The case of John Smith : his heaven and his hell

Front matter

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Class ' cj u c}¥S ^

His Heaven and His Hell

Contents

—The Voice of the God .

PACB I

II.-

II

LET us now imagine this revelation vouchsafed to, let us say, a certain John Smith as he laboured at his typewriter during a busy day.

He had hardly had time to grasp it fully, The C&S6 of •-> J. ^

John Smith ^°^ ^^® afternoon waned and his employer was impatient for uncompleted documents, yet Smith's subconscious self turned over the idea busily while his fingers played upon the lettered keys. By the time he delivered the neatly folded and labelled papers, and prepared to catch the 5.37 train to Lonelyville, he had begun to be a little familiar with these so new intimations.

Watching the scowling face of his employer as he jammed himself into his overcoat and hat, thrust the papers into his pocket, and slammed himself out of the office without thanks or farewell, John Smith muttered amusedly, as he in turn prepared to depart from the scene of his labours:

"Gee! — I guess the Boss don't suspect this is heaven. He's got a good business, a nice wife, and a new motor car, yet I bet he thinks things in general are a good deal more like hell. Sort of funny when you come to consider it."

Smith's habit had been to read the evening 10

The Case of John Smith ii

paper during the journey homeward, and, incidentally, to anathematize the railway company for the poor light, the shabby cars, and the unevenness of the track. It had seemed one of the worst hardships of his lot, that dull suburban journey twice a day, but this evening the paper failed to hold his attention. His new idea looked fresher and more important than the contents of the latest extra, even though its flaring headlines reiterated the horrors of a general European war.

He pushed up the dusty window and leaned out to look at the September moon rising rosilygold through the misty amethyst of the dusk that brooded across the marshes. It had always seemed a vapid, ugly outlook heretofore, but the new sense of ownership opened his eyes to the magic of those dim purples and pansy-browns.

''Mine!'' — he smiled, and found it as pleasant a stretch of landscape as a man might wish to see.

Here and there a glint of silver was lighting the soft expanse of tawny sea-grass where the rising tide had filled a brackish pool. He breathed his lungs full of the mild salt air that moved languidly through the growing night, the weariness of the day's work falling from him like the dropping of an actual burden.

"My! — don't the moon look pretty tonight," exclaimed a woman to her companion in the seat behind him.

Smith flushed a little at her comment and grinned half deprecatingly. It was pleasant to hear his belongings so frankly admired. . . .

Lonel3rsrille was a new "building scheme" pushing out into the fields beyond the little town where he left the train. Its magnificently wide avenues, with unfinished sidewalks and trees still in the clothes-pole stage, were but sparsely inhabited as yet by excessively detached dwellings. He had always resented the ten minutes' walk between the alighting and his own door, but tonight it seemed less burdensome than usual. It would give him time, he felt, to digest this astonishing new thought.

The electric lights sputtered a little and glowed a silvery purple, being newly turned on, and then the current steadying, flared into pink radiance, casting upon the pavement beneath clear sepia shadows of the fast thinning boughs. He paused a moment to watch the fine lines at his feet flitting and mingling as the wind breathed through the branches.

"That's about as charming a thing as you'd ever find," he reflected admiringly. "Guess I never noticed it before, though I've certainly seen it a thousand times. It must look fine when there is snow on the ground — I'll remember to watch out for it this winter. Anyhow it's a regular picture, and it's mine," he smiled to himself, moving on.

The chimes rang from a neighbouring steeple; clashes of melodious vibration, tangling the newsmitten bell notes with the still quivering tones of their forerunners into a woven braid of sound. They proclaimed with sweet sonority that

"He who watches over Israel Neither slumbers nor sleeps."

"Lord! that's nice too," John Smith told himself appreciatively as he hurried on.

"I thought the minister was a blithering old idiot asking for money to stick a lot of bells in the steeple. I said to Nelly when she was trying to tease a dollar out of me — ' What's the use of 'em, ' I said. 'Just wasting money to make an infernal lot of noise.' — But I guess the parson knew what he was about. It's real pleasant walking home to big music like that. . . . And all that's mine too."

The houses began to space farther apart. He neared the end of the little town. A mound of moist leaves, brushed from the streets since last night's storm, slowly burned in a vacant lot. The breeze carried to him from the smouldering heap thin wisps of pungent smoke, sweet as incense.

"Well, if that smell don't take me right back to the farm," he mentally exclaimed. "Makes me think how Ma used to put us to raking and burning the leaves evenings in the fall when the chores were done."

The necromancy of an odour woke a quick vision of his hardy Spartan childhood; the stem discipline of study and labour, the meagre fare and few indulgences, because of which he had been so restive, from which at last he had fled resentfully to the city.

He had remembered his early years always with a certain bitterness, but the perfume of the smoking leaves seemed suddenly to readjust and sweeten those recollections.

How clean, and wholesome, and God-fearing that life had been. What delicious sleep he had known after toil; what fine vigour and sanity of body followed upon the sweat in the sun ; how good the plain food had tasted when one never had a crumb too much. No meals had ever seemed quite the same since. . . .

And the yearly circus, his one pleasure, for which he had had to earn his entrance money — why, if someone were to give him a box at the opera for the whole season he couldn't quiver with ecstasy for weeks before and after as he did in those days over his single luxury. . . .

His one luxury? By George! — now he came to think of it he'd had a thousand. He'd not realized it at the time. . . .

His nostrils were reminiscent of all the good country smells — the mild milky odour of the cows as he drove them home in the evenings; of the hot spiciness of the pine needles when he snatched ten minutes, sleep after the noon dinner; of the warm nourishing perfume of the hay as he pitched it; of the clean bread-like fragrance of the corn he husked; of the aromatic sap bubbHng and singing from the green logs on winter nights. . . .

Memory brought back the savour of his boyhood's food — the flowery sweetness of fresh honey on the hot biscuits for supper, the winey tartness of the first-ripe apples, the crisp deliciousness of the new nuts, the warm juiciness of the blackberries, the bland richness of the fresh buttermilk.

Then that splendid tingling shock of the cold creek water when one dived; the big pulse of the boyish games, the laughter, the thrilling mischief. . . .

"That was a sort of heaven, too — if I'd only known it," he told himself amazedly. "And me cursing the farm all these years! Guess I've been pretty considerable of a fool in my time. . . . "

A last whiff of the smoke as he passed on brought a later memory.

Little Nelly had been buried in September, and he recalled passing just such a scented leaf -fire that first night as he came home after the funeral. That desperate evening when he knew he should find Nelly, the mother, waiting for him in new black and unquenchable tears in the house lonely for ever of the gay presence of the child.

He stopped, with a pang, to consider this from his new point of view. How could one call any place a heaven where a man could suffer as he had done that night, and many nights? It didn't seem reconcilable.

Little Nelly! . . .

A sob rose in his throat, and his eyes stung. Of course he loved his two boys — but his girl ! . . . She was different. He could see her curls now; could feel her small soft arms about his neck when she ran "to give Daddy a big hug" every night when he came home from work. And now she was only a name. Just a small grassed-over mound in the cemetery behind the hill. After a while, when he and Nelly were gone, no one would remember she'd ever lived. That was the hardest part — that she should be forgotten as if she'd never been at all, his little Dear. . . . All her pretty tricks came back to his memory as if it were only yesterday she had died.

She was like a rose . . . like a bird. . . .

A deep elemental tenderness flooded his heart.

He'd never paid much attention to roses till Nelly died, but now they always made him think of her. It was why he and her mother had such pleasure in their garden, particularly when the roses came in June — her birthday month. The best of them they always saved for the little mound and most of the others went to the Children's Hospital. How pleased the sick kids always were with the bouquets of roses and honeysuckle and the card tied on that said "With Little Nelly's love."

Why, heavens! That was just what his girl had taught him, pity and love. . . .

Like a rose . . . like a bird. . . . Like a bird she had come and had flown, but she'd left something behind her. He'd been stupid before — just hadn't thought — but Nelly had shown him the meaning of the suffering of other folk's children. Her sufferings had made him feel he'd like to help and comfort all the little young helpless creatures in the world. And suddenly the old hidden hurt melted into unutterable sweetness.

Nelly forgotten? — She'd live always in the kindness he'd carry on to others, and that they would give in turn down the generations. When you came to think of it the world couldn't get on without the pain that taught you to feel for other folk's pain.

Perhaps that was just the way the very first kindness began! . . .

His Baby! — He'd never ask again why she'd been taken away. She'd gone so that she might teach him pity and a wider love. Perhaps if she'd stayed he never would have learned. She'd be like a hidden treasure in his breast always now, to be shared with all who needed. You couldn't call a child dead who went on helping other people to live ....

The moon was well up. The flooding creek turned to a river of light. He glanced, hurrying past, at the young beech tree which grew at the entrance of his street of sparse, scattered houses. Already nearly all its leaves had gone. It stood up bare and silvery, lifting its slender branches as if dancing lightly in the soft winds of the darkness. He'd hardly noticed it before, but he hngered a moment to look, and thought the tree as prettyas a slim nude girl. Then, his gaze turned back lingeringly, he passed on with quick steps to the light shining from his own windows.

"You're awful late this evening," said his wife fretfully as he hung his overcoat on the hook in the passage. "I do wish we could live somewhere you didn't have such a tiresome long way to come from the station. "

"Oh, I don't mind," he answered cheerfully, putting his arm about her shoulders and giving her a kiss. "It's a real pretty walk a night like this; sort of blows the office out of your lungs."

He noted her flush of pleasure at his tenderness and reminded himself never again to forget the little caress when he came home. He supposed women cared more than you'd think about small things like that.

"The grate in the range burnt out this morning," she announced as they sat down to supper, "and the plumber came to see about it. He had to draw the fire, and it looked like he wouldn't get it done in time to cook anything tonight."

"Seems you managed, though," he smiled. "Bully good meal, I call it, but it's safe to bet on you getting there, every time."

His wife's brow smoothed.

"Well, it took hustling to do it. The worst thing was Liphook always wants cash right down, so I had to give him what we'd put aside for taking the young ones to the White City tomorrow.

Jim and Rob are feeling awfully downhearted about it."

The two sleek -headed boys looked their disgust — mouths and hearts both too full to do spoken justice to the subject.

"That's a pity; but look here now, how about doing up a cold lunch tomorrow and taking a trolley into the country somewheres. Think I'd like that better anyhow. Say, boys, let's go out and take a look at our country estate."

"Country estate! It's a grand estate we've got. It's as much as we can do to keep up the payments on this house — though it's country enough, goodness knows," Mrs. Smith commented tartly.

"Well, there's Crawford's Beach out at the end of the line. We can go there, and I guess all out-of-doors is as much ours as anybody's. Pretty big estate when you come to think of it. "

"Oh, if you choose to call it yours, I suppose it is big enough."

"Well, whose is it if it isn't ours? We'll give it to the boys when we're done with it, Nelly. Hey, fellows! you'll be rich young bloods when I leave you all out-of-doors in my will. Guess the Vanderbilt and the Astor children won't get anything bigger than that."

The boys kicked the rungs of their chairs and snickered. Dad was in an awful good humour, they thought.

"Anything special happen at the office today?"

his wife enquired. John was usually rather weary and cross Saturday nights. These high spirits must have a cause.

"Well, the Boss was in a pickle of a temper because some business came in late and prevented his getting off till after five. He was meaning to motor up the State a ways to his Country Club, but it's easy enough to make it after dinner with this moon."

"Some folks are never satisfied," commented his wife scornfully. "Of course he didn't think about your being kept late too, and no motor car to come home in, either."

"Oh, well, I'd a nice walk, and that was more than he did," laughed her husband contentedly as he rose to look for his pipe. "Here, you boys — you'd better get off to bed; we've got to make a long day of it tomorrow."

They had made a long day of it. A yellow trolley car, with its "witch's broom" touching the magic strand of wire threaded through the land had whirled them past pale blonde autumn fields, and rocked them through gold and scarlet woods to the sleeping indigo sea that frilled a languid foam upon the long stretch of sallow sands.

The boys had wiled their father into an elaborate game of fort and castle building by the water's edge — a game occupying all the morning with salt and gritty but inspiring labour, and they reluctantly abandoned their heaped walls and curving demilunes only at their mother's midday call to food.

She had chosen as a dining-room the angle of an old fragment of crumbling worm-fence, once closing in the pasture from the beach. Over the grey rails, furred and hoary with lichens, hung a tattered crimson drapery of Virginia creeper. Above slanted an ancient cedar, worn and bent by the winds but still sucking sturdiness from the salt moisture beloved of its roots — a little wild sea bower where she had spread her meal beside a posy gathered in the meadow and set upright between two stones; a posy of purple iron weed, mauve asters, and late goldenrod half fluffed into a tawny fur of seeds.

"Well, you're the great one!" her husband cried admiringly as he dropped beside the cloth. "You'd make a sort of home wherever they set you down. Deserts or desert islands wouldn't phase the old lady."

The boys grinned appreciatively as she blushed and dimpled.

How good the food tasted; — how good was the pipe after it !

"No, you villains," their father protested as he stretched himself in the warm sand and propped his shoulders against the tree, lazily watching his wife pack the basket. "You build your own forts. I'm helping your Mommer. "

"Humph! — helping — " his wife scoffed cheerfully, and the boys wandered back to the irresistible treasures of weeds and shells.

"Oh, John!" she yearned, finishing her task and settling herself beside him. "Don't you wish we were rich and could do things like this every day?"

"I don't know. Guess we wouldn't care about it if we were. You never see rich people doing pleasant things that don't cost money, do you now? Can you imagine my Boss and Mrs. Boss liking this?"

They exchanged amused smiles at the idea, and he went on:

"As for being rich, seems to me we've got an awful lot already." He waved his hand comprehensively. "And wait a minute! — here's something handsome for you — look at that!"

A late dragonfly lingering, by some quaint tenderness of the season's oversight, alone of all his race, drifted down the breeze and hung hovering over her posy.

"Ain't that wonderful? He's like a piece of jewellery flying about. I'll make you a present of him, Nelly, and I bet the Boss never gave his wife anything finer than that. "

She studied the silent flickering of the winged gem circling her flowers, and as it vanished, turned a brooding eye upon her husband.

"You might just as well tell me» John Smith," she said severely. "You've been talking awfully queer, and I am going to know what it means."

And then he did try to tell her — stumblingly ; in broken ejaculation, with inadequate phrases.

"It sort of came to me," he concluded, putting away his pipe and clasping his knees. "I don't know just how — as if somebody was talking — kind of wirelessing it into my head. "... He looked gravely into her wide, startled eyes. "Just think what it means, Nelly, if it's true — and by George! I believe it is. . . . This heaven, right here and now, if we could only see it was. All these splendid big things our own property. And did you ever feel before how fine they are? I never did. It sort of makes your heart swell up inside of you to see them so beautiful, and know they're all our own — things that looked only just common and natural before. After you think of them this new way it seems enough just to see, and hear, and breathe, and sleep and eat. , . , "

She made no answer. She let her wondering glance pass up to the benignant paleness of the blue above; out to the deep-toned autumn sea that sighed slumberously against the grey-gold sand. She brooded a moment upon the dull rose and jade of the lichens clothing the rails of the sagging fence; upon her nosegay propped between the two veined stones; on the fluttering bright leaves of the creeper. The shouting play of her two sturdy lads held her attention for a while. Then the gaze came back to the man stretched beside her along the thin fading grass.

"Oh — but John!" she began, and caught a long breath. "Don't you see? It's sort of terrible "

"Terrible?"

"Yes. ... If it is — well, then we've got to be so awfully careful not to spoil it. You couldn't do anything mean, or bad, or cruel in heaven you

know "

! He considered a moment, in the light of this idea, and reaching out gathered the hand nearest him into a close grasp.

"That's a new one to me — but yes, Nell, I guess you're right. It comes to just about that."

"And to think, " she went on, with another deep breath, "of the way they are acting over in Europe now! — blowing each other in pieces and spoiling all the houses and towns and everything. Why, of course, if folks act so foolish how's any place going to be like heaven? Seems to me if they only knew what place they're in they'd behave different. It's a pity somebody doesn't tell them."

John Smith lifted himself to his feet and began to brush the sand from his trousers.

"Perhaps nobody ever has told them," he said regretfully. "I wish somebody 'd try to make them understand: but of course they wouldn't listen to you or me. They'd just sniff and call us crazy cranks. Well, let's call the boys. It's about time we were getting home, Mommer."

Ill

A VAGUE sense of a radiance close at hand, causing him to glance frequently over his shoulder, came to John Smith as time passed. There was nothing definite to be seen. His first thought was that he had forgotten to ® ^*"* draw down the office blind, but the sen- standing sation was quite as clear after the day was done and he was carrying his new idea home with him in the dusk, turning it over, trying to grasp some of its infinite implications.

This impression of light grew stronger as the weeks elapsed, as did his habit of turning suddenly to catch a glimpse of something or someone near. Once he fancied he had a fleeting vision of lucent outlines, but he told himself this must have been but a fancy, and for long the thing tantalized him with a sense of an elusive following presence. Yet the light always grew and deepened, and the consciousness of a personality, a being, near at hand became a conviction.

He was at times sure he saw it, and then was less sure, and he could hardly have told — so gradual was the realization — when he became wholly aware of the exquisite thing that was his companion on those shadowy tramps every evening from the station to his home in Roosevelt Terrace, Lonelyville. It was much later yet when he found courage to speak to this glimmering comrade.

"I'd like to know just who you are," he said at last, with shy abruptness.

"Have you no idea?" she demanded smilingly, turning her deep shining eyes upon him.

"No, I haven't," he admitted reluctantly, and then in a burst of irrepressible frankness: "But whoever you are you're a 'looker,'"

" Yes, " she replied amiably, " I have always been thought beautiful by those who have known me. "

"But what's your name?" he persisted.

"I've been known by so many names! — Men have called me Religion, and Philosophy, and Art, and Truth, and Poetry, and Wisdom. You see I have so many forms, and am seen so differently by different eyes. What I call myself is the Spirit of Understanding. "

"It's very kind of you to walk home with me, " John Smith said humbly. Her manner, gentle as it was, gave him the impression that she was a very great lady.

"Oh, I don't bestow my society exclusively on the people who are considered important. 'Babes and sucklings' — you know," she laughed.

He smiled with polite vagueness in answer, not being quite sure of her meaning.

"To those who confide themselves to my leading, " she continued, "I show the most surprising things."

"Will you show them to me?" he enquired hopefully.

"Why not? You are one of those who have eyes to see, and they are rare folk," she said indulgently. "I gave you a message not a great while since and you understood it."

"It was you, then, " he cried, and as she nodded kindly: "Why, I told Nelly it was just like someone speaking. . . . "

"You shall see as well as hear," the Shining Lady murmured, laying her hand on his, and very suddenly and surprisingly John Smith was aware that instead of making the third turning to the left he was walking with his Shimmering Lady in a vast country where there were mountains and plains, forests, rivers, brooks, and shining seas. He saw around him flowers, and fields of grass, and sandy wastes, and many great cities, smaller towns, and little villages.

Everywhere throughout this prodigious landscape there were men and women and children. Most of the children ran about freely enjoying the big things and the little ones, but to John Smith's amazement those who were passing into adolescence, and all the elders without exception, went with their Hmbs fettered. At first he supposed that these unfortunate persons were the victims of an alien oppression, the slaves of some cruel tyranny, but as they passed on their way — he and his companion — he noticed many in the act of tying complicated bands about themselves with an air of virtuous complacency. One tied a bandage over his eyes, another was pouring wax into his ears and nostrils, another knotting ropes about his ankles so that he could walk only by shambling hops. Still others tied up one arm or both, forced their necks through heavy yokes, sought out stones and bound them on their backs, drew up and buckled straps about their chests till their labouring lungs whistled for breath. A few, in what seemed to John Smith a sort of desperate insanity, maimed themselves horribly, cut their own tendons, disfigured their faces, gashed their bodies, dug out their own eyes, cut out their tongues.

"But why do they do such things?" he cried in horror. "Is this a land of madmen?"

"One would think so to look at them, would one not?" said his Lady sadly. "They do not realize it, though. They call themselves practical people who know the world, and yet always they have made for themselves these fetters, have blinded and tortured themselves for many strange reasons. Some of these chains they call habit and custom, or common sense, or worldly wisdom, and some fashion, or propriety. Many of their self maimings and disfigurements go by the name of religion or patriotism or philosophy. "

"Gee!" murmured John Smith.

"Now look over there to the east," suggested the Spirit. "See the millions of women who bind their feet into hooves, and totter about painfullyall their lives. They begin this with the babies, and the little things wail and fret all through their first years under the unceasing torture inflicted by their mothers, who really love them. The weaker children are never free from fever during their childhood, a fever brought about by physical misery, and hundreds of thousands of them die of it."

"Well, they certainly are looneys" commented her hearer indignantly.

"So the people over there in the west say, and yet among themselves hardly one has a natural, undeformed foot. Many of their women too totter through life in clothing for their feet fantastically unfitted to the human members, and aggravate it by putting a prop under the rear end of their shoes. They have been told again and again, and they know it quite well to be true, that such things produce in thousands of cases all manner of painful, even hideous diseases in other parts of their bodies, but they cling to this chain which blights their freedom and energies and causes them constant sufferings."

John Smith thought of the shape of his own foot and maintained an uncomfortable silence.

"Here you will notice," continued his guide, "are many binding their bodies in an overtight bandage, crushing together all their organs, weighting the action of their hearts, cramping their lungs, impeding the circulation of their blood: some of them never know a moment of physical comfort for the greater part of their lives because of this bandage. See in that direction — people tearing holes in their flesh to hang jewels in them, jewels so heavy that the lobes of their ears nearly touch their shoulders. There they tear holes in their noses. Yonder men prick their whole bodies from head to heel to make ornamental patterns of various colours, and fester and fever in the doing of it. "

"I notice it's mostly the women that are the worst," the man commented a little self -righteously.

"Oh," answered his guide lightly, "femininity has its favourite chains, but you will see the men in this place do some queer things too. Their favourite chain is the use of poisons. The men in the east, where the women maim their own feet, grow a deadly drug which they inhale through pipes. A drug that rots them body and soul; one of the crudest fetters ever yet discovered. And turn now to the west. See that huge flood of poison like a vast rushing river . . . watch how the men fling into it youth and health, honour, hope, wealth, virtue, intellect — everything they possess. They bathe in that hideous flood of fiery fluid: saturate themselves in its bitter waters, and some of them, maddened by it, kill their friends, their wives, their children, themselves. You will admit, my friend, that when men clasp such a gyve as this upon their Hmbs even the tortured foot seems but a light bond by contrast. "