Chapter XVIII: Bohemia’s Highways and Byways

“Work thou for pleasure; paint or sing or carve
The thing thou lovest, though the body starve.
Who works for glory misses oft the goal;
Who works for money coins his very soul.
Work for the work’s sake, then, and it may be
That these things shall be added unto thee.”

--_Kenyon Cox._

One day a miracle happened,--at least Cartice Doring considered it a miracle. She was swinging to a strap in one of the always dirty and frequently crowded cars of the elevated railroad--when, as the train went ricketing round a curve she was flung against a man behind her with such force that both well-nigh fell to the floor.

Before she could apologize, a familiar voice said:

“Mrs. Doring! I’m delighted to have been knocked down, since it proves to be the means of meeting you.”

He was a newspaper man whose occasional visits to the _Register_ she had greatly enjoyed; and his was the first familiar face that she had encountered since she had turned her back on former scenes.

“Why, Mr. Farnsworth, I’m glad enough to cry,” she blurted out, and came near proving the truth of her assertion.

When he learned that she had come to New York to seek her fortune, he said:

“I can put a spoke in your wheel, for I came here with that intention myself, and have my tent permanently pitched. A pen and pencil like yours need never be idle. Come to our publishing house to-morrow at two o’clock--here’s a card--and we will lay the corner-stone of your future greatness.”

Cartice was wakeful far into the night nursing her gratitude, and thinking over the miracle. Farnsworth had been a lifelong friend to Prescott. Perhaps Prescott brought about their meeting, and put it into Farnsworth’s head to employ her. Who knows what the people we call dead may not be able to do? Perhaps they give us many of our thoughts, purposes and plans. Does not every event in our lives, however trivial and insignificant, hang upon thousands of preceding events, great and small?

And when it comes to a question of what a soul can or cannot do, embodied or disembodied, who can answer?

What is the soul of man? Before assigning it limitations it were well to know its composition. It is assumed to be the “immortal unit which represents personality”; but here and there have been men and women who demonstrated a marvelous complexity of ego, their visible body seeming a mere tenement for a variety of distinct personalities, all linked together by some mysterious chain of kinship, though not all resembling each other, and not always dwelling in harmony.

Stevenson makes Dr. Jekyll say, “I hazard a guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens.”

Are we not all conscious of a Mr. Hyde within us who breaks out at times and sadly stains the good record of Dr. Jekyll? May we not be harboring many Jekylls and Hydes, each differing in degrees of goodness and badness?

Thinking on this, Cartice remembered the answer of the nameless wise one to the question, “What is the soul?”--an answer that startled her, for it opened a vista so vast, since it meant that the soul is God, or absolute being revealing himself or itself.

This being granted, its personalities are beyond computation. Its Jekylls and Hydes and its millions which are neither Jekylls nor Hydes are past number.

In a sea of wonder like this is it worth while to ponder the causes of any miracle great or tiny?

The next day Cartice found herself installed at a desk in Farnsworth’s publishing house, pen and pencil both flying. The wished-for foothold was found, and she stood upon it, busy and grateful.

After becoming acquainted with a number of the metropolitan people of the pen, she was obliged to give up many of her illusions regarding them. Some of whom she had formed a flattering opinion, on acquaintance fell far below the mark. Others who flew high on paper, kept shockingly near the ground off paper. Some who had been successful were struggling frantically against a turn of the tide. But that which astonished and pained her most was their lack of ennobling ideals. Their pens were ever pointed toward the market, their talk was of prices, not ideas, and the shrine at which they worshipped was the ninth letter of the alphabet.

For the most part they were so busy writing and talking of what they had written and intended to write, that none read another’s production. Like swimmers in a turbulent sea, their energies were wholly given to the business of keeping afloat. In slavery to the baker and meat-seller, they expressed only such sentiments as they believed acceptable to the commonplace majority,--otherwise marketable products. They trimmed, tempered, pruned, whittled and cut their literary wares, to make them suit what they supposed to be the public’s wants, without regard to conscience or convictions.

Did all angle in these shallow waters? No! Here and there a worthy few had boldly refused to write down to the low level of average intelligence. They had penned their honest thought, and by so doing had brought a respectable portion of the public up to their plane, fame and money sometimes coming with it. Consciously or unconsciously they had operated a great law of the universe, that of giving one’s best to get the best.

In other words they had faithfully followed their highest ideals, in the face of possible ruin, under the pressure of poverty and the frowns of public taste and opinion. To do this is to live a great principle, to set the soul free. Whoever does this shall reap the reward of principle; he shall find his measure full. The multitude whose slavish bonds of ignorance he defies will cringe and fawn at his feet and pour its gold into his coffers.

The ideal is the real. If it be high its faithful followers are lifted up.

Workers who spend their lives in throwing sops to the mass of mediocre minds pay the inevitable penalty at last. They fall into the contempt of the very monster whose favor they have courted, who at heart respects only its masters, not its slaves.

* * * * *

One day Bardell, a straggler whose weapon was the pencil and whose field was the dreadful one of the commonest newspaper art, stopped at Mrs. Doring’s desk, as he often did, for a word or two. She regarded him as an almost hopeless bungler, but liked his unassertive, dreamy personality. Some of his drawings were altogether abominable, and in none of them did he seem to have the slightest pride.

He was undersized and queer-looking, with a big square head, a thin stooping body, large hollow eyes, and a face that suggested a worn-out spirit.

Ordinarily he had almost no words about anything, yet seemed to derive a silent pleasure from hanging near Cartice’s desk a few moments, when he brought his drawings to the “art man” of the house. His self-effacement was so refreshing to Cartice after much contact with pushing ninth-letter people, that she showed him marked civility.

To-day he seated himself and asked her opinion of the drawing he carried. As usual, his manner was without animation, yet she instantly felt that he expected a word of praise. This was extraordinary on his part, as he invariably gave out the wordless impression that he continued to live more from habit than anything else, but found life wholly without interest.

The picture, which was destined to illustrate a jingling little rhyme and visualize it for such readers as have no imagination, represented a short-skirted maid standing by a rustic fountain, pitcher in hand. Cartice gave a little cry of delight, as her eyes fell upon it, though a second glance showed her that something was wrong with it, but what, she could not for a moment say. Presently the blunder stood revealed, and was gross enough to mortify Bardell for all time, if she pointed it out. Yet it would be his ruin to let him go to the “art man,” with the drawing as it was. So she said, “It is charmingly done; but there is a trifling error in it. The girl’s feet are put on wrong. Left and right have changed places.”

The pale, hollow face of the artist flushed red with shame. “I’m most grateful to you, Mrs. Doring,” he said, as his astonished eyes saw the hitherto unnoticed blunder. “Had I gone to Buskirk with that it would have been the end of me in this shop. As it is he almost withers me with his contempt. It doesn’t stop at my work, either, but includes all there is of me, physically, mentally, artistically, and financially. I sustain myself under it with the reflection that, however profound his contempt for me, it is outdone again and again by my contempt for myself.”

Cartice understood well the awful wounds to self-respect men and women are daily forced to endure for the sake of a chance to earn a livelihood. She looked at Bardell with a vast, wordless sympathy shining in her eyes, thinking of the courage necessary in the tragedy of life, as displayed by the man before her and tens of thousands of others. He understood and went on:

“I don’t endure it for the mere sake of living, I assure you. The experience called life, as I know it, isn’t worth it. But when I was younger and considerably more of a fool than I am now, I married, as a kind of business or because others did, or I don’t really know why. Anyhow, I have a little family now, and I have to put up with everything, no matter what, in order to support them. Besides, I have other ties that hold me to life, and those are my ideals.”

Mrs. Doring looked up with a start. “Tell me about them,” she said.

“Ever since I can remember they have been with me, and are my true life,” he said. “They exist in the shape of simple rustic scenes, old-time well-sweeps, tumble-down stone-houses and walls and things of that sort, with people in them who are a part of their history. They come into my mind and insist upon being painted. They are not satisfied to be put in black and white. That is crucifixion for them and for me, too. They beg, entreat and command me to put them in color.

“This girl at the old-time fountain in this drawing is one of them. That’s the reason the picture isn’t hard and lifeless like most of the truck I bring in here. The blunder of putting her feet on wrong occurred, because I drew the feet last, and about that time she found out that she wasn’t being painted, but was to be a sacrifice to the terrible monster of newspaper illustration, which is an easy way to please children and uneducated people, and an offence to those of a higher order of intelligence. In rage at the use I was going to make of her she jumped up and down so fast that her feet got tangled in my mind. I saw her, you understand. She was real--I saw her--not in flesh and blood, but imagination, which to me is a kind of higher reality.”

Astonished and delighted to find one worker with ideals above mere keeping afloat, Cartice asked him if he worked on his ideals or merely dreamed of them.

“I reach after them all I can,” he said, “handicapped as I am. I give my heart to them, though I haven’t been able to give them much of my time. But I have not kicked them out of my way, or murdered them to sell their flesh at the nearest market, as many of my associates have done. Nor have I given up the belief that, if we work on our ideals, devote ourselves to them, in the face of every obstacle, we shall be lifted out of the dreadful mire of the commonplace, where the feet of most of us stick fast all our lives. But they will have no half-hearted devotion. They want whole-souled service only, and they are right. Willing to give us all of themselves it is only fair they should ask all from us.

“I have worked but little in oil, and am almost entirely uninstructed, yet these pictures form, whenever I take up a brush; and it isn’t putting it too strong to say that they beg to be painted. They come in color exactly as they want to be put on canvas,--not simply in my mind, but before my eyes, though thin and shadowy.

“One Sunday when rambling in the country I passed an old well, and said to myself, ‘I’ll paint that.’ Instantly I saw a man lying by the well, though no man was there. I painted it that way and put it up in the den I call my studio.

“One day a stranger who came there with one of my friends saw it and took a great fancy to it. He said it was a scene from his memory. The old well was the one at his childhood’s home, and the man was his father, as he had seen him lying in the shade many a time, long ago. The upshot of it was, that he offered me two hundred and fifty dollars for it--it was a little thing--which it is needless to say I accepted. When he went away I thought I ought to faint or do something extraordinary to work off my astonishment.”

“But you didn’t rest on that?”

“No; I went on with other ideals, in little spots of time squeezed out of the odd-jobbery of my daily grind in black and white. I believe that, when we work on our ideals, the very shape of our heads change. My mother says mine is changing, for which I am most grateful, its original shape being like unto an old-fashioned country horse-block.”

“Have you had sympathy in the pursuit of your ideals?” Cartice asked.

“Not always. That was a want I felt for ten years. All that time I hunted for a companion, an artist, who, like myself, loved the country and rural subjects, to paint with me. At last I found one and have him yet. We inspire each other. Together we go to the country on Sundays and make studies. The other artists I encounter in my humble path are so woodeny, so coarse, so worldly that I need patience to suffer them at all, and I never find them companionable. They chaff me and call me a sentimentalist. I don’t care. I believe in sentiment. If I didn’t idealize life and work, I should have to give both up. I would willingly go and live in the humblest little old place in the country and never see a city again, if I could but work on my ideals.”

Cartice was seeing the square-headed little plodder from a new point of view--an inner and spiritual one, and in its beautifying light the square head became symmetrical, the stooping shoulders erect, the pale face attractive, the eyes aflame with vital force, and the bearing that of one conscious of being of value. It was then that she recognized him as one of her own people, from her own planet, and blamed herself for not sooner seeing through the transparent mask that hard environment had made.

She asked him what he thought is to be the fate of those, who, having an ideal, stifle, ignore or slaughter it even, and give their time and energy to the performance of some poor pitiful, paltry work which demands but a tithe of their ability, for the sake of a little money with which to keep out the unwelcome howls of the wolf.

“Look about you and see,” he said, with a contemptuous gesture. “Look at me, a creature slinking in and out of rich publishing houses, hunting crumbs, like the dogs that hung round the rich man’s table, with fear written in every movement, dejection in my spirit, indigence in my garments and weariness in my heart.”

He got up and walked to and fro nervously, and as he moved and talked he became transformed. The timid, shrinking little figure vanished and in its place strode one whose step was firm and eye fearless.

“There are hundreds like me. The woods--the city’s accursed woods are full of them. They run over each other in their eagerness to do the bidding of some master who can drop a coin or so into their flabby purses. Faust sold his soul to the devil for a good price; but we, miserable wretches, sell it daily for a song. Why? Because we are such pitiful cowards that we can’t face the scarecrow that goes by the name of starvation. We live so far below our true selves that we don’t know the law that would carry us through, which is, give the best to get the best. Why not trust the soul? The ideal is the real; it is the voice of the soul, otherwise the voice of God, and it _must_ have expression. If not here and now, then sometime, somewhere. Its account is bound to be presented and _must_ be paid. Death itself can’t prevent the final settlement.

“What do they do at school with the lazy boy who slights his lessons? After a while they turn him back in his books and he has his road to retrace. We shall have the same experience, if we have heard the voice of the ideal and heeded it not. We shall be sent back to do it all over again--yes, from beyond the grave, for what can there be on the other side for him who has betrayed his trust, but contempt and a command to go back and try again?”

He stopped before Cartice, and with blazing eyes and uplifted finger said, “In this moment I determine to outrage my ideals no more, come what may. I have new light. We all have been acting on the assumption that we knew what would happen if we didn’t do thus and so. In point of fact nobody knows. With results we have nothing to do. We have only to follow our highest leading and leave the rest to God. To ignore or debase a noble gift that has been entrusted to us is a sin against our souls, which many of us have stupidly committed day after day, and we are daily paying the penalty. You shall see me here no more, bartering work in which I have no heart for a few miserable dollars. Never again; no, never again.”

“You are right, Mr. Bardell, a thousand times right,” said Mrs. Doring, with throbbing heart and glistening eyes. “I have long known that one should never give less than the best, and that an outraged ideal will be avenged. Yet I daily commit that sin. I used to feel that I had something more than common to do in the world. I had ideals; but I put them off, always waiting for a time when I could see my way clear to devote myself entirely to them. I waited too long. Now they come less frequently and are less urgent, and I have grown weary and indifferent. I wasted my time hunting happiness.”

“Happiness belongs to the ideal,” said Bardell. “It is a matter of subjective appreciation, so is its opposite, misery. Perhaps it would be clearer to say that happiness exists in the idea one forms of it, hence it is purely ideal. We are happy, when we believe ourselves happy. But for the most part all the world thinks happiness is to be found in externals; that it can be secured in thick slices which we can eat like bread, while comfortably seated in good houses. Money and marriage are supposed to have a monopoly of it. What idiocy!”

“Yes, idiocy,” Cartice echoed. “Thackeray says, ‘For my own part I know of nothing more contemptible, unmanly or unwomanly and craven than the everlasting sighing for happiness.’ When a child, I had a consciousness or memory of a world in which I had once lived where there was no such word as happiness, and yet none were unhappy. I understand that now. It means that happiness only exists where it is not thought of, talked about or pursued. I believe it is intended that we shall be happy; but not in our own foolish way. Freedom is the destiny of the human race, and that freedom holds for us a happiness infinitely greater and higher than we now can imagine, because it contains our full development, our perfected intellectual and spiritual growth. It is the freedom of truth, long since prophesied. When we know the truth, we are free, and happiness comes with freedom. Heaven is within one; it consists in the soul’s unfolding or coming into a knowledge of itself. We reach that through expression. In this way we grow, as every plant struggles to do. So you see, if we strangle our ideals, we stunt our growth, and shall be cut down like the bent, and imperfect tree,--cut down, to come again perhaps, for another trial, and still another and another until our destiny is accomplished. Therefore it is that doing our best should be our religion, as it is nature’s religion. It is the only road we can take which leads to the goal at which we must arrive, sooner or later. It is the price each soul must pay who would be saved. Instead of that, most of us have gone about hunting happiness on a childish plane, and making a great plaint, when we didn’t find it. ’Twould be laughable, were it not so pitiful.”

“Isn’t it plain enough,” said Bardell, “that if a wholesome civic and social spirit prevailed, we should be sufficiently enlightened to find our reward in doing our best, whether it were to raise potatoes, polish door knobs or paint pictures. All great men and women who have helped humankind have done so. They gave their best and nothing less, even when the world did not want it, and stoned them for it. They had a far greater reward than human appreciation. They grew to heroic, mental and spiritual stature. If Jesus of Nazareth had not given the best that was in Him, even at the cost of crucifixion, He could not have been the light of the world.

“How would it be with the world to-day, if all the great spirits that make up the enlightened minority, had merely jogged on doing something that secured the necessities of the body, rather than run any risk of being short of bread by pointing to a new road? The soul must follow its best light, taking no thought for the result. I shall do that henceforth.”

“I rejoice in your emancipation,” Cartice said, looking at him with glowing eyes. “I begin to see what it means to be born again. May it not be to awaken a knowledge of our own being, value and work?”

Bardell bade her good-bye with the seriousness of one going on a long journey. When he was gone a new sense of loneliness came over her. It was because he already had started up the mountain, leaving her still in the vale.