Chapter V: Front Matter (5)

The Holy Ghost she defines as Christian Science; "This Comforter I understand to be Divine Science."

_Mrs. Eddy's Revision of the Lord's Prayer_

In the course of Mrs. Eddy's revision of the Bible, she paused to "spiritually interpret" the Lord's prayer. She has revised the prayer a great many times, and different renderings of it are given in different editions of "Science and Health." The following is taken from the edition of 1902:

"Our Father-Mother God, all-harmonious, adorable One. Thy kingdom
is within us, Thou art ever-present. Enable us to know--as in
heaven, so on earth--God is supreme. Give us grace for to-day; feed
the famished affections. And infinite Love is reflected in love.
And Love leadeth us not into temptation, but delivereth from sin,
disease, and death. For God is now and forever all Life, Truth, and
Love."

In this interpretation the petitions have been converted into affirmations, and Mrs. Eddy's prayer seems a somewhat dry enumeration of the properties of the Deity rather than a supplication.

This method of "spiritual interpretation" has given Mrs. Eddy the habit of a highly empirical use of English. At the back of her book, "Science and Health," there is a glossary in which a long list of serviceable old English words are said to mean very especial things. The word "bridegroom" means "spiritual understanding"; "death" means "an illusion"; "evening" means "mistiness of mortal thought"; "mother" means God, etc., etc. The seventh commandment, Mrs. Eddy insists, is an injunction against adulterating Christian Science, although she also admits the meaning ordinarily attached to it. In the _Journal_ of November, 1889, there is a long discussion of the ten commandments by the editor, in which he takes up both personal chastity and the Pure Food laws under the command, "Thou shalt not commit adultery."

Mrs. Eddy insists, and doubtless believes, that her "Science" is simply an elaboration, a more advanced explanation, of the teachings of the New Testament. Yet on the subject of repentance, which occupies so important a place in the teachings of Christ, we hear never a word, and upon that consciousness of sin, which is the burden of the Epistles, she is consistently silent. Paul's reiterated explanation of original sin, of the Atonement and Redemption, are ignored. "As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive" is made to read: "As in error all die, so in Truth shall all," etc. Even Paul's "Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" is made substantially to mean, Who shall deliver me from the belief that there is sensation in matter? Whatever cannot be "spiritually interpreted" into a confirmation of Mrs. Eddy's theory that sin, sickness, and death are non-existent, she refuses to consider.

_Mrs. Eddy's Therapeutics_

Mrs. Eddy's theology is, of course, a mere derivative of her system of therapeutics, an attempt to base her peculiar variety of mind-cure upon Biblical authority. In her therapeutics there is nothing new except its extremeness. That the mind is able, in a large degree, to prevent or to cause sickness and even death, all thinking people admit. Mrs. Eddy's fundamental propositions are that death is wholly unnecessary and that the body and the organs of the body have nothing to do with life. A man could live just as well after his lungs had been removed as before, if he but thought he could. "Cold, heat, exercise, study, food, infection, etc., never caused a sick or healthy condition in man." "Scrofula, fever, consumption, rheumatism or small-pox never produced pain or inharmony." "A dislocation of the tarsal joint (ankle-joint) would produce insanity as perceptible as that produced by congestion of the brain, were it not that mortal mind thinks this joint less intimately connected with mind than is the brain."

Sight and hearing do not depend upon the eyes and ears. The nervous system can really cause no suffering. "Nerves are not the source of pain or pleasure." "Nerves have no more sensation, apart from what belief bestows upon them, than the fibre of a plant." What really suffers is mind, or belief; and, if we change that belief, the pain will disappear. "You say a boil is painful," says Mrs. Eddy, "but that is impossible, for matter without mind is not painful. The boil simply manifests your belief in pain, through inflammation and swelling; and you call this belief a boil."

Mrs. Eddy even argues against spanking children because "the use of the rod is virtually a declaration to the child's mind that sensation belongs to matter."[11]

Mrs. Eddy's idea is that our lungs are necessary to us because we think they are, just as we think heavy underwear is necessary in winter. Horses and cows, certainly, do not think much about their lungs, but Mrs. Eddy says that domestic animals are controlled by the beliefs of their human masters, and that we have corrupted the horse and have taught him to have epizooetic and colic. "What," says Mrs. Eddy, "if the lungs are ulcerated? God is more to a man than his lungs." "Have no fears that matter can ache, swell, and be inflamed.... Your body would suffer no more from tension or wounds than would the trunk of a tree which you gash, were it not for mortal mind."

All functional and organic diseases are produced by a popular belief in their reality. "No gastric juice accumulates ... apart from the action of mortal thought."

"Inflammation, hemorrhages, tubercles, decompositions are all dream shadows," "Man is the same after, as before, a bone is broken or a head chopped off."

But as to who invented the idea of pain and whence came the superstition that we must have lungs to breathe and that the heart is necessary to life, Mrs. Eddy maintains a discreet silence. Sin, sickness, and death, she says, are beliefs which originated in mortal mind. And how and when did mortal mind originate? Mortal mind does not exist, she answers, therefore it had no origin. This reasoning satisfies her; she believes it perfectly adequate.

It is not only the diseased body which is to be disregarded and put out of mind, but all hygienic precautions. Mrs. Eddy particularly objects to diets, and she says that one food is as good as another. God gave man "dominion not only over the fish in the sea, but over the fish in the stomach also," she once said.

There is no such thing as fatigue: "You would not say that a wheel is fatigued; and yet the body is just as material as the wheel. If it were not for what the human mind says of the body, the body would never be weary, any more than the inanimate wheel."

Mrs. Eddy denies that physical exercise strengthens the muscles. "Because the muscles of the blacksmith's arm are strongly developed, it does not follow that exercise has produced this result, or that a less-used arm must be weak.... _The trip-hammer is not increased in size by exercise._ Why not, since muscles are as material as wood and iron?"

Constant bathing, Mrs. Eddy says, received a "useful rebuke from Jesus' precept, 'Take no thought ... for the body,' We must beware of making clean merely the outside of the platter."

_A Sensationless Body the Goal of Existence_

"A sensationless body," Mrs. Eddy says, is the ultimate hope of Christian Science. Since insensibility to pain is the ultimate good which her system of philosophy offers, it is natural that she should often point us to the lower forms of animal life for our exemplars. "The conditions of life become less imperative in lower organisms, or where there is less mind and belief on this subject." She points out hopefully that certain marine animals multiply their species by self-division. "The less mind there is manifested in matter, the better. When the unthinking lobster loses his claw, it grows again." If we but believed that matter has no sensation, "then the human limb would be replaced as readily as the lobster's claw." She points out the fact that flowers produce their seed without pain. "The snowbird sings and soars amid the blasts; he has no catarrh from wet feet."

"Obesity," Mrs. Eddy says, "is _an adipose belief of yourself as a substance_."

_Mrs. Eddy's Physiology_

The most discouraging thing about Mrs. Eddy's dissertations upon anatomy and physiology is that she seems to know so little about the physical facts and laws which she despises. She says, for instance, that a father "plunged his infant babe, only a few hours old, into water for several minutes and repeated this operation daily until the child could remain under water for twenty minutes, moving and playing without harm, like a fish." Does Mrs. Eddy actually believe that a child could live under water for twenty minutes? Again: "The supposition that we can correct insanity by the use of purgatives and narcotics is in itself a species of insanity." Where did Mrs. Eddy get the idea that such treatment was ever supposed to cure "insanity"? Mrs. Eddy says the fact that a finger which has been amputated continues to hurt is proof that nerves have nothing to do with pain, because, she states, "_the nerve is gone_"!

Mrs. Eddy says that when we burn a finger, not fire but mortal mind causes the injury. To this statement she adds: "Holy inspiration has created states of mind which are able to nullify the action of the flames, as in the Bible case of the three young Hebrew captives, cast into the Babylonian furnace; while an opposite mental state might produce spontaneous combustion." That is, if mortal mind worked hard enough, we could burn our fingers without any fire, or we could produce the fire by willing it.

The action of drugs depends entirely upon the belief of mortal mind. Stimulants, narcotics, poisons, affect the system solely because they are reputed to do so. And yet, with all her ingenuity, Mrs. Eddy has to admit that if a man took arsenic unknowingly it would probably kill him. This, she says, is because of the consensus of opinion that arsenic is deadly. Such would probably be her explanation of the destructive processes which go on in the world without the knowledge of man; fire consumes the forest, the tiger kills the antelope, and the bite of the cobra kills the tiger because the human mind has attributed such tendencies to fire, to the tiger, and to the cobra.

_Mrs. Eddy's View of History_

All the emanations of mortal mind are evil. Our redemption, Mrs. Eddy says, lies in Divine Mind, of which we are a part. "Spirit imparts the understanding which leads into all Truth.... This understanding is not intellectual, is not aided by scholarly attainments." There is no mistaking Mrs. Eddy's meaning; the thing in us which is capable of cultivation and expansion, that which inquires and investigates and reasons, is mortal mind, and is therefore evil. All the physical sciences are the harmful inventions of mortal mind, and the slow and painful accumulation of exact knowledge has been but the harmful activity of the baser element in human nature. There was never such a discouraging view of human history.

It is scarcely necessary to remark that everything which civilization most cherishes has been the direct result of that spirit of inquiry and of those inductive processes of reasoning which Mrs. Eddy despises. If the morality of the civilized world is higher to-day than it was in the fifth century, it is not because men know any more about moral laws than they did two thousand years ago, but because this same spirit of inquiry has made cleaner living possible and imperative. Mrs. Eddy says that Christian Science would abolish war; but the diminution of war has come about, not through any growth of "Divine Mind" but, as Buckle pointed out, through three triumphs of the experimental tendency of the intellect;--the discovery of gunpowder, the discovery that war was detrimental to trade and to the best economic conditions, and the improvement in methods of transportation. Contemplating the history of civilization from Mrs. Eddy's point of view, we have simply gone on developing this injurious thing, "mortal mind"--applying our intelligence to the study of the physical universe--and have gone on piling up false belief on false belief. It is "matter" that is our great delusion and that stands between us and a full understanding of God; and matter exists, or seems to exist, only because we have invented it and invented laws to govern it and have given properties to its various manifestations. The more we know about the physical universe, the heavier do we make our chains; our progress in the physical sciences does but increase the dose of the drug which enslaves us. And there have been but two breaks in this jumbled dream of "error": the first when Jesus Christ "demonstrated the nothingness of matter," the second when Mrs. Eddy proclaimed its nothingness from Lynn.

With a "sensationless body" for the goal of existence, the savage was certainly much higher in "the scale of being" than the nations of modern Europe, and Mrs. Eddy is perfectly right when she refers us to the amoeba and crustacea. Happy, indeed, the lobster who thinks so little about his anatomy that his lost claw is replaced by another!

From all her flights Mrs. Eddy comes back to her starting-point: physical well-being. Not for a single page are we permitted to forget that her religion is primarily a kind of "doctoring"; therapeutics made religion, or religion made therapeutics. She makes the fact that Christ healed the sick the principal feature of his mission, and makes it authority for her assumption that religion and therapeutics are essentially one. Certainly the burden of the New Testament is not that man may avoid suffering, but that he may suffer with noble fortitude.

_Lack of Religious Feeling in Mrs. Eddy's Book_

But it is before such a word as fortitude that Mrs. Eddy's book takes on its most discouraging aspect. Her foolish logic, her ignorance of the human body, the liberties which she takes with the Bible, and her burlesque exegesis, could easily be overlooked if there were any nobility of feeling to be found in "Science and Health"; any great-hearted pity for suffering, any humility or self-forgetfulness before the mysteries of life. Mrs. Eddy professes to believe that she has found the Truth, and that all the long centuries behind her have gone out in darkness and wasted effort, yet not one page of her book is tinged with compassion. "Oh that mine head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!" If there were one sentence like that in "Science and Health" no one would stop to quarrel with Mrs. Eddy's metaphysics.

But if there is little intelligence displayed in Mrs. Eddy's book, there is even less emotion. It is not exaggeration to say that "Science and Health" is absolutely devoid of religious feeling. God remains for Mrs. Eddy a "principle" indeed, toward which she has no attitude but that of a somewhat patronizing and platitudinous expositor. She discusses sin and death and human suffering as if they were curves or equations.

_Malicious Animal Magnetism_

In all the editions of Mrs. Eddy's book there is the same shiftiness, the same hardness, and the same astonishing complacency, and the text of the first three editions is disfigured by innumerable ebullitions of spite and hatred. In the first edition the first fifteen pages of the chapter on "Healing the Sick" are given up to an attack upon Richard Kennedy, the young man who was her first practitioner, and of whose personal popularity she was so bitterly jealous. The second edition, a small volume, is largely made up of denunciations of Daniel Spofford. The third edition opens with a preface (signed Asa G. Eddy) attacking Edward Arens, and contains the famous chapter on "Demonology" in which Mrs. Eddy devotes forty-six pages to settling scores with half a dozen of her early students, charging one and another with theft, adultery, murder, blackmail, etc. The Reverend Mr. Wiggin, when he revised Mrs. Eddy's book in 1885, persuaded her to omit these vituperative passages on the ground that they were libelous.

Mrs. Eddy's one original elemental contribution to Quimbyism, was her doctrine of Malicious Animal Magnetism; a grewsome superstition born of her own vindictiveness and distrust. Mrs. Eddy's more enlightened followers have for years tried to divert attention from this one of her doctrines, and there are hundreds of Christian Scientists in the field who know and think very little about it. But it has been a very important consideration in the lives of those who have come into personal contact with Mrs. Eddy. Between 1875 and 1888 many of Mrs. Eddy's students left her because in her lectures and conversation she dwelt more upon the malign power of mesmerism than upon the salutary power of truth. In her contributions to the _Journal_ during those years she frequently took up Animal Magnetism; she tells her followers over and over again that she will denounce it, and that she will not be silenced. For several years there was a regular department in the _Journal_ with the caption "Animal Magnetism," but the crimes which were charged to mesmerists were by no means confined to this department. "_Also they have dominion over our bodies, and over our cattle, at their pleasure, and we are in great distress_," the _Journal_ again and again affirms.

_Poverty a False Belief_

Mrs. Eddy surmounts economics as easily as she does physics and chemistry and physiology. Poverty is only a form of "error," a false belief. It can be abolished as readily as sin or disease or old age. She advertised the first edition of "Science and Health" as a book that "affords an opportunity to acquire a profession by which you can accumulate a fortune." "In the early history of Christian Science," Mrs. Eddy says, "among my thousands of students few were wealthy. Now, Christian Scientists are not indigent; and their comfortable fortunes are acquired by healing mankind morally, physically, and spiritually." Her healers should be well paid, she says. "Christian Science demonstrates that the patient who pays what he is able to pay, is more apt to recover than he who withholds a slight equivalent for health." In Mrs. Eddy's book[12] she publishes a long testimonial from a man who relates how Christian Science has helped him in his business.

This view of poverty has been generally accepted among Mrs. Eddy's followers. One contributor to the _Journal_ writes: "We were demonstrating over a lack of means, which we had learned was just as much a claim of error to be overcome with truth as ever sickness or sin was."[13]

Another contributor writes: "The lack of means is a lupine ghost sired by the same spectre as the lack of health, and both must be met and put to flight by the same mighty weapons of our spiritual warfare."[14]

In the files of the _Journal_ there are many reports of the material prosperity of individual Christian Scientists. It is an evidence of "at-oneness" with God to prosper in business just as it is to overcome disease.

In the _Journal_ of September, 1904, a contributor says:

"Is it reasonable to believe, as we have believed, that popular
fancy, whims, climate, the state of politics, any or all of a
hundred lawless elements, are able to ruin a man's business while
he stands by and doesn't know enough even to make an intelligent
protest?"

Government, civilization, and even "climate" are demonstrated to be unreal, but the reality and importance of "business" is never questioned, and that each and every Christian Scientist should get on in the world remains a matter of indubitable moment, even to Mrs. Eddy herself.

_Mrs. Eddy's Views on Marriage_

Among the many incidental ideas which Mrs. Eddy has added to Quimbyism are her theory that the Godhead is more feminine than masculine, and her qualified disapproval of matrimony. Quimby himself had a large family and saw nothing unspiritual in marriage. In defining the real purpose of marriage Mrs. Eddy says nothing about children; "to happify existence by constant intercourse with those adapted to elevate it, is the true purpose of marriage." In her chapter on marriage she says: "The scientific _morale_ of marriage is spiritual unity.... Proportionately as human generation ceases, the unbroken links of eternal harmonious being will be spiritually discerned."

In her chapter called "Wedlock" in Miscellaneous Writings (1897) Mrs. Eddy, after a vague and evasive discussion of the subject, squarely puts the question: "Is marriage nearer right than celibacy? Human knowledge inculcates that it is, while Science indicates that it is _not_." In the same chapter she further says: "Human nature has bestowed on a wife the right to become a mother; but if the wife esteems not this privilege, by mutual consent, exalted and increased affections, she may win a higher."

Mrs. Eddy apparently believes that Jesus Christ taught us to ignore family relations: "Jesus acknowledged no ties of the flesh. He said: 'Call no man your father upon the earth; for one is your father which is in heaven.' Again he asked: 'Who is my mother, and who are my brethren but they who will do the will of my father?' We have no record of his calling any man by the name of father."

_Future of Christian Science_

Whoever has watched the amazing growth of the Christian Science sect must feel some curiosity as to its future. Mrs. Eddy's followers are by no means the only people who are trying to meet, by suggestive treatment, nervous diseases and the many functional disorders which result from overwork, worry, and discouragement. The foremost neurologists of all countries are employing more and more this suggestive method which is the essential reality in Christian Science healing. The followers of the "New Thought" school apply this principle in their own way, and the hundreds of unaffiliated "mind curists" and "mental healers" are each applying it in ways more or less honest and legitimate.

In October, 1906, Dr. Elwood Worcester and Dr. Samuel McComb, the rector and the associate rector of the Emmanuel (Episcopal) Church of Boston, organized the Emmanuel Church Health Class, for the treatment of nervous disorders. Believing that, as Professor William James has said, "the sovereign cure for worry is religious faith," the workers at Emmanuel Church have been endeavoring to cure nervous disorders by putting the patient at peace with himself. Every patient is examined by a physician, and if the root of his disorder proves to be nervous (hysteria, alcoholism, a drug habit, insomnia, or any one of the many forms of neurasthenia) he is admitted into the Health Class for psycho-therapeutical treatment. Here he is encouraged to unburden himself of the distress or perplexity which haunts him, and is given the kind of suggestive treatment which seems best adapted to his disorder. Dr. Worcester studied psychology under Wundt, in Germany, and taught it for six years at Lehigh University. Dr. McComb studied psychology at Oxford. The records of the Emmanuel Health Class show that of the 178 cases treated between March, 1907, and November, 1907, the condition of seventy-five patients has been improved, forty-eight have not been helped at all, while in fifty-five cases the result is unknown.[15]

_Mrs. Eddy's Opposition to the Mind Cure Movement_

Mrs. Eddy and her followers have given a demonstration too great to be overlooked, of the fact that many ills which the sufferer believes entirely physical can be reached and eradicated by "ministering to a mind diseased," by persuading the sick man continually to suggest to himself ideas of health and hope and happiness and usefulness, instead of brooding upon the emptiness and unanswered needs of his life or upon his failing physical powers. Mrs. Eddy's sect, more than any other one of the cults which believe in and practise this method of bettering the patient's physical condition through his mind, has forced the most hide-bound medical practitioners to take account of this old but newly applied force in therapeutics.

But what is Mrs. Eddy's own attitude toward the general awakening to the value of psycho-therapeutics in the treatment of human diseases? She declares that every kind of mind cure and suggestive treatment except her own is dangerous and harmful. As one of Mrs. Eddy's students wrote in the _Christian Science Journal_, September, 1901, "The loyal Christian Scientist knows that neither he nor his patient should read or study the books of any other author than those of our beloved Leader in order to learn the Science of the Christ truth, which she is teaching and demonstrating to this age."

Mrs. Eddy's own editorials in the _Journal_ are never so bitter as when she is attacking the mental healers who do not practise her own copyrighted variety of mind cure. Recently the _Christian Science Sentinel_ of January 18, 1908, stated that Mrs. Eddy cannot countenance the work done at the Emmanuel Church. Mr. Archibald McClellan, the editor of that publication, published an article entitled "No Christian Psychology." He says: "Christian Psychology is equivalent to Christian phrenology, physiology and mythology, whereas Jesus predicted and demonstrated Christian healing on the basis of Spirit, God. He never complicated Spirit with matter, etc.... Her teachings (Mrs. Eddy's) show further that she cannot consistently endorse as Christianity the two distinctly contradictory statements and points of view contained in the term 'Christian psychology'--otherwise Christian materialism."

Mrs. Eddy holds that any system of healing which at all takes account of, or admits physical structure, is not Christian.

Mrs. Eddy's endeavor has been to convert a universal principle into a personal property. And she has gone a wonderfully long way toward doing it. Thousands of people believe that they owe their health and happiness to a healing principle which was revealed by God to Mrs. Eddy and by Mrs. Eddy to mankind; that since the ministry of Jesus Christ upon earth no one of the human race has understood this principle except Mrs. Eddy, and that she is the only human being now alive who fully understands it; that when she dies her works alone will stand between the world and darkness.

But all the while that Mrs. Eddy was energetically copyrighting, and pruning, and expelling, and disciplining, that other stream which came from Quimby, through Dr. Evans and through Julius Dresser and his wife, was slowly and quietly doing its work.[16] Mind Cure and New Thought grew up side by side with Christian Science. As organizations they were not nearly so effective, and their ranks, like Mrs. Eddy's, were often darkened by the adventuress and the battered soldier of fortune. But the Mental healers and the New Thought healers treated the sick on exactly the same principle which Mrs. Eddy's successful healers employed.

As to the future of Mrs. Eddy's church, her own attitude toward every attempt to investigate and to apply liberally the principle of mental healing, seems to determine that. It has been possible for her, during her own lifetime, absolutely to prohibit preaching, thinking, independent writing,--investigation or inquiry of any sort--in her churches. But after her death, when that compelling hand is withdrawn, either the church must renew itself from among the ignorant and superstitious, as Mormonism has done, or it must permit its members to use their minds. Those who use their minds will discover that Christian Science is only one method of applying a general truth, and that it is a method which is hampered by a great deal that is illogical and absurd; that if Christian Science, as Mrs. Eddy has promulgated it, were universally believed and practised, it would be the revolt of a species against its own physical structure; against its relation to its natural physical environment, against the needs of its own physical organism, against the perpetuation of its kind. The moment a Christian Scientist realizes that the helpful and hopeful principle of his religion can operate quite independently of all the inconsequential theories which Mrs. Eddy has attached to it, that moment he is, of course, lost to Mrs. Eddy. Mrs. Eddy's church organization stands as a sort of dyke between the general principle of mind cure and Mrs. Eddy's very empirical, violent, and temperamental interpretation of that principle. It is the future of psycho-therapeutics that will determine the future of Christian Science. If "Mind Cure," "Christian Psychology," and regular physicians offer the benefits of suggestive treatment in a more rational and direct way than does Christian Science, Mrs. Eddy's church will find in them very formidable competition. On the other hand, if Christian Scientists throw down their barriers and join the general mind-cure movement, and the two branches of Quimbyism meet, then half of Mrs. Eddy's life-work is lost. The labor of her days has been to keep these two streams apart; to prove one the true and the other the false. Her efforts to stem the progress of all other schools of mental healing have been secondary only to her efforts to advance her own. Yet, unconsciously and against her own wish, she has been the most effective instrument in promoting the interest of the whole movement.

On the theoretical side, Mrs. Eddy's contribution to mental healing has been, in the main, fallacious, pseudodoxal, and absurd, but upon the practical side she has been wonderfully efficient. New movements are usually launched and old ideas are revivified, not through the efforts of a group of people, but through one person. These dynamic personalities have not always conformed to our highest ideals; their effectiveness has not always been associated with a large intelligence or with nobility of character. Not infrequently it has been true of them--as it seems to be true of Mrs. Eddy--that their power was generated in the ferment of an inharmonious and violent nature. But, for practical purposes, it is only fair to measure them by their actual accomplishment and by the machinery they have set in motion.

THE END

HER FRUITS

BY

MARY ELEANOR ROBERTS

These are her fruits, kindness and gentleness,
And gratefully we take them at her hands;
Patience she has, and pity for distress,
And love that understands.

Ah, ask not how such rich reward was won,
How sharp the harrow in the former years,
Or mellowed in what agony of sun,
Or watered with what tears.

THE KEY TO THE DOOR

BY FIELDING BALL

ILLUSTRATIONS BY WALTER JACK DUNCAN

"_There was the Door to which I found no Key;
There was the Veil through which I might not see.
Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee
There was--and then no more of Thee and Me._"

The postmaster was lounging in an open window, cleaning his fingernails with his pocket-knife, as Allison went into the post-office. He rose with some show of animation at sight of the tall, boyish figure in the doorway.

"I got a hired girl for you all right, Mr. Allison," he said, advancing to meet him. "Used to work down to Webb City, in a restaurant, but got tired of it--hours too hard. She's a good cook, and she knows how to get things on the table so they look real nice--I knew that would mean considerable to you folks."

He went on to dwell at length upon the girl's good points, becoming more nervously demonstrative in his praise as he found that Allison's face reflected none of his enthusiasm, but remained unexpectedly impassive and non-committal.

Allison interrupted at the first opportunity.

"You have been very kind, Mr. Barbour," he said, with impersonal civility. "Would you be so good as to get me my mail?"

He took the letters which the man handed him and walked out without giving him another glance.

Just outside of the door he met Jim Brown, man-of-all-work at the station. Allison himself was station agent. Allison looked at Jim as he passed with such a cold, unswerving gaze that in spite of himself the other dropped his eyes. Jim had been present at the interview between Billings and Allison that morning; Allison knew that he was coming now to tell the postmaster about it. The young man set his lips hard at the thought of some of the things he had done during the last two weeks, when he had been full of glad confidence in himself and in this invention of his--this brake which Billings had told him an hour ago was not worth the stuff of which it was made. The recountal of his performance would doubtless afford much entertainment to the pair in the post-office. Just yesterday he had asked the postmaster to find for him, if possible, a capable maid-servant, and had said, without thinking anything in particular about it, that he would pay a satisfactory girl five dollars a week. Five dollars a week--it had not seemed much to him; he had been amused by Barbour's evident astonishment. To-day he saw more reason in it.... Then there was that perfume for Gertrude--he should have to countermand his order for that. He had no choice in the matter, he told himself, with bitter resentment that a paltry nine dollars should mean so much to him. In spite of the fact that he had come to this decision before he reached the drug store, he did not go in, but walked past with his head in the air, looking neither to right nor to left. He felt as though every one must already know of the morning's experience; and he was fearful of meeting eyes alight with cynical understanding.

The postmaster and Jim watched the young man from the post-office door as he made his way up the one hilly street of the little town. The soldierly precision of his carriage and gait, together with a certain air of distinction about his clothes, made him seem singularly out of keeping with all about him--the narrow, stony road, the straggling white houses on each side of it, the unkempt yards, the neglected trees, the dilapidated sidewalks half hidden by an amazing growth of dog-fennel.

"You'd know somep'n had gone wrong by the way he had his head reared back, wouldn't you?" Jim asked with a smile on his dark face.

He had just finished telling Barbour of what had happened that morning. Several days before, Allison had got word from the railroad company that some time this week they would send a man to tell him what offer they were prepared to make for the brake on which he had been working for so many weeks, and had finally finished; and this morning Billings had put in his appearance. The brake was practically good for nothing, he assured Allison--certainly not worth a cent to the company; and he told him the reasons why this was so.

He went on to say, however, that he felt sorry for Allison,--sorry for that nice little wife of his,--Jim smiled grimly as he repeated the condescending phrase,--that he knew they were having a mighty hard time of it. Sixty dollars a month was not enough for a single man to live on decently, much less a married one; and the way in which Allison had been brought up made it harder. He didn't mean to criticize Allison's father--he didn't believe in criticizing the dead--but he certainly should not bring up _his_ son in such a way that he couldn't make a living for himself if necessary. You never could tell what was going to happen in this world; Allison wasn't the first gay young fellow who had grown up not expecting ever to have to do a day's work, and then all of a sudden had found himself glad to get almost any sort of a job. Well, as he said, he was sorry for Allison, and ready to help him out a little. He meant to see to it that Allison got something out of this brake of his--a couple of hundred dollars, perhaps; of course, two hundred dollars wasn't a great deal; it wouldn't mean much to him--Billings--but it would probably mean considerable to Allison.

"What did Mr. Allison say?" the postmaster asked.

"Never changed face. Set there starin' at Billings with those darned cool eyes o' his that look's if they'd never blink 'f a cannon went off under his very nose--waited till Billings got good and done, 'n' then said with that high 'n' mighty air of his, f'r all the world's if he was speakin' to some poor, half-witted Swede: 'Two hundred dollars doesn't mean as much to me as you think, Mr. Billings.' Then he stopped a minute, 'n' went on in a little diff'rent tone, 'You needn't concern yourself any further about me and my troubles'--'n' that had very much the sound of 'I'll make kindling-wood of you if you do!' Then he looks at his watch. 'I've given you all the time I can spare,' says he; and with that he swings around 'n' begins looking over some papers on his desk. Billings reddened up a little--coughed 'n' wriggled around in his chair, 'n' tried to get up courage to say somethin' more--but he simply didn't _darst_. He went off finally lookin' sort o' cheap. Mist' Allison never give him another glance, no more'n 's if he was that dog o' yours."

The postmaster was silent for a minute or two. Then he turned to Jim. "I'm not particularly sorry to see Billings get left," he said. "Still, it might be just as well for Mr. Allison if he'd have kept on the right side of Billings from the start. There's no use talking, he's got an awfully uppish way with him, that boy."

Jim nodded an emphatic assent. Along with other smaller grievances there still rankled in his mind the memory of how, when Allison had first come as station agent to the little town, a year ago now, he had one day asked Jim if he did not suppose that the nice-looking girl who had passed their house with Jim the Sunday before could be induced to come and work for them. Allison had asked the question in all innocence, not dreaming that this unshaven young man in blue seersucker shirt and greasy trousers considered himself in every way Allison's equal, and was as much affronted by this suggestion as Allison would have been by one of the same sort. Jim could not forgive him for it--any admiration he felt for Allison was invariably tempered by resentful remembrance.

"It's about time he woke up to the fact that he doesn't have a father worth two millions behind him these days," Barbour went on. "Extravagant! Lord, he never stops to ask what a thing costs before getting it, as long as he has money in his pockets. Went into the book-store the other afternoon to get some magazines--carried off about everything Henry had in the place. Three dollars and fifteen cents his bill was. Never thinks, when he's buying anything in the way of shirts or ties, of getting less than half a dozen at a time--s'pose he hasn't found out you can buy them any other way. And his laundry bills--guess he about runs the laundry. And just yesterday he was telling me in the most off-hand way that he would pay five dollars a week to a hired girl. Five dollars a week! I could hardly believe my ears. But I guess he's gone back on that." The postmaster smiled sourly.

The young man of whom they were talking was almost at the top of the hill by this time. So far he had met few people; and those whom he had met had not forced any formal recognition from him. But as he passed Mrs. Jennings, she called out a greeting that could not be ignored. Gertrude had stopped once to talk to her and to admire her collection of shells; and since then every noon and night he found her waiting here by her gate to speak to him; and she invariably asked the same question about his wife, always in the same tone, always with the same inflection. The meeting with her had become one of the frightfully unvarying things of his day. As he walked on now, he saw stretching before him an interminable vista of days, weeks, years--one deadly sameness of hard work, long hours, scanty pay, poor living, growing debts--and inextricably mixed up with it all, this dreary, gaunt black figure, waiting always for him at the top of the hill.... He had not realized what it meant to him, the success of his invention--how much he was depending on it. He felt now as he might if, moving blindly through a dark passage, hoping any minute to see a glimmer of light ahead, an outlet into the open air, he had run full into a locked door--a door to which he had no key.

The thought of going home to his wife brought no comfort with it. They had long ago ceased to be honest with each other, Gertrude and he; their attempts to make the best of a sorry situation had in the end become a barrier which held them apart. Gertrude would not admit that she was ever tired, or lonesome, or discouraged; would find no fault with their poor little house, their scanty means, her unaccustomed duties. She never spoke of the past any more, nor of the future, lest in that there might be an implied criticism of the present; she was resolutely, unvaryingly, aggressively contented. But this contentment was too constant, too uniform, like false color on a woman's cheek. He sometimes wished she would throw pretense to the winds--would put her head on his shoulder, and sob and cry, and confess that she wished she were dead--or that she would upbraid him, reproach him, call him some of the hard names he called himself. But she was insistently cheerful; and there was nothing for him to do, in the face of this, but play an awkward second to her, ignore his aching back, his sore hands, his throbbing head, and keep a resolute silence as to all that happened to vex and humiliate and perplex and hurt him. It was not always easy; to-day he was conscious that he was walking more and more slowly as he drew near the house.

How poor and forlorn it looked in this glare of light! During these last weeks his thoughts had turned often to that stately house where he had lived for nineteen years--its green, close-clipped lawn glistening under a perpetual play of water, its great beds of white and green and cardinal foliage plants, its shut-in porches, its awnings, its flowering shrubs, its vines, its heavy iron fence. He looked with bitter attentiveness at the dingy frame cottage he was approaching, noticing each homely detail--the dish-towels spread on the bushes in the back yard, the mop hanging by the door, the kerosene can under the step, the lean hen scuttling away under the currant bushes, the vegetable garden lying parched and dry along the fence. There was a small artificial mound of stones at one side of the house, with a somewhat scanty growth of portulaca springing from its top. The last occupant of the house was responsible for that adornment. Allison wondered how they had happened to leave it there so long. That mound of stones--all his hopes might have been buried under it and he could not have hated it more. It stood, somehow, for all that chafed and irritated him here--the moral, mental, and physical stuntedness of the people--their petty ambitions, petty jealousies, petty quarrels, petty virtues.

Allison was seized with a sudden vague fear as he saw on the kitchen window-sill, just where he had left it at seven this morning, the package which Gertrude had promised to take to Mr. Fulton as soon as she had finished the breakfast dishes. He noticed almost at the same instant that the kitchen door was open; countless flies were sailing in and out; and there on the cellar door, in the blazing sunlight, was the morning's milk, thick and sour by this time. He quickened his steps--made his way hurriedly through the kitchen and dining-room, noticing, as he went, various signs of disorder. The kitchen fire was out--the floor unswept; the coffee he had knocked over when he had built the fire this morning lay where it had fallen: the room was full of its pungent odor. On the dining-room table were the remnants of breakfast, the oatmeal dry and stiff, the butter melted down to a thin oil. In the front room he found Gertrude, bending a flushed face over something she was writing. She gave a start of fright as he came in--then got very red.

"I sat down to write a little of that play I was telling you about last night"--she was picking up her papers with frantic haste as she spoke--"and I had no idea it was getting so late." She cast an appalled glance around the room, and hurried out to begin clearing off the table, making a great clatter with the dishes in her excitement and haste.

Allison stood for a minute looking after her wearily. Her manner hurt him. More than once, in days gone by, he had told her fondly that when she married him she should do nothing but what she liked to do--if she chose, she might work on her little dialogues and fairy stories from morning till night. The air of frightened apology which she wore--this servile haste--pained and irritated him. He threw himself into a chair and began mechanically to look over the mail which the postmaster had handed him. A week ago he had written to an Eastern firm asking for a catalogue of the refrigerators they made. Here it was--bulky, imposing, abounding in alluring pictures of tile-lined refrigerators filled with game, fish, fruit, wine. He found he could buy their smallest and most inexpensive refrigerator, "built especially to supply a demand for low-priced goods,"--so the advertisement ran--for forty-five dollars. He dropped the book, and turned to his other letter. It was from a great retail dry-goods house, and was in answer to a request he had made for samples of dotted swiss--he had thought he would like to get Gertrude a dress such as she had worn when he first knew her. The samples were sent, and along with them a letter expressing pleasure at being able to serve him, and a desire further to accommodate him whenever possible; its extreme deference and respect was like a calculated sarcasm. He pushed it away from him and leaned back in his chair, looking about the room with a curious stare, as a convict, who has just heard that his sentence is for life, might gaze at the walls of his cell. It was a low-ceiled room, with an uneven floor, cheap woodwork, painted in an unsuccessful imitation of natural wood, and walls hung with faded paper of an indeterminate pattern and even more indeterminate color. To-day it was in greater confusion than usual, with white dust thick on table and chair, a window-shade askew, the music-rack disarranged, and a plate of grape-skins which Allison had left last night on the piano still standing there. But it was not the disorder which irritated Allison most, nor the signs of poverty, but the fact that the poverty was so _genteel_, so self-respecting, so determined to make the best of things and present a brave front to the world. The kerosene lamp had a shade of red, crinkled tissue-paper--the cheap net curtains were arranged with the utmost elaboration--a rug was artfully laid down in such a way as almost to cover the square of zinc on which the stove stood in the winter time, and all of Gertrude's photographs were placed with a view to concealing various defects and deficiencies. His loathing for all this was intensified by a memory of vast rooms stretching out one after the other, hushed and cool, with gracious shadows lending their mystery and romance to everything. With sudden restlessness he rose, and walked over to the window; but the smell of dust and dry, dead vegetation smothered him. Gertrude had raked the long, sparse brown grass all in one direction; it had a grotesque look of having been combed.

He seized his hat, and went to get Mr. Fulton's package from the window-sill. He had barely turned toward the gate, however, when his wife hurried out, remonstrating, apologizing, with an urgent hand on his arm. "It is important that Mr. Fulton should get these papers to-day," he said stiffly. It did not really matter whether Mr. Fulton got the roll of agricultural papers to-day, to-morrow, or next week; but Allison felt the necessity for doing something, it did not much matter what, to crush down his growing despair; and this was the only thing which suggested itself. Gertrude was persistent, however, in her entreaties that he come back; it was frightfully hot, and he already looked tired; she would take the papers to Mr. Fulton right after luncheon. He yielded at last, from sheer languidness, and came silently into the house. Gertrude's moist face, her loud, anxious voice, her warm, clinging hand, were exceedingly disagreeable to him--so much so that finally the desire to escape them became more importunate than any other.

He was again standing by the window, gazing out, when his wife came into the dining-room to set the table. He did not turn--gave no sign of seeing her.

"What are you thinking about, Philip?" she asked presently, with an effort to make her question sound casual.

"I am not thinking--at least I am trying not to," Allison answered, in a somewhat strained, unnatural voice. Why would she not leave him alone? Could she not see that he did not wish to talk?

"What was the last thing that you were thinking about before you stopped?" Gertrude spoke with painstaking gaiety.

Would she always keep up this dissimulation? Allison asked himself. For his part, he was done with it!

"I was thinking that this place was fit for a dog-kennel--and for nothing else!" he said. All the bitterness that was eating out his heart was in the low words.

"It does look pretty bad to-day," Gertrude acquiesced, after an appreciable interval of time.

"_To-day!_" Allison gave a hard, contemptuous little laugh. "As though it ever looked any other way!"

Gertrude did not reply.... When Allison noticed her silence, and turned to look at her, he saw that there was a peculiar light in her eyes, a red flush over all her face; after a moment's dazed wonder, he realized that she had misunderstood him--had misunderstood him utterly. His thoughts had been on the sagging floors, the cheap furniture, the marred wall-paper, the miserable ugliness and poverty of the house, and everything in it; but she had seen in his remark only scorn for her housekeeping, irritation at the room's untidiness. She was very angry. As Allison realized this, a sudden fierce satisfaction possessed him. Now at last she would speak out, without pretence, without reserve! He should hear the truth at last.

But the wrathful look died out of her eyes. She began arranging the knives and forks, looking suddenly old, and steady, and sober.

"I'm not much of a housekeeper," she said, quietly.

"No, you're not." Allison made his tone as ugly as possible--and waited. Surely she would turn upon him now, overwhelm him with bitter words!

She made no answer of any kind, however, but turned and hurried into the kitchen, striking her arm clumsily against one side of the door as she passed through, as though she had not seen very well. He heard her moving rapidly about, getting his luncheon. She brought it in with her head in the air and her lips compressed. The coffee was muddy, the steak burned, the creamed potatoes scorched--she had been having bad luck. Allison ate every scrap of what she brought him. He did not dare look at her--did not dare ask her to forgive him. What right had he to do that? He lingered on the steps some time before starting for the station, fussing with his cuff, pulling his hat into shape, breaking off from the tree at the corner of the house the branch Gertrude had complained was in her way. His wife usually followed him to the door to tell him good-by; but to-day she was sweeping the dining-room vigorously, singing the while a very gay and cheerful tune. It was one to which they had often danced together in the old days; at the same moment at which he realized it, the song stopped, as though Gertrude had been silenced by the same memory that had come to him. He whistled tentatively; but she did not answer, though she was near enough to hear, as he knew from the sound of her broom.