Chapter VIII: Death’s Narrow Sea

The child that enters life comes not with knowledge or intent;
So those who enter death must go as little children sent.
Nothing is known, but I believe that God is overhead;
And as life is to the living, so death is to the dead.

--_Mary Mapes Dodge._

One morning Cartice met Colonel Layton in the hall, as he was about to go out for the day. His unusual appearance struck her at once. He was clean shaven and carefully dressed; his face was pale and no signs or fumes of liquor were upon or about him. This, of itself, was enough to attract particular attention; but there was more. An indefinable something in his manner asked for sympathy in a silent way, like an animal; and in his eyes which of late were unusually glassy and vacant, was an expression of reminiscent sadness, such as comes to the eyes of those who in a quiet, self-questioning hour, look back upon their lives and see scenes that bring regret. Cartice felt her heart stirred by a wish to comfort him.

Perhaps he was conscious of that vibration of sympathy, for he smiled and the smile was singularly sweet and winning, revealing a glimpse of his old-time handsome self, when he had won the Butterfly’s heart.

In conversation the Colonel was ever a failure. His ability in that art did not go much beyond a few stock expletives, eked out with significant shrugs and emphatic grunts. But now he tried to make talk, and lingered as though he had something to say and knew not how to begin.

“Hang it all,” he growled at last, “what is there in this life anyhow? What are we here for, I should like to know? What’s the object of the whole, miserable procession? It’s a devil of a grind for everybody, and we have to give it up at last, and go out of it, God only knows where. What do you think is at the end of it, Mrs. Doring?”

“O Colonel, I think and think, but I know nothing.”

“Yes, that’s the dickens of it, nobody knows,” he sighed. “But if there is a hell most of us will be well seasoned for it by tough times here. I feel about ripe myself. At least I am certain they can’t get up anything worse than this world anywhere. Mighty little happiness here.”

There was something inexpressibly pathetic in this ruined man’s mention of happiness. Like all others he had been in pursuit of it, yet his seeking had but led him farther astray.

“Should you like to live your life over again?” he asked with sudden animation.

“I have not the courage,” she answered.

“I don’t know that I have either,” he said, with a weary air. “I don’t know that I want to; yet all the morning I have seen myself as I was when a child in my father’s house, and my grown-up life seems but a dream. If it were so, and I remembered the dream, I would not again travel the same road, I assure you. I recall one spring morning, particularly--a Sunday morning--when I sat with my mother on the shady old porch with vines running up the sides, and she sang this:

“‘There is a land of pure delight,
Where saints immortal reign.
Infinite day excludes the night,
And pleasures banish pain.

“‘There everlasting spring abides
And never-withering flowers.
Death like a narrow sea divides
That heavenly land from ours.’”

A good tenor voice had once been his, but the best of it had gone the irrevocable road, like many of his other endowments and possessions. Enough remained, however, to give a touching sweetness to the grand old words, and as he sang his face became softened, beautified, transfigured, all that was erring and evil dropping out of it. The years, too, fell away, and he was a little child again--nor had he ever been anything else--just a child, weak, wandering, blundering, stumbling often--just a child, brother to us all.

“Do you think there is anything for us on the other side of death?” he asked, the childlike look still upon his face.

“I hope so.”

“Well, I believe there is,” he said, with unwonted decision. “I have always believed so, in spite of my bad practice, though I don’t know what it is; but I am not afraid though I’m no saint. It seems all right.”

“Yes, whatever it is, it must be all right,” Cartice answered. “It could not be anything else. But I wish we knew something about it. I wish we knew.”

“It may not be long before I know. You see what I am--a shadow of what I used to be, a wreck in everything and nobody to blame but myself. I guess the end of the road can’t be very far ahead. After I make the lonely journey, I’ll come back and tell you something about it if I can.”

“Ah, Colonel Layton, thousands, millions have started on that journey with the same promise upon their lips, but who has kept it?”

“Yes, it is a stumper,” he said, reflectively, “but in spite of it I have faith that perhaps I can. Mother and father are on the other side somewhere. This morning they seem very near to me--nearer than ever before since they went away. I feel that I might meet them at any turn.”

With a sigh and a smile he lifted his hat in graceful adieu and went slowly down the stairs, softly singing,

“Death like a narrow divides
That heavenly land from ours.”

Two hours later Cartice was sitting at her desk in the editorial office of the _Register_, when a stranger entered. Speaking low, as even the rudest do when they bring dread news, he said:

“Colonel Layton fell dead on the street a few minutes ago. He has been carried into Dr. Olcott’s office, and the doctor wants you to come at once. He knows you are a close friend of Mrs. Layton, and I guess he wants you to tell her and help make arrangements.”

Dazed and trembling, Mrs. Doring was about to start when Prescott entered, and he volunteered to accompany her.

They found everything calm and orderly. The doctor was noted for keeping an even mind under all circumstances, and had permitted no intrusion of the curious and idle. He opened the door to an inner room, and led them to a sofa on which the dead man lay awaiting the coroner. With professional coolness the doctor turned down the sheet, saying, “He was already gone when they brought him in.”

In very truth he had become a child again. The fair weak face wore a look of youth and innocence. The light, shiny hair, scarcely ruffled from its careful arrangement of the morning, had on it baby tints of sunshine, and under the blonde moustache lurked the remnant of the childishly sweet smile that lighted his face when Mrs. Doring saw him go singing down the stairs two hours before. The placid form before her was his semblance, indeed, but it was not he. That mysterious fact Cartice realized in an instant. There were his clay garments, but all that was he was gone.

The funeral took place two days later. Mrs. Doring could not be present, for she was unable to raise her head from the pillow. Thoughts of the great mystery which had just touched elbows with her haunted her all the time. The “narrow sea that divides the heavenly land from ours,” what was it like? What shore touched it on the other side? Was there a heavenly land or any land beyond that dark ocean? And where was Colonel Layton now?

No answer to these perplexing queries came. And yet, perhaps an answer always comes could we but read it. Perhaps it came to Mrs. Doring, for as she lay there wondering about it, a calm came upon her, and in imagination she saw Colonel Layton as he stood at the top of the stairs on the day they talked together about this greatest of all problems, and heard him say, “I am not afraid. It seems all right.” Far down within herself she heard the echo, “all right! all right!” and then she saw again the Colonel’s childish smile, and he repeated assuringly, “Yes, it’s all right.”

* * * * *

Chrissalyn went to live with a friend and determined to find a way to earn her bread. The end of one path through which she had sought happiness was reached and only sadness and disappointment were there. Now she must look for others, for the endless quest goes on, clear to the grave itself and possibly beyond. When she with the last scrap of her possessions was gone and her apartments left solitary, Cartice felt a sense of desolation greater than she had known since she and the Butterfly had been friends. Life is as inexorable as death; its separations are often more cruel.

In the office of the _Register_ the final fate of man was a subject often under discussion. Prescott snorted in derision at any mention of a continuance of life in a sphere invisible to us now. “We die and turn to dust, like the worm,” he said. Cartice held to the hope of something more than we have here--a sequel to this life, or a continuation of it, but she could advance no basis for the hope which he considered tenable.

Well-known figures in the state and community passed out of sight into the silence of the grave every now and then, and it was the _Register’s_ custom to speak with unvarnished frankness about their lives. Without doubt this, in many instances, added to the terrors of death, for Prescott was capable of very rough surgery in his post-mortem analysis. He flouted the old injunction, “speak no ill of the dead,” saying that mere dying did not excuse a man’s misdeeds, nor make an angel of him, and that they should reap an obituary harvest of whatever crop they had sown. Not even the time-honored “regular subscriber” or “constant reader,” had immunity from this harsh ruling. He was willing to take the same medicine himself when his time came, and it should never be said of him that he was in the habit of plastering people all over with laudatory lies just because they had died. “O yes,” he would snarl, “lots of men serve the devil all their lives, and then expect newspapers to put plenty of heaven in the truck they print about them when they die. But the _Register_ isn’t conducted that way. They shall get in it what they have earned, no more, no less.” Truly, many found, even without dying, that it was a terrible thing to fall into the too truthful hands of the _Register’s_ editor.