Chapter XVIII

Good Friday came, and with it the car to bring Edith home. As she was whirled through the parkways toward the West Side, she felt very unready. Easter had always been a great day in the family, and now she was reluctant to meet it.

Finally she directed the chauffeur to take her to Hull-House in Halsted Street, and leave her there, and explain to Mrs. Drummond that she would be home in time for dinner at seven.

As the car drove away, Edith stood at the corner of Polk and Halsted and looked at the scene. Her thought had been to enter the settlement and inquire of her friend for any news of Elsie. But there was no use in doing this, and at that instant she was willing to let Elsie go. An animal must have its fling.

She boarded a street car and went north. She passed Trench’s house, and longed to see him. How beautiful his lips were. How endearing that little twist of rough hair at the top of his forehead.

She left the car at Division Street and turned her steps westward across the bridges and the smoky mysteries of Goose Island. This was Chicago—and Mr. Kipling had declared that he knew a wretched crossroads in India which was a better place to live in! She walked west and then south again, coming down through the great Polish district to little Sicily.

Near a church—it was the same which Saadi and Deland had visited—shops were selling religious gear. A little girl who reminded her of Clara’s sister darted into her father’s shop and came out with a crucifix, which she offered for sale. For little Maria’s sake Edith bought it.

Then she looked at the church. She had done no thinking during her long walk. Perhaps she had better go in and rest.

She found the interior very dark. She could see a few lonely worshippers, but where was the altar? There was no ruby gleam from the shrine, and no towering mystery such as had enthralled her in European churches. With a shock she perceived that the altar had disappeared, and that in its place was the tomb of Christ. She beheld the domelike roof of the rock-cut sepulchre; and there beneath, lighted by the pale reflection of candles, was the ashen body of the Son of Man.

For a moment she stood breathless. Then she reasoned it out. A great painting had been stretched over the altar. Rome did not stop at mere poetry. Yonder knelt Sicilian pagans gazing at Adonis in his grave, as they had knelt long before Jesus lived.

She sank into a pew, unconsciously holding the crucifix against her breast. She leaned forward against the rail of the next pew, and gazed at the apparition, as Saadi had gazed at the two coffins.

What was the world of her studies? It was a closed system of environment and response. The same energies within the body as without, so that on close analysis the body disappeared in the general atomic tissue of the universe. The same general structure for each organism, from lily to bride. And to produce a lily or a bride, the same number of tyrannical chromosomes in the impregnated cell. The lily was supposed to be an unconscious creature, the bride a conscious. But the researches of Bose showed them doing much the same things, and though the morning stirred the bride to a sense of being a bride, it never showed her the inexorable chemical processes within her body. And in all scientific probability, the death of lily or bride was merely so much dissipation of energy.

If a spirit returned to animate that ashen, immobile mass of dead cells yonder, why, the pattern of every cell that ever lived would return. The case had only to be stated to be seen absurd. There had been no resurrection of the cell, and therefore none of the body. And if the resurrection of the “spirit” was true, biologists must believe exactly as savages believe. Ghostly birds of paradise were restlessly walking in asphodel meadows, unable to mate, and therefore refusing food—the ghostly psyches of butterflies.

It was all derisible nonsense. The simple fact was that birds of paradise were mottled by the earth they grew on, and carried their human origin on every feather. So-called spirits of the dead were indeed half angel and half bird, and all a wonder and a wild desire. These things were merely secondary sex-traits made to float away from the organs that generated them, and fancied to exist in a limbo of their own. In such bodiless creations ecstasy is very cunning.

The pale cell-colony in the distance had its structure like the rest. The jaw had fallen, and no longer crunched the flesh of other animals. It was dead for good and all. But self-deceiving hominidæ had used it to serve their own desire for survival. They had taken the grave-clothes of this Jewish specimen and flung them over the whole earth, an enchanted veil of false hope. The mechanism of desire had manufactured the risen Christ.

So she had come at last to Dr. Trench’s position. She would never be able to win him to the fairy tale of immortality. She would never be able to win him—she paused at the words, and something struggled into consciousness. She loved him!

The thrill of it led her automatically to the next step. If she admitted his point of view, might not she win him for herself? And if they had a child, let it take its chances like the rest. Let it take its chances! Let it be content with such brief joy and passion as earth could afford. She would drink deep of this sweet cup, and then sleep forever. She believed she could win him—she gave new meaning to the trembling of the hand which once had lifted her own nearly to his lips.

For a minute she dreamed. She saw the twenty-eighth of June approach, and herself awaiting him in the conservatory. She saw the feathery moss of the orchids’ bed, where pink-veined bosoms lay revealed. “Yes,” she would say, “they are but mechanisms, and do not know their own love.” And she could hear him reply as she wished him to reply, “But, dearest, do we not know ours?”

Then the reaction set in. She scanned her conclusion. It was free from superstition, but was it free from stain? Suppose that Trench did come in June, though still determined not to marry; suppose he did lose his self-control—for her words would lead him as the lines of colour on the cypripedium lead the insect to the stigma. How much would their conduct differ from that of two uneducated persons whose excuse was that they couldn’t help it? How much would it differ from Elsie’s running off with a married man?

The reaction grew sharper. They were taking her Saviour from her, and she knew not where they had laid him. God help her! What thoughts had she entertained? Men had idealised that man in the tomb, but in doing so they had thought nobly of man. In the pathos of their desire to be freed from the remora of desire, they had shown confidence at least in Him. He had been tempted without sin. They had called him the Prince of Peace, because he had mastered the passions which are the cause of war. Though he had felt the blind chemical urge of hunger and anger and love, even as the machine called the scorpion feels it, he had shown men how to control and refine their instincts. Whole races had been less beastly for thinking of Him. These things she long had known, and yet she had been on the point of tempting impersonal passion.

She had read in books of the “necessity” of love. She had read of lovers who spoke of something stronger than they. But in the name of the Prince of Peace, was there no necessity still stronger? She pressed fiercely against the oaken rail, and the crucifix hurt her breast. The pain felt good. It was as if she were a mother, and her baby were hurting her. There welled up within her an overwhelming pity for the mothers of millions untimely slain—and she knew once for all that she could never abandon the hope of heaven for mothers and children.

Thus her faith returned on the wings of a single moral decision, and as the price of giving up the man she loved. Whether God or chemistry had compelled her made no difference.