscious that she was
breathing an atmosphere highly charged with a subtle aura that
manifestly emanated from the body of the crystal itself. This air was
entirely different from that which floated in the grotto an hour before,
when she entered with her offering, because it was unmistakably charged,
and that, too, very heavily, with a powerful magnetic aura. I said
'magnetic;' I should have said 'magnetoid,' for whereas the former
induces drowsy feeling and somnolence, the latter had a purely opposite
effect, for it provoked wakefulness, and promoted greater and
intensified vigilance on the part of both the woman and the man.
"In the second place, there came a remarkable change in the crystal
itself; for, having lost its brilliant, diamond-like colors and
interchanging rainbow spray, it now became decidedly opalescent,
speedily passing into the similitude of a ball of clear glass, with a
disk of pearly opal transversely through its centre. Very soon even this
changed, until it became like a dead-white wall, upon the surface of
which the eye rested, without the power of penetration as before. Gazing
steadily upon this opaque frame, the girl in a short time distinctly and
perfectly beheld, slowly moving across that pearly shield, as if
instinct with life, numerous petite, but unmistakable _human
figures_!--figures of men and women, tiny to the last degree, but
absolutely perfect in outline and movement. And they moved hither and
thither across the field of vision; she saw them moving through the
streets of a city. A little closer!--'as I live, they are going up and
down Bush street!'--an aristocratic thoroughfare in the great city known
in this story as Santa Blarneeo. This fact she instantly recognized,
with that strange and inexplicable anachronism peculiar to Dreams, and
the still stranger inconsistency peculiar to dreamers and voyagers to
the 'Summer Land.'
"Gradually these tiny figures appeared to enlarge, or rather, she saw
them in such a perspective, that they looked like full-sized persons
some little distance off. Even while she gazed, the crystal changed
again, or rather, vanished from her perceptions altogether, the figures
enlarged--approached, as it were--and she became a passive spectator of
a scene at that moment transpiring--but where? Certainly not in this
world of ours, nor in Dream-land, nor in fancy's realms, nor in the home
of souls you read about in the 'very funny' descriptions of 'Starnos and
'Cor,' nor in 'Guptarion,' nor around the 'Lakes of Mornia,' nor among
the 'Pyramidalia,' nor in 'Saturn,' nor in any of the gloriously
ridiculous localities imagined by A. J. Davis, and put forth by him in
the delusive hope that any sane man or woman could be found green or
fool enough to swallow. Few men better deserve the name of impostor than
the author of 'Guptarion,' 'Mornia,' 'Foli,' 'Starnos,' 'Galen,' 'Magic
Staffs,' 'Harm _only_--Man,' and ''Cor,'--not one of which has the least
existence on the earth, under, or above or around it; but the true and
exact location of which is on an extensive and very soft spot just above
their author's ears, and the soft spots of his followers, for it is
morally certain that no one with even an ordinary modicum of--not
sanity, but common sense, can, would or could accept his funny
'Philosophy?' as true.
"'Where, then, was the true locality of the scene that Betsey saw taking
place?' you ask. And I answer, and I tell you, in nearly the words of
the strange Hermit of the Silver Girdle, when explaining it to Betsey
Clark: All these strange things are occurring, not in any sort of
phantom-world, but in another material earth, quite as solid as this.
This crystal is a magic telescope through which we may view whatever we
desire to, whether on this earth or off it.
"Listen! Space is by no means limitless, but is a globular or
elliptical, definite region--the play-ground of the Powers--and is
bounded on all sides by a thick amorphous Wall, of the materials of
which new worlds and starry systems from time to time are fashioned.
This Wall is thicker, a million-fold, than the diameter of the entire
menstruum wherein this universe is floating. Surrounding this universe,
on all sides of this wall, are seven other universes, separated as is
this, from all the others; and they all differ from our own and the
rest, as differs a volcano from a sprig of rosemary--that is to say,
utterly--totally. The material worlds of each of these other universes
outnumber the sands of the desert, yet their number is precisely that of
the one in which we live; but they are larger, for the earth that
corresponds to, and bears the name of this of ours, is, in the smallest
of the other universes, quite as bulky as the sun which gives us light,
and the other solar bodies in proportion. The universe next higher is
immeasurably larger than the one just alluded to. It has the same number
of material worlds, and the earth corresponding to this of ours is as
large as the solar system in which we are. That of the third is as large
as the solar system of the second, and so on to the last of the series
of seven; but not the last in fact, for outside of, and surrounding the
entire seven, is another Wall, separating them from forty-nine other
systems, in ascending grade. I cannot now give you any information
respecting the sublime realities of these forty-nine, nor of the regions
and realms STILL BEYOND; therefore I recall your attention to this world
and sphere of being.
"On earth there are seven distinct classes or orders of men: the
INSTINCTUAL, AFFECTIONAL, INTELLECTUAL, INTUITIONAL, ASPIRING,
INDIFFERENT, and WISE, to all of whom a different destiny is decreed.
Organizations determine destinies! Every nebulæ seen in the far-off
heaven is a system of worlds. That wonderful family of stars to which
our sun belongs is, with all its overflowing measure of star-dust, but a
single cosmos; and there are myriads of such within the confines of this
present universe, and before we cross the vast ocean of Ethylle, and
reach the Wall alluded to. All things are in halves; male,
female--negative, positive--light, dark, and so on. So is the nebulæ of
worlds to which we belong. Now, remember what I have said of the
resemblances between this earth and universe and the seven others
beyond the Wall. Precisely such likenesses exist between the worlds of
the respective halves of our own system.
"At various distances, flecking the vault, we behold suns and systems
innumerable. These all belong to this, the female half of our system.
Beyond them lies a vast ocean of Ether, separating the Continents.
Across that Ocean, at a distance incomputable by the human intellect, is
the male half of our system. There--there is a sun precisely as large,
as brilliant, and as hot as ours--and no more so. Around that sun fiery
comets whirl, planets revolve, and meteors flash, just as they do
hitherward. There is a Venus, Mercury, Asteroids, Mars, Jupiter, and all
the other planetary bodies, just as here, and of the same dimensions. A
globe there is called Earth; it has a moon, an Atlantic, Pacific,
Mediterranean, and other seas, exactly equivalent to ours. It has a
California, a San Francisco, Paris, Berlin, Munich, Boston, New York,
Philadelphia, Baltimore, Pittsburg, just as here; and their names, as
are those of its trees, countries, counties, town, people, capitals, are
exactly as on this earth. There is a President Lincoln, and General
Fremont; a Thurlow Weed, and Cullen Bryant; an Agassiz, and Horace
Greeley; Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's Magazine; a New York Mercury, an
Independent, edited by Beecher, Tilton and Leavitt--and they deal the
same as do their similitudes here. The streets and omnibuses are
precisely as here; Wall street is as full of thieves, and contractors
get fat off their country's gore as they do here. There is a Rebellion
there, and Union Generals sell themselves to Treason just as here--while
the men who could and would save the nation are left out in the cold, in
spite of the Tribunes, Posts, and Times--all of which long since pointed
out the road to Richmond and to victory--and were laughed at just as in
our planet.
"In that far-distant world there is at this moment a steamer, 'Uncle
Sam,' sailing across the Gulf of California, as at this moment we are,
and on board of her there are just as many men and women as on this one,
and their persons, names, habits, features, motives, hopes, fears,
characters, secrets, and intellectual and moral natures, are precisely
the same as our own, on board this ship. Our namesakes there are at this
instant doing, thinking, acting, reading, as are we; and some of them
are listening to a very strange story, and its still stranger episodes,
told by a Rosicrucian--just such a personage as myself--indeed my Very
Self--in the self-same form and feature. And I say, and I tell you, that
the _alter ego_--the living portrait of each man and woman in this
circle, is thinking of him or herself, and of me and my revelations, at
this moment, with the same stupid levity, with the same deep and awful
impression of their truth, in the same manner, whatever it be, as are
all of you at this moment. And some there, as here, set me and my story
at naught--stigmatize me as an enthusiast or dreaming poet, as do some
of you. Others believe my truths. You have heard that coming events cast
their shadows before them, and that Prophecy has been demonstrated true.
Behold the solution of the world-enigma. Events transpire in that other
world a trifle sooner than they do here; yet you must remember that
there is a vast interval of space, and therefore time, that must be
bridged by even that swift courier, Sympathy. According as a man there,
and his counterpart here, are fine, aspiring, and spiritual-minded, so
is their _rapport_ across the awful gulf; and the male half, the more
perfect portion of each man or woman's self, very frequently telegraphs
the other, often a long time before the event becomes actualized on this
earth. You have heard of Fays and Fairies. Listen, and learn the truth
concerning them: Remembering that no human soul can by any possibility
quit the confines of this universe until it has exhausted the whole of
its, the universe's, resources, and has attained _all_ of Love, Will,
Majesty, Power, Wisdom and Dignity, that this vast cosmos can give it;
after which it sleeps awhile, but will awake again to the exercise of
Creative Energy, on the thither side of the Wall--both duplicates sleep
at once; for, after their deaths on the material earths, they exist
apart, but sustain the same relations, in certain aromal worlds attached
to their respective primary homes. At the final deaths, they blend
forever, their stature is increased, and they enter, through the Wall,
that earth resembling the one whereon the double unit had its birth
_originally_.
"You have heard of Metempsychosis, Transmigration, of Reincarnation, and
of Progress. Listen, and learn more: Not only the inhabitants of the
countless myriads of worlds in this material _and aromal_ universe, but
also the material and aromal worlds themselves, are in a constant state
of progressive movement. By aromal worlds I mean the aërial globes that
attend each planet. They are places where souls rest awhile after death,
before they commence in earnest the second stage of their career; and
this state is an intermediate one, just like sleep, only that they are
conscious and active while there; but it is an activity and
consciousness, not like, but analogous to that of Dream. Every world,
and assemblage of worlds, is periodically reduced, by exhaustion, but at
enormously long intervals, into Chaos, and is then reformed, or created
anew, still, however, being the same world. After this passage, each
system and world becomes vastly more perfect than before; but, owing to
the diminished quantity of Spirit or essence which has been consumed in
giving birth to hosts of immortal armies, each system and world is
vastly smaller than before. This is for two reasons, one of which I have
just stated; the other is, in order to make room for new cosmi, and new
worlds, both of which are being constantly created from the material of
the Wall; and the Wall itself is the condensed effluence of the
Maker--in short, it is God-Od, and therefore inexhaustible. The majority
of those who have lived on any world are re-born in it after its
restitution, they, in the meantime, having grown correspondingly clean
and perfect. The same relative proportions between a world and its
occupants is still preserved, and never varies; and, consequently, the
six-foot man and the five-foot woman of one career, find themselves, in
their next state, occupying five and four-foot bodies respectively. The
present is our thirty-fourth Incarnation. Originally we were taller
than many of our present trees, and coarser than our mountains. We are
smaller and better than ever before, and our worst man is better than
the best of the preceding state. The worst, in the next change, will be
better than our best.[2] To illustrate, let me say, that the following
persons, viz.: Thurlow W----, Abraham L----, Russel L----, J. Gordon
B----, Henry J. R----, Wm. Cullen B----, Jefferson D----, John G.
Fre----, James Buch----, Wigfall, Charles Sum----, Horace G----,
Fernando W----, George B. Mc----, Gen. J. H--k--r, Dr. H. F. G--d--r,
Charles T--n--s, Lizzie D---- and myself, respectively, were, previously
to the last change: the first, a feudal lord; the second, an editor; the
third, a Danish prince; the fourth, a court-jester; the fifth, a
missionary; the sixth, a _generalissimo_; the seventh, a harpist; the
eighth, a theatrical manager; the ninth, a knife-grinder; the tenth, a
privateer; the eleventh, a preacher; the twelfth, a schoolmaster; the
thirteenth, a trumpeter; the fourteenth, a politician; the fifteenth, a
hunter; the sixteenth, a very little boy, died exceedingly young; the
seventeenth, an emperor; the eighteenth, a born queen; and the last, a
barber's clerk; so that it is evident, that though our progress is slow,
still that we are 'Coming up.' Little as our actual worth may be, still
we are better now, generally speaking, than in the former stage. Thus,
we will grow smaller at every change. Some worlds, and their dwellers,
in this universe have thus decreased, and being sometimes seen by people
here, have been called Fays or Fairies. The world has yet to undergo
some thousands of these changes, until at last we become very small
indeed, which will occur when conception is no longer possible in the
universe, either in the vegetable or animal worlds; and then will occur
the change and transference beyond the Wall.
[Footnote 2: Extremes meet. The sublime impinges on the ridiculous. The
substance of the text--save only that I have changed the names--was put
forth seriously as truth, by a recent British author. Here, of course,
it is given for what it is worth, which may be _more than some imagine_.
Viewed in one light, these notions are almost as absurd as are the
desperately-funny lucubrations of Andrew Jackson Davis, concerning what
he calls the "Summer Land," which many people regard as true revelations
of Man's _post-mortem_ life, when, in fact, they are monstrous
abortions, devoid of even common sense, and are without one particle of
truth from beginning to end.]
"Betsey Clark was beholding persons and events of that other world-half
of this, our little staying-house, beholding things through that fairy
lense--that beautiful magic crystal, through which the human eye can
see, the human brain _sense_, things that have occurred, are occurring,
or are to occur, upon the world-stage of this our life's theatre.
"It is an established fact that fools never dream! Wise people often do!
And those belonging to the latter category cannot have failed to notice
that things, dates, persons, circumstances, and probabilities, are
considerably mixed up, as a general thing, in dreams. Their anachronisms
are especially remarkable and provoking, and indicate that time is of
but little, if any, account, so far as the soul, _per se_, is concerned.
A dream of a minute often embraces the multifarious experience of a
century. This instant you are hob-nobbing with one of the pre-Adamite
kings on the plateaus of eastern Asia, and in the next are taking wine
with Pharaoh and Moses on the banks of the Nile; now you are delivering
an oration before Alexander the Great, and in a jiffy find yourself
stuffing ballots on Cornhill in an election for ward-constable; now you
are contemporary with Sardanapalus or Thothmes III., and in half a
second you are delivering a 'Spiritual Lecture' in Lamartine Hall,
having paid fifty cents for the privilege of listening to your own
'Splendid and Overpowering Eloquence.' Taken together, dreams, like
Complimentary Benefits, are queer concerns. Such was that of Betsey
Clark; for at one moment of time she was a virgin girl, a wife, a widow,
and a wife again. She recognized at once the facts of her girlhood, that
she had carefully deposited one husband in a hole in the ground, and was
in high hopes of performing the same kind office for a second--Mr.
Thomas W.
"Presently the view in the crystal faded away, and in its stead there
came the appearance of a large and splendid atelier, containing
numberless statues, in a more or less finished condition, standing on
pedestals or in niches round the wall-sides. The sculptor was absent. It
was evident at a glance that his images were not hewn of marble, but of
some other material, which needed but a touch of fire to make them start
up into life, liberty, and light. It was a man-factory--a place where
people were carved out to order by a wonderful Artist, who had just
opened business thereabouts and who, judging from appearances, was
already in a fair line of patronage, and quite likely to do well, if not
better.
"Standing near the centre of the apartment, propped up with bits of
wood, Betsey saw the exact likeness, in all respects, of Mr. Thomas
Clark--but the figure was unfinished--soft, puttyish, and doughy as a
Northern Politician.
"This statue stood semi-erect, and strongly suggested an invalid kitten,
leaning on a hot brick; or, a modern philosopher of the spread-eagle and
Progressive school, when the contributions are small. The figure was
labelled 'Tom Clark, as he was;' that is to say, soft, ductile, capable
of being moulded into the Ruffian or the Man. Directly beside it was
another statue, closely resembling the other in many points, but yet
different. It was labelled 'Tom Clark, as he is!' that is to say, it
looked as if abundantly capable of feeding on tenpenny nails, dining on
files, and supping upon pigs of iron. It looked, for all the world, as
if the greatest possible favor that could be done for it, would be to
tread on the tail of its coat, or knock a chip off its shoulder, or as
if its supreme delight would be to be permitted to wrap itself in a
star-spangled banner; move across the room in three strides and a
straddle; fire off two horse-pistols, and die like a son of a--gun,
after having exercised a special penchant for divorced women--separating
wives from their husbands, for the sake of position, wealth, beauty and
passion. It looked as if it was troubled about stealing rain-producing
theories--not for stealing, but for being caught at it. It looked as if
its heart was breaking, because it had not brains enough to be a
Pantarch--or the tenth-part of one. It looked as if its heart would
burst with envy, because other men had friends, and power, and
applause, and merit, in spite of _its_ little, perked-up, seven-by-nine,
skull-cracked soul--poor cambric, needle-eyed soul, twelve hundred and
eighty trillions to the half ounce. It looked, for all the world, as Tom
really did the very last time he came home, just before they lay down
upon their couch, in the little chamber in which was the little window,
whose upper sash was down--that is to say, short, crusty, crisp, and
meaner than 'git;' as he felt before they both lay down, and dreamed
such 'very funny' dreams--mean, despicable, iron-hearted Tom Clark, the
plague of her life, bane of her existence, and source of all her
troubles. So at least it seemed to the lady in her curious vision.
Presently both these figures slowly faded from her sight, and in their
stead there arose through the floor a third figure, labelled, '_Tom
Clark, as he may be_.' While she was admiring the vast superiority, in
all respects, of this new statue, a fourth human figure entered the
atelier; this figure was alive, and, _mirabile dictu!_ the woman beheld
the exact counterpart of--_herself!_--clad as a working artist--a
sculptor, with apron, paper-cap, and dusty clothing, all complete, as if
she had just left chiselling the dead marble. This lemur of herself
appeared deeply gratified at the appearance of the statue; for, after
surveying it awhile, she proceeded to arm herself with a flame-tipped
baton, wherewith she touched the figure in various places, but mainly on
the head, and over the region of the heart. The effect of these touches
of flame was to make the figure move; and, in five minutes the dead mass
was warm with life, vitality and genius--for the phantom-artiste
appeared to endow the figure with a portion of her own life; and a
closer inspection revealed the curious fact that the flame at the end of
the staff--which was hollow--was fed from a deep well of subtle, fine
and inflammable ether in her own heart.
"The statue lived. It was Tom Clark, and no mistake; but Heaven! what a
change!--what a difference between the actual and the ideal man! His
features fairly blazed with the fires of Genius and Ambition; and they
beamed like a sun, with Friendship, Intelligence, Truth and
Manhood--they all held high court in his soul, and radiated from his
inspired features; his very presence charged the air with Mind, though
his lips spoke never a word, breathed never a syllable. And now Betsey
heard her _alter ego_ speak; and it said to the living statue: 'Rise,
Tom Clark; rise, and be a Man--be yourself. Rise!' And it rose; stepped
from the pedestal, erected its head--and such a head!--while she, the
phantom artiste, with careful tread, and anxiously holding her nether
lip between her teeth, slowly retreated backward from the room, quitting
it through the door by which she had entered a little while before. She
was followed majestically by the statue, which moved with power and
grace, as if charged to the brim by God's Galvanic Batteries.
"Scarcely had the two phantoms left the room, than the woman on the
stool--the real Betsey Clark--followed their example with a sudden
bound, exclaiming, as she did so, despite the warning of the Hermit of
the Silver Girdle (for whom at that moment she didn't care;--not even a
piece of a fig), 'My _husband_! _my_ husband!' Human nature, especially
woman nature, could stand the pressure no longer. She felt and acted
_as_ she felt--as every woman has, since the year ONE--and will, until
Time and Eternity both grow grey. '_My husband!_' there spake the woman.
In an instant the Hermit of the Silver Girdle was in a very great and
unprecedented fluster.
"'Silly girl! didn't I tell you not to speak? Only look! see how you
have gone and done it!--done _me_! Oh, dear! if I warn't a Rosicrucian,
I'd get excessively angry, Dorg on it, if I wouldn't!' and in his
trouble, he pronounced 'dog,' with an _r_. Commend me to a female for
upsetting the best calculation of the wisest Rosicrucian that ever
lived. I speak from experience.
"'I told you not to open your lips, and here you've gone and spoken
right out! What's the consequence?' exclaimed the venerable grey-beard.
'Why, the spell is broken--the charm fled--nor can either be recalled
before the sun has set and rose again, and once more declined toward the
western sea. Familiar as I am with the secrets of Galæ and the mysteries
of magic crystals, I know that you have done very wrong; for no one is
fit to consult Destiny by their aid who is not competent to keep silence
for an hour, no matter what the temptation or provocation to break it
may be. Now hie thee homeward. To-morrow thou mayest return again,
provided thou wilt obey me, and speak not a syllable while the
phantasmal game of Fate is being played before thine eyes.'
"The Hermit of the Silver Girdle had spoken truly; for at the very
first movement of her lips, the whole scene of enchantment vanished into
thin air, leaving only a three-cornered table and a little
glossy-looking ball behind.
"To depict her chagrin and disappointment at this abrupt termination of
a very strange affair, is a task totally beyond my capacities. She
bounced out of the grotto in a miff, tossing her pretty head in a manner
peculiarly adapted to play the very Old Scratch with the soft and
susceptible heads and hearts of the male 'sect'--especially their heads;
but she had no idea of abandoning the adventure at that point--not she;
but was fully resolved to see it out next day, even if she bit her
tongue in two, in the endeavor to keep still. Warriors, statesmen,
philosophers, and well-read men can comprehend the sublimity of her
resolution, because they know that of all earthly tasks, the one
assigned herself was the greatest, most heroic, and one compared to
which the twelve labors of the Greek god were mere child's pastime. At
all events, to keep perfectly silent she would certainly--'Try,' said a
voice, right beside her ear! She started, attributing the circumstance
to mere fancy; but again the magic word was, by unseen lips, gently,
softly whispered in her ear. 'Try,' it said--and the word went echoing
through her very soul. Whence came the voice? Who was it--what was it
that spoke? Certainly not herself, nor the Hermit. When was it, where
was it, that she had heard that voice and word before? When, how, where
had it made so deep an impression on her mind? Was it in a dream? Who
can tell? she could not. My hearers, can you?
"Next morning, bright and early, the young girl returned once more to
the grotto of the Hermit of the Silver Girdle, who dwelt on the shady
borders of a forest wild. An hour or two elapsed in friendly converse
and admonition; and now again behold the dissimilar twain once more
seated silently before the little table, on which glittered, as before,
the rare, pearl-disked, magic, wonder-working crystal globe. Again, as
before, the glorious play of colors came and went. Again it faded, and
she saw the atelier, the artiste, and the artiste's living statue; but
this time Betsey could look right through its body, as if it were made
of finely-polished glass. Tom Clark stood before her. She saw and
comprehended him on all sides--soul, spirit, body; and though she was
neither a strong-minded woman, a lecturess on philosophy, 'The good time
coming,' nor 'Woman's sacred and delicate work,'--and though she knew
but little of the human organism, beyond a few familiar
commonplaces--yet she comprehended enough of the glorious mystery before
her to be aware that the red, pulsing lump just beneath its throat was
technically known and considered as the heart; and she couldn't help
admiring its wonderful and mighty mechanism; its curious movements,
mystical arrangements of parts, and adaptation of means to ends; its
auricles, valves, and veins; its ventricles, and its pump--tapping the
well of life, and forcing its water through a million yards of hose,
plentifully irrigating the loftiest gardens of man's body, and hence, of
his imperishable soul. The inspection was almost too much for the girl,
who had liked to have screamed out her wonderment and delight; but
having made up her mind to keep still this time, she, by dint of much
handkerchief and tongue-biting, succeeded, to the eternal credit of
herself--or any other woman!
"'That which you see,' said the Hermit, who of course had the privilege
of talking as he pleased, 'is a man's heart, in full play. It is, as you
perceive, filled with blood, whose office is to give life to the body
and vigor to the mind. But the heart has other chambers than those
containing the venous and arterial fluids; for all its walls and valves
contain innumerable small cells; and these cells secrete and contain
certain aëriform fluids far more potential than blood, and which
subserve the ends of a higher and far more wonderful economy. There are
two kinds of blood; so also are there two kinds of the subtle fluid I
have mentioned: one sort is born with us, and we come into the world
with exactly one half of these cells full, while the other half are
entirely empty; and so they must remain until they are filled from the
heart of some one else. Males are born with the cells of the left side
empty, females with those of the right unfilled, while the other cells
of each are always full. These fluids are real, actual, perceptible, but
imponderable. Their name is Love; and when things take their proper and
natural course, the fluid flows out from the cells of a woman's heart
into the empty ones of a man's; and the full cells of a man's heart fill
the empty ones of a woman's, in which case they are said to "love each
other." Two men cannot thus love; nor can two females. Many of either
sex travel from the cradle to the grave without either filling, or
being filled in turn; for it is a law that love cannot flow unless it be
tapped by the opposite party; and it can only be tapped by KINDNESS,
GENTLENESS, RESPECT--these three! The unloved and unloving are only half
men and half women--and, believe me, my child, there's a mighty sight of
Halfness in this world of ours! Much of it comes of not Trying to have
it otherwise. People--married people, especially--devote half their days
to growling because they have not got somebody else's wife or husband,
when the fact is that their own partners are quite good enough--as they
would find out with a little proper endeavor. Men expect a woman's love
to bubble up all the time. Fools! why don't they sound its depth, and
_bring it to the surface_? There are altogether too many divorces--a
divorce first, and the next step--is dangerous. I knew a wife of three
divorces; I knew a man the husband of two consecutive divorcees. Good
intentions! Bah! Hell is paved with such. I know of fifty broken-hearted
women whose husbands, after wearing them out, sneaked off to Indiana and
robbed them of name, fame, life, and hope;--the demons! Out upon the
wretches! The woman who has wasted her youth and bloom upon a man who
then wants a divorce, and permits him to obtain it, is a fool. He
promised for life. Make him keep it, even if you invoke the law's strong
arm. If both agree, that alters the case. I have a legal acquaintance in
New York who drives a large trade in the divorce line, at twenty-five
dollars a head. I feel called upon to expose the infernal methods by
means of which it is done, and I call upon the Legislature to see to it
that the thing is not suffered to go on. A. is a lawyer; B. and C. are
husband and wife. B. wants a "divorce without publicity;" goes to A. and
pays a fee to secure it, but has no legal quibble by means of which to
obtain it. A. gives him the following counsel: "Go to a brothel, take up
with an inmate thereof; call her D.; make three or four male and female
acquaintances (E., F., G., and H.), introduce them to D. as your wife;
leave town a day or two, but take care that D. is well watched in the
interim. Of course she will avail herself of your absence to ply her
vocation. E., F., G., and H. furnish the most incontestable and damning
proof of her supposed guilt. The witnesses may or may not know your
precious scheme. You prosecute the leman under your wife's name--she, of
course, knowing nothing about the proceedings--poor thing! The court
takes the evidence, hands it over to a referee, who passes on it;
returns it, affirmed, to the court, which forthwith enters a decree of
perpetual divorce. A scoundrel goes unwhipped of justice, and an honest
woman's reputation is forever damned!
"'Legislators, I tell you that these things are done every day! I was
told it--could not believe it--and assuming to be desirous of such a
decree, received the above counsel, word for word, from a practitioner
at the New York bar. Legislators, here is a crime worse than murder!
Will you sanction it longer? How prevent it? Summon the witnesses and
performer of this marriage; or at least _prove the identity of the woman
or the man_, as the case may be--for women practice in that court also!
"'There would be far less of this sort of iniquity, if there were fewer
blatant philosophy-mongers afloat on the tide of the times, inculcating
their morbid, detestable, blasphemous, brothel-filling, "Harmonial"
theories, all of which directly pander to the worst vice a man can
have--Meanness.
"'People insanely look for and expect perfection in others--not only
without the slightest claim thereto themselves, but without the least
attempt in that direction--which is a very suicidal policy to pursue.
Such soon come to be vampires, consuming themselves and destroying
others--ravening tigers at their own fold's side! Sometimes one person's
affection--which is akin to love--goes out toward and clings round
another; but Death ever flaps his wings by the side of such, when that
other fails to give it back. The unloving loved one, if such a thing be
possible, is a born thief, from the cradle to the clouds; and there are
a great many such robbers in the world.'
"'But how is one to love when one don't feel like it, or has attractions
in another direction?' asked Betsey.
"'Where duty and honor point, there should the attraction lie! Whosoever
shall render themselves lovable and lovely, can no more help being loved
than smoke can help ascending through the air. Make yourself agreeable
to the partner of your lot in life, and that partner can no more help
loving you than mirrors can help reflecting.
"'The heart of yonder statue, which is that of the man who is destined
to be a future husband of yours,' said the old man--pointing to the
first figure of the previous day, which had, together with the second,
re-appeared upon the scene, 'will be only half full by reason of your
withholding and refusing all tender wifeliness; you will rob him and
yourself of the better meat of life; your years will be gloomy ones; you
will make him wretched, and be the same yourself--cheat your bodies of
health, your souls of happiness and vigor! Take heed; correct the fault.
You "can't?" There's no such word. TRY!'
"Turning now to the second figure of the previous day, he observed:
'See! Tom Clark's heart is empty. All its cells are _filled with a
void_--hollow as the apples of Persia's arid wastes. Have mercy, Heaven,
on him whose heart throbs not with the rapturous burden of a woman's
love! Pity him whose soul groweth not tender with the love-light beaming
from a baby's eyes! Ah, what a world of nameless glory flashes from an
infant's eyes! They are telescopes through which my soul sees
Heaven--through which I watch the mazy dance of starry worlds, and
behold the joys of seraphim. We Rosicrucians love babies--seed of the
ages--and their mothers, too--because they are such; for we believe that
after death the maids fair worst--the wives fare better; but no tongue
or pen can express the rapture that awaits those who have borne sons and
daughters to the world and heaven! Bachelors! Bah! I will pass by such
cattle, merely remarking that their place is not to be found in heaven,
or the other place. They repair in a body to Fiddler's Green--and ought
to stay there, if they do not!'
"And Betsey gazed on the forlorn figure of poor Tom--who was all
one-sided, crooked, lean; his hopes and joys were flown, because no one
loved him, not even his wife; and who else should, if not she? And so he
was wretched, like full many another whom I have seen as I journeyed
down life's glades. His soul was driven back upon, and forced to eat
itself, day by day, and year after year. 'And this great wrong you will
do,' said the hermit; and 'This great wrong I have already done,'
thought the girl--wife--widow--wife--four in one, with that strange,
anomalous inconsistency, peculiar to Dream-Life. 'I have done badly; but
this I will do no more--not another second longer!'
"Bravely, royally thought and said! Better, if more gloriously
done!--and that's just the difference--saying and doing. The first is
common; the last is very rare. 'Better still, if truly said, and still
more nobly done!'--was whispered in the woman's ear, in the same low,
silvery voice, she had heard the day before. Who was it that spoke these
melodious words? Not the hermit in grey. Was it the invisible Hesperina,
telegraphing Betsey's soul across the vast expanse of the Continent of
Dream? Who shall answer me these questions?
"Said the silver-girdled hermit, as he smiled a smile of more than human
gladness--more than human meaning--'It is Well.' She looked again toward
the magic globe, and lo! within a moment, its disk had changed. The
first two figures had disappeared; the third had once more come upon the
scene--a conspicuous actor in such a terrific drama, as neither earth
nor starry eyes ever saw before, may they never see again!
"The Gorgon, WAR, had glutted himself on Europe's bloody fields, and had
flown across the salt sea, alighting on our shores. The demon landed
with a howl, midway between Moultrie and Sumter. He had seized the reins
of government, proclaimed himself sole Lord and King; strangled Reason
in his dreadful gripe, until she lay bleeding on the gory earth, and
meek-eyed Peace fled tearfully away from his grim presence, and hid
herself upon a distant mountain-top, whence she could survey the shock
of armies on the plains beneath, and sigh, and long for Liberty and
rule.
"War and Carnage, side by side, with gory banners flying, marched from
one end of the nation to the other, until their footsteps rested on the
graves of eight hundred thousand men. God's precious word was
disregarded, and His blessed soil dyed red with human blood--the rich,
fat blood of the noblest race that ever trod His earth--the blood of
your brother, and of mine, O my countrymen!
"And now, the loud-lunged trumpets brayed their fierce alarums, and
summoned Columbia's sons to deeds at which our grandsons shall turn
pale--deeds of heroic daring such as Greece, nor Rome, nor Carthage ever
dreamed of, nor storied page has chronicled: summoned them to Sumter's
stony ramparts, and Potomac's grassy banks--summoned them to do,
and--die. Eight hundred thousand Men! And they went--going as tornadoes
go--to strike for a Nation's life--to strike the foul usurper low, and
fling his carcass to the dogs. They would have struck--struck hard and
home; but they were stayed. _That_ was not the 'little game' of
Generals and Statesmen, and of high contract-ing parties. Oh, no!
Victory would never do! 'Let us fight the foe with gloves on!' said the
Minister. They fought. The foe wore gloves, also; but the palms were
brass, the fingers iron, and the knuckles polished steel! But the
Minister had his whim, and unborn generations will feel its
consequences! Eight hundred thousand graves!
"And the Union legions went, from decreed Fate toward a consummated
Destiny, in spite of Ministers, their minions, or the 'little game;' and
Tom Clark went, too.
"And loud the trumpets brayed; and the heavy drums did sound; and they
woke strange and fearful energies in the slumbering Nation's heart. What
a magic transmutation! Plowmen transformed to heroes, such as shall
forever put Cincinnatus in the shade; day laborers, carriers of the hod,
claiming--and rightfully, too--high places in the Pantheon of heroic
demi-gods. Look at Fredericksburg! Forget not the Black Brigade! Bear in
mind the deeds of a hundred regiments on a hundred fields--fields, too,
that might, and would have finally decided the carnage and the quarrel,
but for the Minister, his gloves, his 'little game,' his great whim--and
lo! its consequences!
* * * *
"Tom Clark, quickened into life by the subtle, flame-tipped staff in the
hands of the phantom-artiste--the proprietress of the wonderful atelier
and Man-factory, now stepped forth through the door of the room, and
forthwith the scene expanded to such vast dimensions, that Betsey found
it impossible to realize the magic mimicry, for the whole thing was too
real, and on too grand a scale. She stood on the hill of the world,
surveying its valleys at leisure. Tom Clark, apparently heard--deeply
heard, his Country's wail of agony--for unchecked Treason was then
griping her tightly by the throat. That cry called him to a field of
glory, such as God's green earth never before afforded, nor His sun ever
saw; nor His moon; nor His myriad, twinkling, starry eyes!
"Clark's soul was in arms, as his offended ears drank in the hoarse,
deep thunders of Treason's cannonry, pouring iron hail upon a prostrate
Nation's head; and his eyes beheld the flashing of the guns, as they
vomited a hell of iron and fire upon Sumter, upon Anderson, and the
peerless EIGHTY-THREE! Tom Clark saw the storm, and his heart indignant
swelled, at the insult to the Star-gemmed Flag of Human Rights and
Liberty--an insult, long since wiped out in traitor's blood, but for the
Minister, and the gloves, and the 'little game,' and the whim, whose
consequences are--eight hundred thousand skeletons!
"Like a true man, Clark, inspired by a true woman--the phantom-wife, and
artiste--ran, leapt, flew to arms and deathless glory. Ah, God! to arms,
and fadeless glory! He had no time to grieve, or grumble; or to
criticise this general, or that battle. He looked over the heads of
cowards and traitors in his own camp, at the noble men in arms, and who
bravely fought, and nobly died, for the Country. He saw, and gloriously
emulated such men as Lyon, Saxton, Hunter, Fremont--and Baker! Baker!--O
Oregon! my tears fall with thine, for him! He was mine, yours--ours!
Ours, in his life; in his nobleness; in his soul-arousing eloquence; in
the valor, and the effulgent glory of his death--the result of another
whim, and lo! the consequences!
"And now, see! Behold the smoke of yonder battle! Death rides on
cannon-balls, to-day! And, to-night, there will be much mourning in the
land; for strong men in thousands are giving up the ghost. Weep not, O
widow, for God accepts such sacrifices; mourn not, O orphans, He who
tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, will hold thee in His keeping; thy
grateful country will not let thee want for bread; and, by-and-by, it
will be a proud boast of thine, 'My father died to redeem the land from
treason!'
"Death rides on cannon-balls, to-day, in the fight that we are seeing.
Tom Clark is a hero. See! he leads the van. God spare him! What a
presence! What blows he deals for Liberty and the Union! Lo! the
thundering battalions of the brave and bold, but insane, misguided, and
revengeful foe, sweep down the embattled plain, their war-cry ringing
out above the belching roar of artillery; and, with such might and valor
do they charge, that Freedom's cohorts reel and stagger beneath the
dreadful shock of arms. Another such a charge, and all is lost. But,
see, there comes a man from the ranks--a common soldier--his voice rings
clearly out upon the sulphur-laden air: 'Follow me!' The inspiring words
and action kindle new fire in the wavering breasts of hundreds. They
rise; they throw themselves upon the foe--they hush his battle-cry in
death. He is repulsed! 'Who did that?' demands an aide-de-camp.
'Private Thomas W.,' is the response. 'Hero! greet him in my name, as
Color Sergeant,' says the General; and Tom Clark is promoted on the
field.
"The first day's fight is over. It is renewed next day, and, when the
tired guns give over with the sun, a group of soldiers are gathered
round a man. 'Who is it?' 'Who is it?' 'I thought you knew--why, it is
the man who saved the Tenth Brigade--and was rewarded on the
spot--Captain Thomas W.!'
"With the sunrise, came the foe! 'Pass the word along the line,
there--Captain Clark is wanted at the tent of the General-in-Command!'
He goes.
"' Captain Clark, do you see yonder battery of the enemy? It must be
taken, or we are lost. If I give you command of a regiment whose colonel
was killed yesterday, can you take it?' 'I will try.' ... 'General, the
battery on the left is ours,' says an aide-de-camp an hour afterwards.
'It is taken, and all its men are either dead or prisoners!' 'Indeed! So
soon? Greet the commander in my name, and salute him as Colonel Thomas
W.'
"Another day dawns on the ensanguined field--a field where privates were
heroes and generals poltroons! Hard fighting is before us. Up, up the
soldiers spring; and on, on to death or victory they rush. Oh, it was a
splendid sight--those death-defying demi-gods, who, had they in previous
battles had but a Man to lead them, would have taken fifty rebel
strongholds in as many hours. But such was not the drift of the 'pretty
little game.' More men must die, more ditches must be dug, and more
human bones must fill them, else how can Ministers carry out their
whims; how else can the enemy be fought and placated at the same time?
It isn't Constitutional! besides which it hurts the prospect for the
Presidency of the re-United States--which prospect would be forever
marred, and the 'little game' played out, if we fought without gloves,
and violated our Constitutional obligations by kicking the wind out of
the foe, who is trying might and main to strangle the Nation. He might
hereafter say: '_You_, sir, fought without gloves on!' which wouldn't
do, you know.
"'Damn that Colonel Thomas W. If the fellow keeps on at that rate, we'll
surely whip somebody--badly. Curse the fellow, he don't believe in the
glove business, or in the "Erring Sisters' theory,"' soliloquized
somebody on a certain day. 'This'll never do! Aid, come here; go tell
Colonel Clark take possession of the Valley down yonder, and hold it at
all hazards till nightfall!' 'But, General, he has only seven hundred
men--the foe is thirteen thousand strong!' 'So much the worse for'--he
meant Clark, but said, 'the enemy--they will fight like tigers.' And the
aid transmitted the order--shaking hands with the Colonel as he rode
away, muttering, 'Poor fellow! His goose is cooked for a certainty! What
a pity he stands in somebody's light--somebody who is jealous of even a
private's fame. Ah me!' and he rode back to headquarters, wondering
whose turn next it would be to face the forlorn hope--such a singular
number of which this Rebellion has developed.
"But there was no flinch in Colonel Thomas W.--no flinch in his men.
They all saw the hazard; but _they_ were Men and Soldiers. _They_ knew
how to obey orders, when their superiors did not. But then again, they
had no hopes of success in a general election; they had no 'little
game.'
"'Their's not to reason why,
Their's but to do or die.'
And they done it!
"On, on, like more than Spartan heroes, on they dashed, literally, as
absolutely as anything earthly can be, 'into the jaws of death--into the
mouth of hell.' I have a minnie bullet on my table that plowed a furrow
through a brother's heart of mine in that same dreadful valley! Away
they went--that gallant band, that gallant man; and many a bullet went
crashing through skulls and bones as they went; and many a soul sped its
way to God ere the cohort reached the knoll in the valley. Once there,
they were no longer men--they were as sublime exemplar gods. But a man
fell--fell before the resistless force of a hundred horses charging with
all of Treason's vehement strength, and the gallant man went down, and
the thunder of iron hoofs exploded in his ear, and then the cloud passed
on.
"And Thomas Clark went down--down, as Truth, and Justice and I went
down; but he rose again--so ever does Truth and Justice; and as for me,
_Je renais de mes cendres_--let those beware by whom I fell.... Down to
the gory soil he went; but even while the woman sat there in the grotto,
gazing till her eyeballs fairly ached with intensity--sat gazing with
suppressed breath, so still was she--sat gazing, her blood on fire, her
pulse beating three hundred to the minute, beating with a deep, fierce,
tumultuous fire; sat gazing stilly, while her heart bounded and thumped
within its bony citadel as if impatient of its duress, and longing to
burst its tabernacle, and let the imprisoned soul go free; sat gazing,
while her eyes, large grey eyes, all the while gleamed with a light that
proved her capable of giving birth to heroes--even while thus she gazed
on the wheeling squadrons, the charging hosts, and the great guns, as
they gave forth their fiery vomit, charged with sudden deaths--the man,
Tom Clark, sprung to his feet again, and, as he staunched his blood with
one hand, he pointed with the other at the foe. 'Follow me!' he cried.
'See! we are reinforced! On to victory--on!' And his voice rose above
the tempest, and it flew over the spaces, and it fell upon the ears of a
'great man,' and the 'great man' wrung his hands, and he thought: 'Not
dead yet! Damn the fellow! He will make us win a victory--and that'll
never do! Dear me! that cursed fool will spoil my little game! Oh, for
night, or a fresh division of--the enemy! I must reinforce him, though,
else it'll get into that infernal _Tribune_--or into that cursed George
Wilkes' paper--and that'll spoil my little game! Ho, there! Aid, go tell
General Trueman to reinforce Colonel Thomas W. _My little game_!' and he
arranged his epaulettes and gave his moustache an additional killing
twist. In the meantime, Tom Clark had charged the enemy with bayonets
with the remnant of his own force, followed by hundreds whom his
example had transformed into something more sublime than fighting
soldiers.
"And now occurred one of those conflicts which make or mar the fortunes
of a nation: one of those terrible multi-personal combats which mark a
century's history, and strike the ages dumb with awe; one of those
terrific scenes in the world's great drama, that mark historic epochs,
and enshrine men's names in fiery letters upon the scrolls of Fame.
"The charge and the action were short, sharp, swift, desperate; but at
its close the
"'Flag of the Planet gems,
With saphire-circled diadems,'
floated proudly over the scene of Treason's battle lost--a Nation's
battle won!
"Day closes again; and the wounded hero in an ambulance was borne
fainting--almost dying, from the field. 'Colonel Clark, can I do
anything for you?' said one of the fighting generals to the stricken
man--a bullet had gone through him. 'You are a noble fellow, and I speak
for myself, your comrades in arms, and for our country. Can I--can they,
can we, can she--do anything for you, in this sad hour of your destiny?
If so, I beg you to speak.'
"'Alas! no, my friend,' replied he, reviving, only to swoon again. A
little cold water on his temples partially dissipated the coma, but not
all the fog from his perceptions; for his general's words, 'Can _she_,'
considerably obfuscated his intellect, and he thought: 'He means
Betsey--that's the only _she_ I know of.' And then he strengthened up
for a last dying effort; strove to collect his thoughts, partly
succeeded, and said: 'Nothing more, dear general. Yes. No.
I'm--dy--ing--going--home. Tell Betsey--_dear_ Betsey--I did not--find
her out till--it was--too--late. Tell her that I loved--her from
my--soul--at last. Tell her--that'----
"She can't stand the pressure any longer--globe or no globe, hermit or
no hermit--not another minute. _You_ Bet! It's a pretty how de do, me a
settin' here, and poor Tom laying there, killed a'most to death!'
shrieked the fair girl in the grotto of the hermit of the silver girdle,
waked up beyond endurance by the skillful magic of the weird recluse.
And repeating the Californian, 'You _Bet_!' with vehement emphasis on
the last word, she sprung to her feet, in spite of the warnings of the
man who dealt in magic crystal globes in the precincts of a forest
wild--upsetting table, tripod, stool and hermit, in her eagerness to
reach Tom's side and give him wifely ministry.
"What luck she might have had in bridging Phantom River I know not,
having omitted to remain long enough for inquiry, not having had time to
thus devote; but this I do know, namely, that she nearly kicked the
veritable Mr. Thomas W. Clark completely out of bed--the bed at whose
foot was a window, whose upper sash was down--the identical window
through which came all the 'funny things' of this most veracious
history, which, of course, is all true. Betsey woke from excitement, Tom
from being kicked, and both had finished their double dreams.
"'What'n thunder's up now, Bet--no, Lizzie, I mean?' said he, checking
the less respectful utterance, and modulating his voice to what he
doubtless intended to be a 'velvet-dulcet cadence,' but which wouldn't
pass for that in Italian opera. 'Not nothing, Tommy, dear.' 'Not
nothing, Lizzie?' 'Not nothing.' 'That ain't grammar, sweet.' 'I was
paragorically speaking, my turkle dove! Only I've been having two very
funny dreams.' 'You! _Two_ dreams? That _is_ queer!' 'You Bet!' 'What
about, Lizzie?' 'Oh, all about how we didn't love each other as we ought
to, husband.' 'And, dorg on my buttons, wife, if I haven't had two just
such dreams myself--all about a precipice, and a pile--Oh, wasn't it a
pile, though?' 'You Bet!' 'And my dreams were all about how I ought to
love you, and didn't--and then, again, I did.' 'That's a dear!' 'You
Bet!' 'Let's love each other this time out, will _you_?' 'I will; will
_you_?' 'You _Bet_!' 'Let's profit by our dreams. I mean to; won't you?'
'I'll _try_!' '_I'll_ try!' 'We'll both try!' 'You BET!' And they tried
to forgive and forget.
"Will you do the same?" asked the Rosicrucian of the "Angular
Character," who had told his own story in disguise. The latter saw that
his secret was out; yet his heart was touched, for, as a great tear-drop
rolled down his cheek, he said, with smothered breath, the holy
words--"I'll try!" "Amen!" said the Rosicrucian. "Amen!" said we all;
and then, turning to his auditors again, the story-teller said:
"Friends, go thou and do likewise; and so long as you live, I charge you
never to forget the Rosicrucian nor his story; nor IT, the Shadow; nor
Hesperina, the Light; nor Otanethi, the Genius of the Hour; nor the
silver-girdled Hermit, and his Crystal Globe in a forest wild; nor,
above all, the little window at the foot of the bed, whose upper sash
was down."
* * * *
A day or two afterwards we reached Panama, and after that we saw but
little of our entertainer; but before I finally lost sight of him he
told me that he was about writing some Rosicrucian stories, the MSS. of
which he would send to me when ready. I have received some, and they
will be published by me as soon as I can spare time to attend to it,
which will be--
"When this cruel war is over"
P. B. R.
UTICA, _November, 1863_.
From SINCLAIR TOUSEY
NEWSVENDERS' AND BOOKSELLERS' AGENCY.
I INVITE THE ATTENTION OF DEALERS IN _Cheap Publications, Periodicals,
etc.,_
To my facilities for packing and forwarding everything in my line. All
goods packed with the utmost care, and forwarded, _in all instances_, by
the very earliest conveyance following the receipt of the orders.
I am GENERAL AGENT for, and take the WHOLE EDITIONS (except mail
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I also supply ALL OTHER Magazines, Newspapers, and other Periodicals
sold in the Trade, at the very LOWEST PRICES, and forward them at the
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No. 121 Nassau street, New York.
MISCELLANEOUS ARTICLES.
Dealers wanting anything from New York, not in their regular order, as
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BY DR. P. B. RANDOLPH,
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A ROSICRUCIAN ROMANCE, AND THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY AND THRILLING WORK
EVER PUBLISHED IN THIS COUNTRY.
Contents:--The Strange Man.--The Legend.--Preëxistence.--Double
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III. and the Rosicrucian.--An extraordinary Séance in
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_Being the Third Thousand of the celebrated_
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III.
PRE-ADAMITE MAN:
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IT ISN'T ALL RIGHT;
Being an Answer to, and refutation of, the modern doctrine that
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