Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Hilbrook stopped, and swallowed dryly. Ewbert noticed how he had dropped more and more into the vernacular, in these reminiscences; in their controversies he had used the language of books and had spoken like a cultivated man, but now he was simply and touchingly rustic.

  “Well,” he resumed, “that wore out, too. I went into business, and I made money and I lost it. I went through all that experience, and I got enough of it, just as I got enough of fightin’. I guess I was no worse scared than the rest of ‘em, but when it came to the end I’d ‘bout made up my mind that if there was another war I’d go to Canady; I was sick of it, and I was sick of business even before I lost money. I lost pretty much everything. Josiah — he was always a good enough friend of mine — wanted me to start in again, and he offered to back me, but I said no. I said if he wanted to do something for me, he could let me come home and live on the old place, here; it wouldn’t cost him anything like so much, and it would be a safer investment. He agreed, and here I be, to make a long story short.”

  Hilbrook had stiffened more and more, as he went on, in the sort of defiance he had put on when he first began to speak of himself, and at the end of his confidence Ewbert did not venture any comment. His forbearance seemed to leave the old man freer to resume at the point where he had broken off, and he did so with something of lingering challenge.

  “You asked me just now why I didn’t think character, as we call it, gave us some right to expect a life after this. Well, I’ll try to tell you. I consider that I’ve been the rounds, as you may say, and that I’ve got as much character as most men. I’ve had about everything in my life that most have, and a great deal more than some. I’ve seen that everything wears out, and that when a thing’s worn out it’s for good and all. I think it’s reasonable to suppose that when I wear out it will be for good and all, too. There isn’t anything of us, as I look at it, except the potentiality of experiences. The experiences come through the passions that you can tell on the fingers of one hand: love, hate, hope, grief, and you may say greed for the thumb. When you’ve had them, that’s the end of it; you’ve exhausted your capacity; you’re used up, and so’s your character, — that often dies before the body does.”

  “No, no!” Ewbert protested. “Human capacity is infinite;” but even while he spoke this seemed to him a contradiction in terms. “I mean that the passions renew themselves with new occasions, new opportunities, and character grows continually. You have loved twice, you have grieved twice; in battle you hated more than once; in business you must have coveted many times. Under different conditions, the passions, the potentiality of experiences, will have a pristine strength. Can’t you see it in that light? Can’t you draw some hope from that?”

  “Hope!” cried Ransom Hilbrook, lifting his fallen head and staring at the minister. “Why, man, you don’t suppose I want to live hereafter? Do you think I’m anxious to have it all over again, or any of it? Is that why you’ve been trying to convince me of immortality? I know there’s something in what you say, — more than what you realize. I’ve argued annihilation up to this point and that, and almost proved it to my own mind; but there’s always some point that I can’t quite get over. If I had the certainty, the absolute certainty, that this was all there was to be of it, I wouldn’t want to live an hour longer, not a minute! But it’s the uncertainty that keeps me. What I’m afraid of is, that if I get out of it here, I might wake up in my old identity, with the potentiality of new experiences in new conditions. That’s it I’m tired. I’ve had enough. I want to be let alone. I don’t want to do anything more, or have anything more done to me. I want to stop.”

  Ewbert’s first impression was that he was shocked; but he was too honest to remain in this conventional assumption. He was profoundly moved, however, and intensely interested. He realized that Hilbrook was perfectly sincere, and he could put himself in the old man’s place, and imagine why he should feel as he did. Ewbert blamed himself for not having conceived of such a case before; and he saw that if he were to do anything for this lonely soul, he must begin far back of the point from which he had started with him. The old man’s position had a kind of dignity which did not admit of the sort of pity Ewbert had been feeling for him, and the minister had before him the difficult and delicate task of persuading Hilbrook, not that a man, if he died, should live again, but that he should live upon terms so kind and just that none of the fortuities of mortal life should be repeated in that immortality. He must show the immortal man to be a creature so happily conditioned that he would be in effect newly created, before Hilbrook would consent to accept the idea of living again. He might say to him that he would probably not be consulted in the matter, since he had not been consulted as to his existence here; but such an answer would brutally ignore the claim that such a man’s developed consciousness could justly urge to some share in the counsels of omnipotence. Ewbert did not know where to begin, and in his despair he began with a laugh.

  “Upon my word,” he said, “you’ve presented a problem that would give any casuist pause, and it’s beyond my powers without some further thought. Your doubt, as I now understand it, is not of immortality, but of mortality; and there I can’t meet you in argument without entirely forsaking my own ground. If it will not seem harsh, I will confess that your doubt is rather consoling to me; for I have so much faith in the Love which rules the world that I am perfectly willing to accept reëxistence on any terms that Love may offer. You may say that this is because I have not yet exhausted the potentialities of experience, and am still interested in my own identity; and one half of this, at least, I can’t deny. But even if it were otherwise, I should trust to find among those Many Mansions which we are told of some chamber where I should be at rest without being annihilated; and I can even imagine my being glad to do any sort of work about the House, when I was tired of resting.”

  VIII.

  “I am glad you said that to him!” cried Ewbert’s wife, when he told her of his interview with old Hilbrook. “That will give him something to think about. What did he say?”

  Ewbert had been less and less satisfied with his reply to Hilbrook, in which it seemed to him that he had passed from mockery to reproof, with no great credit to himself; and his wife’s applause now set the seal to his displeasure with it.

  “Oh, he said simply that he could understand a younger person feeling differently, and that he did not wish to set himself up as a censor. But he could not pretend that he was glad to have been called out of nonentity into being, and that he could imagine nothing better than eternal unconsciousness.”

  “Well?”

  “I told him that his very words implied the refusal of his being to accept nonentity again; that they expressed, or adumbrated, the conception of an eternal consciousness of the eternal unconsciousness he imagined himself longing for. I’m not so sure they did, now.”

  “Of course they did. And then what did he say?”

  “He said nothing in direct reply; he sighed, and dropped his poor old head on his breast, and seemed very tired; so that I tried talking of other things for a while, and then I came away. Emily, I’m afraid I wasn’t perfectly candid, perfectly kind, with him.”

  “I don’t see how you could have been more so!” she retorted, in tender indignation with him against himself. “And I think what he said was terrible. It was bad enough for him to pretend to believe that he was not going to live again, but for him to tell you that he was afraid he was!” An image sufficiently monstrous to typify Hilbrook’s wickedness failed to present itself to Mrs. Ewbert, and she went out to give the maid instructions for something unusually nourishing for Ewbert at their mid-day dinner. “You look fairly fagged out, Clarence,” she said, when she came back; “and I insist upon your not going up to that dreadful old man’s again, — at least, not till you’ve got over this shock.”

  “Oh, I don’t think it has affected me seriously,” he returned lightly.

  “Yes, it has! yes, it has!” she declared. “It’s just
like your thinking you hadn’t taken cold, the other day when you were caught in the rain; and the next morning you got up with a sore throat, and it was Sunday morning, too.”

  Ewbert could not deny this, and he had no great wish to see Hilbrook soon again. He consented to wait for Hilbrook to come to him, before trying to satisfy these scruples of conscience which he had hinted at; and he reasonably hoped that the painful points would cease to rankle with the lapse of time, if there should be a long interval before they met.

  That night, before the Ewberts had finished their tea, there came a ring at the door, from which Mrs. Ewbert disconsolately foreboded a premature evening call. “And just when I was counting on a long, quiet, restful time for you, and getting you to bed early!” she lamented in undertone to her husband; to the maid who passed through the room with an inquiring glance, to the front door, she sighed, still in undertone, “Oh yes, of course we’re at home.”

  They both listened for the voice at the door, to make out who was there; but the voice was so low that they were still in ignorance while the maid was showing the visitor into the library, and until she came back to them.

  “It’s that old gentleman who lives all alone by himself on the hill over the brook,” she explained; and Mrs. Ewbert rose with an air of authority, waving her husband to keep his seat.

  “Now, Clarence, I am simply not going to let you go in. You are sick enough as it is, and if you are going to let that awful old man spend the whole evening here, and drain the life out of you! I will see him, and tell him” —

  “No, no, Emily! It won’t do. I must see him. It isn’t true that I’m sick. He’s old, and he has a right to the best we can do for him. Think of his loneliness! I shall certainly not let you send him away.” Ewbert was excitedly gulping his second cup of tea; he pushed his chair back, and flung his napkin down as he added, “You can come in, too, and see that I get off alive.”

  “I shall not come near you,” she answered resentfully; but Ewbert had not closed the door behind him, and she felt it her duty to listen.

  IX.

  Mrs. Ewbert heard old Hilbrook begin at once in a high senile key without any form of response to her husband’s greeting: “There was one thing you said to-day that I’ve been thinkin’ over, and I’ve come down to talk with you about it.”

  “Yes?” Ewbert queried submissively, though he was aware of being quite as fagged as his wife accused him of being, after he spoke.

  “Yes,” Hilbrook returned. “I guess I ha’n’t been exactly up and down with myself. I guess I’ve been playing fast and loose with myself. I guess you’re right about my wantin’ to have enough consciousness to enjoy my unconsciousness,” and the old gentleman gave a laugh of rather weird enjoyment. “There are things,” he resumed seriously, “that are deeper in us than anything we call ourselves. I supposed I had gone to the bottom, but I guess I hadn’t. All the while there was something down there that I hadn’t got at; but you reached it and touched it, and now I know it’s there. I don’t know but it’s my Soul that’s been havin’ its say all the time, and me not listenin’. I guess you made your point.”

  Ewbert was still not so sure of that. He had thrown out that hasty suggestion without much faith in it at the time, and his faith in it had not grown since.

  “I’m glad,” he began, but Hilbrook pressed on as if he had not spoken.

  “I guess we’re built like an onion,” he said, with a severity that forbade Ewbert to feel anything undignified in the homely illustration. “You can strip away layer after layer till you seem to get to nothing at all; but when you’ve got to that nothing you’ve got to the very thing that had the life in it, and that would have grown again if you had put it in the ground.”

  “Exactly!” said Ewbert.

  “You made a point that I can’t get round,” Hilbrook continued, and it was here that Ewbert enjoyed a little instant of triumph. “But that ain’t the point with me. I see that I can’t prove that we shan’t live again any more than you can prove that we shall. What I want you to do now is to convince me, or to give me the least reason to believe, that we shan’t live again on exactly the same terms that we live now. I don’t want to argue immortality any more; we’ll take that for granted. But how is it going to be any different from mortality with the hope of death taken away?”

  Hilbrook’s apathy was gone, and his gentleness; he had suddenly an air and tone of fierce challenge. As he spoke he brought a clenched fist down on the arm of his chair; he pushed his face forward and fixed Ewbert with the vitreous glitter of his old eyes. Ewbert found him terrible, and he had a confused sense of responsibility for him, as if he had spiritually constituted him, in the charnel of unbelief, out of the spoil of death, like some new and fearfuler figment of Frankenstein’s. But if he had fortuitously reached him, through the one insincerity of his being, and bidden him live again forever, he must not forsake him or deny him.

  “I don’t know how far you accept or reject the teachings of Scripture on this matter,” he began rather vaguely, but Hilbrook stopped him.

  “You didn’t go to the Book for the point you made against me. But if you go to it now for the point I want you to make for me, what are you going to find? Are you going to find the promise of a life any different from the life we have here? I accept it all, — all that the Old Testament says, and all that the New Testament says; and what does it amount to on this point?”

  “Nothing but the assurance that if we live rightly here we shall be happy in the keeping of the divine Love there. That assurance is everything to me.”

  “It isn’t to me!” cried the old man. “We are in the keeping of the divine Love here, too, and are we happy? Are those who live rightly happy? It’s because we’re not conditioned for happiness here; and how are we going to be conditioned differently there? We are going to suffer to all eternity through our passions, our potentialities of experience, there just as we do here.”

  “There may be other passions, other potentialities of experience,” Ewbert suggested, casting about in the void.

  “Like what?” Hilbrook demanded. “I’ve been trying to figure it, and I can’t. I should like you to try it. You can’t imagine a new passion in the soul any more than you can imagine a new feature in the face. There they are: eyes, ears, nose, mouth, chin; love, hate, greed, hope, fear! You can’t add to them or take away from them.” The old man dropped from his defiance in an entreaty that was even more terrible to Ewbert. “I wish you could. I should like to have you try. Maybe I haven’t been over the whole ground. Maybe there’s some principle that I’ve missed.” He hitched his chair closer to Ewbert’s, and laid some tremulous fingers on the minister’s sleeve. “If I’ve got to live forever, what have I got to live for?”

  “Well,” said Ewbert, meeting him fully in his humility, “let us try to make it out together. Let us try to think. Apparently, our way has brought us to a dead wall; but I believe there’s light beyond it, if we can only break through. Is it really necessary that we should discover some new principle? Do we know all that love can do from our experience of it here?”

  “Have you seen a mother with her child?” Hilbrook retorted.

  “Yes, I know. But even that has some alloy of selfishness. Can’t we imagine love in which there is no greed, — for greed, and not hate, is the true antithesis of love which is all giving, while greed is all getting, — a love that is absolutely pure?”

  “I can’t,” said the old man. “All the love I ever felt had greed in it; I wanted to keep the thing I loved for myself.”

  “Yes, because you were afraid in the midst of your love. It was fear that alloyed it, not greed. And in easily imaginable conditions in which there is no fear of want, or harm, or death, love would be pure; for it is these things that greed itself wants to save us from. You can imagine conditions in which there shall be no fear, in which love casteth out fear?”

  “Well,” said Hilbrook provisionally.

  Ewbert had not thought of these
points himself before, and he was pleased with his discovery, though afterwards he was aware that it was something like an intellectual juggle. “You see,” he temporized, “we have got rid of two of the passions already, fear and greed, which are the potentialities of our unhappiest experience in this life. In fact, we have got rid of three, for without fear and greed men cannot hate.”