Shapes that Haunt the Dusk :: In Tenebras A Parable

In Tenebras A Parable

BY HOWARD PYLE

One morning, after I had dressed myself and had left my room, I came upon an entry which I had never before noticed, even in this my own house. At the further end a door stood ajar, and wondering what was in the room beyond, I traversed the long passageway and looked within. There I saw a man sitting, with an open book lying upon his knees, who, as I laid one hand upon the door and opened it a little wider, beckoned to me to come and read what was written therein.

A secret fear stirred and rustled in my heart, but I did not dare to disobey. So, coming forward (gathering away my clothes lest they should touch his clothes), I leaned forward and read these words:

"What shall a man do that he may gain the kingdom of heaven?"

I did not need a moment to seek for an answer to the question. "That," said I, "is not difficult to tell, for it has been answered again and again. He who would gain the kingdom of heaven must resist and subdue the lusts of his heart; he must do good works to his neighbors; he must fear his God. What more is there that man can do?"

Then the leaf was turned, and I read the Parable.

I.

The town of East Haven is the full equation of the American ideal worked out to a complete and finished result. Therein is to be found all that is best of New England intellectuality—well taught, well trained; all that is best of solidly established New England prosperity; all that is best of New England progressive radicalism, tempered, toned, and governed by all that is best of New England conservatism, warmed to life by all that is best and broadest of New England Christian liberalism. It is the sum total of nineteenth-century American cultus, and in it is embodied all that for which we of these days of New World life are striving so hard. Its municipal government is a perfect model of a municipal government; its officials are elected from the most worthy of its prosperous middle class by voters every one of whom can not only read the Constitution, but could, if it were required, analyze its laws and by-laws. Its taxes are fairly and justly assessed, and are spent with a well-considered and munificent liberality. Its public works are the very best that can be compassed, both from an artistic and practical stand-point. It has a free library, not cumbersomely large, but almost perfect of its kind; and, finally, it is the boast of the community that there is not a single poor man living within its municipal limits.

Its leisure class is well read and widely speculative, and its busy class, instead of being jealous of what the other has attained, receives gladly all the good that it has to impart.

All this ripeness of prosperity is not a matter of quick growth of a recent date; neither is its wealth inherited and held by a few lucky families. It was fairly earned in the heyday of New England commercial activity that obtained some twenty-five or thirty years ago, at which time it was the boast of East Haven people that East Haven sailing-vessels covered the seas from India to India. Now that busy harvest-time is passed and gone, and East Haven rests with opulent ease, subsisting upon the well-earned fruits of good work well done.

With all this fulness of completion one might think that East Haven had attained the perfection of its ideal. But no. Still in one respect it is like the rest of the world; still, like the rest of the world, it is attainted by one great nameless sin, of which it, in part and parcel, is somehow guilty, and from the contamination of which even it, with all its perfection of law and government, is not free. Its boast that there are no poor within its limits is true only in a certain particular sense. There are, indeed, no poor resident, tax-paying, voting citizens, but during certain seasons of the year there are, or were, plenty of tramps, and they were not accounted when that boast was made.

East Haven has clad herself in comely enough fashion with all those fine garments of enlightened self-government, but underneath those garments are, or were, the same vermin that infested the garments of so many communities less clean—parasites that suck existence from God's gifts to decent people. Indeed, that human vermin at one time infested East Haven even more than the other and neighboring towns; perhaps just because its clothing of civilization was more soft and warm than theirs; perhaps (and upon the face this latter is the more likely explanation of the two) because, in a very exaltation of enlightenment, there were no laws against vagrancy. Anyhow, however one might account for their presence, there the tramps were. One saw the shabby, homeless waifs everywhere—in the highways, in the byways. You saw them slouching past the shady little common, with its smooth greensward, where well-dressed young ladies and gentlemen played at lawn-tennis; you saw them standing knocking at the doors of the fine old houses in Bay Street to beg for food to eat; you saw them in the early morning on the steps of the old North Church, combing their shaggy hair and beards with their fingers, after their night's sleep on the old colonial gravestones under the rustling elms; everywhere you saw them—heavy, sullen-browed, brutish—a living reproach to the well-ordered, God-fearing community of something cruelly wrong, something bitterly unjust, of which they, as well as the rest of the world, were guilty, and of which God alone knew the remedy.

No town in the State suffered so much from their infestation, and it was a common saying in the town of Norwark—a prosperous manufacturing community adjoining East Haven—that Dives lived in East Haven, and that Lazarus was his most frequent visitor.

The East Haven people always felt the sting of the suggested sneer; but what could they do? The poor were at their doors; they knew no immediate remedy for that poverty; and they were too compassionate and too enlightened to send the tramps away hungry and forlorn.

So Lazarus continued to come, and Dives continued to feed him at the gate, until, by-and-by, a strange and unexpected remedy for the trouble was discovered, and East Haven at last overcame its dirty son of Anak.

II.

Perhaps if all the votes of those ultra-intelligent electors had been polled as to which one man in all the town had done most to insure its position in the van of American progress; as to who best represented the community in the matter of liberal intelligence and ripe culture; as to who was most to be honored for steadfast rectitude and immaculate purity of life; as to who was its highest type of enlightened Christianity—an overwhelming if not unanimous vote would have been cast for Colonel Edward Singelsby.

He was born of one of the oldest and best New England families; he had graduated with the highest honors from Harvard, and finished his education at GÖttingen. At the outbreak of the rebellion he had left a lucrative law practice and a probable judgeship to fight at the head of a volunteer regiment throughout the whole war, which he did with signal credit to himself, the community, and the nation at large. He was a broad and profound speculative thinker, and the papers which he occasionally wrote, and which appeared now and then in the more prominent magazines, never failed to attract general and wide-spread attention. His intelligence, clear-cut and vividly operating, instead of leading him into the quicksands of scepticism, had never left the hard rock of earnest religious belief inherited from ten generations of Puritan ancestors. Nevertheless, though his feet never strayed from that rock, his was too active and living a soul to rest content with the arid face of a by-gone orthodoxy; God's rain of truth had fallen upon him and it, and he had hewn and delved until the face of his rock blossomed a very Eden of exalted Christianity. To sum up briefly and in full, he was a Christian gentleman of the highest and most perfect type.

Besides his close and profound studies in municipal government, from which largely had sprung such a flawless and perfect type as that of East Haven, he was also interested in public charities, and the existence of many of the beneficial organizations throughout the State had been largely due to his persistent and untiring efforts. The municipal reforms, as has been suggested, worked beautifully, perfectly, without the grating of a wheel or the creaking of a joint; but the public charities—somehow they did not work so well; they never did just what was intended, or achieved just what was expected; their mechanism appeared to be perfect, but, as is so universally the case with public charities, they somehow lacked a soul.

It was in connection with the matter of public charities that the tramp question arose. Colonel Singelsby grappled with it, as he had grappled with so many matters of the kind. The solution was the crowning work of his life, and the result was in a way as successful as it was paradoxical and unexpected.

Connected with the East Haven Public Library was the lecture-room, where an association, calling itself the East Haven Lyceum, and comprising in its number some of the most advanced thinkers of the town, met on Thursdays from November to May to discuss and digest matters social and intellectual. More than one good thing that had afterward taken definite shape had originated in the discussions of the Lyceum, and one winter, under Colonel Singelsby's lead, the tramp question was taken up and dissected.

He had, Colonel Singelsby said, studied that complex question very earnestly and for some time, and to his mind it had resolved itself to this: not how to suppress vagrancy, but how to make of the vagrant an honest and useful citizen. Repressive laws were easily passed, but it appeared to him that the only result achieved by them was to drive the tramp into other sections where no such laws existed, and which sections they only infested to a greater degree and in larger numbers. Nor in these days of light was it, in his opinion, a sufficient answer to that objection that it was the fault of those other communities that they did not also pass repressive laws. The fact remained that they had not passed them, and that the tramps did infest their precincts, and such being the case, it was as clear as day (for that which injures some, injures all) that the wrong of vagrancy was not corrected by merely driving tramps over the limits of one town into those of another. Moreover, there was a deeper and more interior reason against the passage of such repressive laws; to his thinking it behooved society, if it would root out this evil, to seek first the radix from which it drew existence; it behooved them first to very thoroughly diagnose the disease before attempting a hasty cure. "So let us now," said he, "set about searching for this radix, and then so drive the spade of reform as to remove it forever."

The discussion that followed opened a wide field for investigation, and the conclusion finally reached during the winter was not unlike that so logically deduced by Mr. Henry George at a later date. The East Haven Lyceum, however, either did not think of or did not care to advocate such a radical remedy as Mr. George proposed. They saw clearly enough that, apart from the unequal distribution of wealth, which may perhaps have been the prime cause of the trouble, idleness and thriftlessness are acquired habits, just as industry and thrift are acquired habits, and it seemed to them better to cure the ill habit rather than to upset society and then to rebuild it again for the sake of benefiting the ill-conditioned few.

So the result of the winter's talk was the founding of the East Haven Refuge, of which much has since been written and said.

Those interested in such matters may perhaps remember the article upon the Refuge published in one of the prominent magazines. A full description of it was given in that paper. The building stood upon Bay Street overlooking the harbor; it was one of the most beautiful situations in the town; without, the building was architecturally plain, but in perfect taste; within, it was furnished with every comfort and convenience—a dormitory immaculately clean; a dining-room, large and airy, where plain substantial food, cooked in the best possible manner, was served to the inmates. There were three bath-rooms supplied with hot and cold water, and there was a reading and a smoking-room provided not only with all the current periodicals, but with chess, checkers, and backgammon-boards.

At the same time that the Refuge was being founded and built, certain municipal laws were enacted, according to which a tramp appearing within the town limits was conveyed (with as little appearance of constraint as possible) to the Refuge. There for four weeks he was well fed, well clothed, well cared for. In return he was expected to work for eight hours every day upon some piece of public improvement: the repaving of Main Street with asphaltum blocks was selected by the authorities as the initial work. At the end of four weeks the tramp was dismissed from the Refuge clad in a neat, substantial, well-made suit of clothes, and with money in his pocket to convey him to some place where he might, if he chose, procure permanent work.

The Refuge was finished by the last of March, and Colonel Singelsby was unanimously chosen by the board as superintendent, a position he accepted very reluctantly. He felt that in so accepting he shouldered the whole responsibility of the experiment that was being undertaken, yet he could not but acknowledge that it was right for him to shoulder that burden, who had been foremost both in formulating and advocating the scheme, as well as most instrumental in carrying it to a practical conclusion. So, as was said, he accepted, though very reluctantly.

The world at large was much disposed to laugh at and to ridicule all the preparation that Dives of East Haven made to entertain his Lazarus. Nevertheless, there were a few who believed very sincerely in the efficacy of the scheme. But both those who believed and those who scoffed agreed in general upon one point—that it was altogether probable that East Haven would soon be overrun with such a wilderness of tramps that fifty Refuges would not be able to supply them with refuge.

But who shall undertake to solve that inscrutable paradox, human life—its loves, its hates?

The Refuge was opened upon the 1st of April; by the 29th there were thirty-two tramps lodged in its sheltering arms, all working their eight hours a day upon the repaving of Main Street. That same day—the 29th—five were dismissed from within its walls. Colonel Singelsby, as superintendent, had a little office on the ground-floor of the main building, opening out upon the street. At one o'clock, and just after the Refuge dinner had been served, he stood beside his table with five sealed envelopes spread out side by side upon it. Presently the five outgoing guests slouched one by one into the room. Each was shaven and shorn; each wore clean linen; each was clad in a neat, plain, gray suit of tweed; each bore stamped upon his face a dogged, obstinate, stolid, low-browed shame. The colonel gave each the money enclosed in the envelope, thanked each for his service, inquired with pleasant friendliness as to his future movements and plans, invited each to come again to the Refuge if he chanced to be in those parts, shook each by a heavy, reluctant hand, and bade each a good-by. Then the five slouched out and away, leaving the town by back streets and byways; each with his hat pulled down over his brows; each ten thousand times more humiliated, ten thousand times more debased in his cleanliness, in his good clothes, and with money in his pocket, than he had been in his dirt, his tatters, his poverty.

They never came back to East Haven again.

The capacity of the Refuge was 50. In May there were 47 inmates, and Colonel Singelsby began to apprehend the predicted overflow. The overflow never came. In June there were 45 inmates; in July there were 27; in August there were 28; in September, 10; in October, 2; in November, 1; in December there were none. The fall was very cold and wet, and maybe that had something to do with the sudden falling off of guests, for the tramp is not fond of cold weather. But even granting that bad weather had something to do with the matter, the Refuge was nevertheless a phenomenal, an extraordinary success—but upon very different lines than Colonel Singelsby had anticipated; for even in this the first season of the institution the tramps began to shun East Haven even more sedulously than they had before cultivated its hospitality. Even West Hampstead, where vagrancy was punished only less severely than petty larceny, was not so shunned as East Haven with the horrid comforts of its Refuge.

III.

As was said, the records of the Refuge showed that one inmate still lingered in the sheltering arms of that institution during a part of the month of November. That one was Sandy Graff.

Sandy Graff did not strictly belong to the great peregrinating leisure class for whose benefit the Refuge had been more especially founded and built. Those were strangers to the town, and came and went apparently without cause for coming and going. Little or nothing was known of such—of their name, of their life, of whence they came or whither their footsteps led. But with Sandy Graff it was different; he belonged identically to the place, and all the town knew him, the sinister tragedy of his history, and all the why and wherefore that led to his becoming the poor miserable drunken outcast—the town "bummer"—that he was.

There is something bitterly enough pathetic in the profound abasement of the common tramp—frouzy, unkempt, dirty, forlorn; without ambition further than to fill his belly with the cold leavings from decent folks' tables; without other pride than to clothe his dirty body with the cast-off rags and tatters of respectability; without further motive of life than to roam hither and yon—idle, useless, homeless, aimless. In all this there is indeed enough of the pathetic, but Sandy Graff in his utter and complete abasement was even more deeply, tragically sunken than they. For them there was still some sheltering Ægis of secrecy to conceal some substratum in the uttermost depths of personal depravity; but for Sandy—all the world knew the story of his life, his struggle, his fall; all the world could see upon his blotched and bloated face the outer sign of his inner lusts; and what deeper humiliation can there be than for all one's world to know how brutish and obscene one may be in the bottom of one's heart? What deeper shame may any man suffer than to have his neighbors read upon his blasted front the stamp and seal of all, all his heart's lust, set there not only as a warning and a lesson, not only a visible proof how deep below the level of savagery it is possible for a God-enlightened man to sink, but also for self-gratulation of those righteous ones that they are not fallen from God's grace as that man has fallen?

One time East Haven had been Sandy Graff's home, and it was now the centre of his wanderings, which never extended further than the immediately neighboring towns. At times he would disappear from East Haven for weeks, maybe months; then suddenly he would appear again, pottering aimlessly, harmlessly, around the streets or byways; wretched, foul, boozed, and sodden with vile rum, which he had procured no one knew how or where. Maybe at such times of reappearance he would be seen hanging around some store or street corner, maundering with some one who had known him in the days of his prosperity, or maybe he would be found loitering around the kitchen or out-house of some pitying Bay-Streeter, who also had known him in the days of his dignity and cleanliness, waiting with helpless patience for scraps of cold victuals or the dregs of the coffee-pot, for no one drove him away or treated him with unkindness.

Sandy Graff's father had been a cobbler in Upper Main Street, and he himself had in time followed the same trade in the same little, old-fashioned, dingy, shingled, hip-roofed house. In time he had married a good, sound-hearted, respectable farmer's daughter from a neck of land across the bay, known as Pig Island, and had settled down to what promised to be a decent, prosperous life.

So far as any one could see, looking from the outside, his life offered all that a reasonable man could ask for; but suddenly, within a year after he was married, his feet slipped from the beaten level pathway of respectability. He began taking to drink.

Why it was that the foul fiend should have leaped astride of his neck, no man can exactly tell. More than likely it was inheritance, for his grandfather, who had been a ship-captain—some said a slave-trader—had died of mania a potu, and it is one of those inscrutable rulings of Divine Providence that the innocent ones of the third and fourth generation shall suffer because of the sins of their forebears, who have raised more than one devil to grapple with them, their children, and children's children. Anyhow, Sandy fell from grace, and within three years' time had become a confirmed drunkard.

Fortunately no children were born to the couple. But it was one of the most sad, pitiful sights in the world to see Sandy's patient, sad-eyed wife leading him home from the tavern, tottering, reeling, helpless, sodden. Pitiful indeed! Pitiful even from the outside; but if one could only have looked through that outer husk of visible life, and have beheld the inner workings of that lost soul—the struggles, the wrestling with the foul grinning devil that sat astride of him—how much more would that have been pitiful! And then, if one could have seen and have realized as the roots from which arose those inner workings, the hopes, the longings for a better life that filled his heart during the intervals of sobriety, if one could have sensed but one pang of that hell-thirst that foreran the mortal struggle that followed, as that again foreran the inevitable fall into his kennel of lust, and then, last and greatest, if those righteous neighbors of his who never sinned and never fell could only have seen the wakening, the bitter agony of remorse, the groaning horror of self-abasement that ended the debauchery—Ah! that, indeed, was something to pity beyond man's power of pitying.

If Sandy's wife had only berated and abused him, if she had even cried or made a sign of her heart-break, maybe his pangs of remorse might not have been so deadly bitter and cruel; but her steadfast and unrelaxing patience—it was that that damned him more than all else to his hell of remorse.

At last came the end. One day Sandy went to New Harbor City to buy leather for cobbling, and there his devil, for no apparent reason at all, leaped upon him and flung him. For a week he saw or knew nothing but a whirling vision of the world seen through rum-crazy eyes; then at last he awoke to find himself hatless, coatless, filthy, unshaved, blear-eyed, palsied. Not a cent of money was left, and so that day and night, in spite of the deadly nausea that beset him and the trembling weakness that hung like a leaden weight upon every limb, he walked all the thirty-eight miles home again to East Haven. He reached there about five o'clock, and in the still gray of the early dawning. Only a few people were stirring in the streets, and as he slunk along close to the houses, those whom he met turned and looked after him. No one spoke to him or stopped him, as might possibly have been done had he come home at a later hour. Every shred and filament of his poor remorseful heart and soul longed for home and the comfort that his wife alone could give him, and yet at the last corner he stopped for a quaking moment or so in the face of the terror of her unreproachful patience. Then he turned the corner—

Not a sign of his house was to be seen—nothing but an empty, gaping blackness where it had stood before. It had been burned to the ground!

Why is it that God's curse rests very often and most heavily upon the misfortunate? Why is it that He should crush the reeds that are bruised beneath His heel? Why is it that He should seem so often to choose the broken heart to grind to powder?

Sandy's wife had been burned to death in the fire!

From that moment Sandy Graff was lost, utterly and entirely lost. God, for His terrible purposes, had taken away the one last thread that bound the drowning soul to anything of decency and cleanliness. Now his devil and he no longer struggled together; they walked hand in hand. He was without love, without hope, without one iota that might bring a flicker of light into the midnight gloom of his despairing soul.

After the first dreadful blast of his sorrow and despair had burned itself out, he disappeared, no one knew whither. A little over a month passed, and then he suddenly appeared again, drunken, maudlin, tearful. Again he disappeared, again he reappeared, a little deeper sunken, a little more abased, and henceforth that was his life. He became a part of the town, and everybody, from the oldest to the youngest, knew him and his story. He injured no one, he offended no one, and he never failed, somehow or somewhere, to find food to eat, lodging for his head, and clothing to cover his nakedness. He had been among the very first to enter the Refuge, and now, in November, he was the last one left within its walls. He was the only one of the guests who returned, and perhaps he would not have done so had not his aching restlessness driven him back to suffer an echo of agony in the place where his damnation had been inflicted upon him.

Between Colonel Singelsby upon the one side, the wise, the pure, the honored servant of God, and Sandy Graff upon the other side, the vile, the filthy, the ugly, the debased, there yawned a gulf as immeasurably wide and deep as that which gaps between heaven and hell.

IV.

The winter of the year that saw the opening of the East Haven Refuge was one of the most severe that New England had known for generations. It was early in January that there came the great snowstorm that spread its two or three feet of white covering all the way from Maine to Virginia, and East Haven, looking directly in the teeth of the blast that came swirling and raging across the open harbor, felt the full force of the icy tempest. The streets of the town lay a silent desert of drifting whiteness, for no one who could help it was abroad from home that bitter morning.

The hail and snow spat venomously against the windows of Dr. Hunt's office in one of those fine old houses on Bay Street overlooking the harbor. The wind roared sonorously through the naked, tortured branches of the great elm-trees, and the snow piled sharp and smooth in fence corners and around north gables of the house.

Dr. Hunt shuddered as he looked out of the window, for while all his neighbors sat snug and warm around their hearths, he had to face the raging of the icy blast upon the dull routine of his business of mercy—the dull routine of bread-getting by comforting the afflictions of others. Then the sleigh drew up to the gate, the driver already powdered with the gathering whiteness, and Dr. Hunt struggled into his overcoat, tied the ribbons of his fur cap under his chin, and drew on his beaver gloves. Then, with one final shudder, he opened his office door, and stepped out into the drift upon the step.

Instantly he started back with a cry: he had trodden upon a man covered and hidden by the snow.

It was Sandy Graff. How long he had been lying there, no one might tell; a few moments more, and the last flicker of life would have twinkled mercifully out. The doctor had him out of the snow in a moment, and in the next had satisfied himself that Sandy was not dead.

Even as he leaned over the still white figure, feeling the slow faint beating of the failing heart, the doctor was considering whether he should take Sandy into the house or not. The decision was almost instantaneous: it would be most inconvenient, and the Refuge was only a stone's-throw away. So the doctor did not even disturb the household with the news of what had happened. He and the driver wrapped the unconscious figure in a buffalo-robe and laid it in the sleigh.

As the doctor was about to step into the sleigh, some one suddenly laid a heavy hand upon his shoulder. He turned sharply, for he had not heard the approaching footsteps, muffled by the thick snow, and he had been too engrossed with attention to Sandy Graff to notice anything else.

It was young Harold Singelsby; his face was very white and drawn, and in the absorption of his own suppressed agitation he did not even look at Sandy. "Doctor," said he, in a hoarse, constrained voice, "for God's sake, come home with me as quickly as you can: father's very sick!"

I had often wondered how it is with a man when he closes his life to this world. Looking upon the struggling efforts of a dying man to retain his hold upon his body, I had often wondered whether his sliding to unconsciousness was like the dissolving of the mind to sleep in this life.

That death was not like sleep was at such times patent enough—it was patent enough that it was the antithesis of sleep. Sleep is peaceful; death is convulsed—sleep is rest; death is separation.

That which I here following read in the book as it lay open upon the man's knees seemed in a way dark, broken, indistinct with a certain grim obscurity; yet if I read truly therein I distinguished this great difference between death and sleep: Sleep is the cessation of consciousness from an interior life to exterior thought; death is the cessation of consciousness from the exterior mind to an interior life.

When Sandy Graff opened his eyes once more, it was to find himself again within the sheltering arms of the Refuge. That awakening was almost to a full and clear consciousness. It was with no confusion of thought and but little confusion of sight, except for a white mist that seemed to blur the things he saw.

He knew, instantly and vividly, where he was. Instantly and vividly everything found its fit place in his mind—the long rows of cots; the bald, garishly white walls, cold and unbeautiful in their immaculate cleanliness; the range of curtainless windows looking out upon the chill, thin gray of the winter day. He was not surprised to find himself in the Refuge; it did not seem strange to him, and he did not wonder. He dimly remembered stumbling through the snow-drifts and then falling asleep, overpowered by an irresistible and leaden drowsiness. But just where it was he fell, he could not recall.

He saw with dim sight that three or four people were gathered about his bed. Two of them were rubbing his legs and feet, but he could not feel them. It was this senselessness of feeling that first brought the jarring of the truth to him. The house-steward stood near by, and Sandy turned his face weakly toward him. "Mr. Jackson," said he, faintly, "I think I'm going to die."

He turned his face again (now toward the opened window), and was staring unwinkingly at a white square of light, and it seemed to him to grow darker and darker. At first he thought that it was the gathering of night, but faint and flickering as were his senses, there was something beneath his outer self that dreaded it—that dreaded beyond measure the coming of that darkness. After one or two efforts, in which his stiff tongue refused to form the words he desired to speak, he said, at last, "I can't see; it's—getting—dark."

He was dimly, darkly conscious of hurry and bustle around him, of voices calling to send for the doctor, of hurrying hither and thither, but it all seemed faint and distant. Everything was now dark to his sight, and it was as though all this concerned another; but as outer things slipped further and further from him, the more that inner life struggled, tenaciously, dumbly, hopelessly, to retain its grip upon the outer world. Sometimes, now and then, to this inner consciousness, it seemed almost as though it were rising again out of the gathering blackness. But it was only the recurrent vibrations of ebbing powers, for still again, and even before it knew it, that life found itself quickly deeper and more hopelessly in the tremendous shadow into which it was being inexorably engulfed.

He himself knew nothing now of those who stood about the bed, awe-struck and silent, looking down upon him; he himself sensed nothing of the harsh convulsive breathing, and of all the other grim outer signs of the struggle. But still, deep within, that combat of resistance to death waged as desperately, as vividly, as ever.

A door opened, and at the sudden noise the dissolving life recrystallized for one brief instant, and in that instant the dying man knew that Dr. Hunt was standing beside his bed, and heard him say, in a slow, solemn voice, sounding muffled and hollow, as though from far away and through an empty space, "Colonel Singelsby has just died."

Then the cord, momentarily drawn tense, was relaxed with a snap, and the last smoky spark was quenched in blackness.

Dr. Hunt's fingers were resting lightly upon the wrist. As the last deep quivering breath expired with a quavering sigh, he laid the limp hand back upon the bed, and then, before he arose, gently closed the stiff eyelids over the staring glassy eyes, and set the gaping jaws back again into a more seemly repose.

V.

So all this first part of the Parable had, as I read it, a reflected image of what was real and actual; of what belonged to the world of men as I knew that world. The people of whom it spoke moved and lived, maybe not altogether as real men of flesh and blood move and live, but nevertheless with a certain life of their own—images of what was real. All these things, I say (excepting perhaps the last), were clear and plain enough after a certain fashion, but that which followed showed those two of whom the story was written—the good man and the wicked man—stripped of all their outer husk of fleshly reality, and walking and talking not as men of flesh and blood, but as men in the spirit.

So, though I knew that which I was reading might indeed be as true, and perhaps truer, than that other which I had read, and though I knew that to such a state I myself must come, and that as these two suffered, I myself must some time suffer in the same kind, if not in the same degree, nevertheless it was all strangely unreal, and being set apart from that which I knew, was like life as seen in a dream.

Yet let it not be thought that this Parable is all a vague dream, for there are things which are more real than reality, and being so, must be couched in different words from such as describe the things that one's bodily eyes behold of the grim reality of this world. Such things, being so told, may seem as strange and as unsubstantial as that which is unreal, instead of like that which is real.

So that which is now to be read must be read as the other has been read—not as a likeness of life in its inner being, but as an image of that life.

Sandy Graff awoke, and opened his eyes. At first he thought that he was still within the dormitory of the Refuge, for there before him he saw cold, bare white walls immaculately clean. Upon either hand was the row of beds, each with its spotless coverlet, and in front was the long line of curtainless windows looking out upon the bright daylight.

But as his waking senses gathered to a more orderly clearness, he saw very soon that the place in which he was was very different from the Refuge. Even newly awakened, and with his brain clouded and obscured by the fumes of sleep, he distinguished at once that the strange, clear, lucid brilliancy of the light which came in through the row of windows was very different from any light that his eyes had ever before seen. Then, as his mind opened wider and fuller and clearer, and as one by one the objects which surrounded him began to take their proper place in his awakened life, he saw that there were many people around, and that most of the beds were occupied, and in every case by a man. The room in which he lay was somewhat longer than the dormitory of the Refuge, and was connected at the further end with what appeared to be a sort of waiting-room beyond. In and out of the connecting doorway people were coming and going. Some of these seemed to be friends of those who were lying in the beds, being in every case led to some particular bedside, the occupant of which had newly awakened; others, who seemed to be attendants of the place, moved constantly hither and thither, busying themselves around other of the beds, where lay such as seemed to need attention.

Sandy looked slowly around him from left to right. Some of the occupants of the beds—and one of these lay in the cot next to him—were not yet awake, and he saw, with a sort of awe, that each of these lay strangely like a dead man—still, motionless, the face covered with a linen napkin. Two of the attendants seemed to have these sleepers especially in their charge, moving continually hither and thither, to the bedside first of one and then another, evidently to see if there were yet any signs of waking. As Sandy continued watching them, he saw them at last softly and carefully lift a napkin from one of the faces, whereupon the man immediately awoke and sat up.

This occurred in a bed not very far from where he himself lay, and he watched all that passed with a keen and thrilling interest. The man had hardly awakened when word was passed down the length of the room to the antechamber beyond. Apparently some friends of the sleeper were waiting for this word to be brought to them, for there entered directly two women and a man from the further doorway. The three came straight to the bed in which the man lay, and with great noise of rejoicing seemed to welcome the new-comer. They helped him to arise, handed him his clothes piece by piece from the chair at the bedside, and the man began dressing himself.

It was not until then, and until his ear caught some stray words of those that were spoken, that Sandy began to really realize where he was and what had happened to him. Then suddenly a great and awful light broke upon him—he had died and had come to life again—his living senses had solved the greatest of all mysteries—the final mystery; the mystery of eternity.

It happens nearly always, it is said, that the first awakening thought of those who die is of the tremendous happening that has come upon them. So it was with Sandy. For a while he lay quite still, with his hands folded, and a strange awful brooding, almost as though of fear, breathlessly wrapping his heart roundabout. But it was not for a long time that he lay thus, for suddenly, like a second flash of lightning in the gathering darkness of a cloud, the thought shot through him that no friends had come to meet and to greet him as they had come to meet and greet these others. Why had his wife not come to him? He turned his head; the chair beside him was empty; he was without even clothes to wear.

For a while he lay with closed eyes like one stunned. Then a sudden voice broke upon his ear, and he opened his eyes again and looked up. A tall man with calm face—almost a stern face—stood beside the bed looking down at him.

Somehow Sandy knew that he had no business in the bed now that he was awake, and, with a half-muttered apology, he made a motion as if to arise, then, remembering that there were no clothes for him to wear, he sank back again upon the pillow.

"Come," said the man, giving his cane a rap upon the floor, "you must get up; you have already been here longer than the law allows."

Sandy had been too long accustomed to self-abasement in the world he had left to question the authority of the man who spoke to him. "I can't help lying here, sir," said he, helplessly. "I've no clothes to wear." Then he added: "Maybe if you let my wife come to me, she'd bring me something to wear. I hear say, sir, that I've died, and that this is heaven. I don't know why she hasn't come to me. Everybody else here seems to have somebody to meet him but me."

"This is not heaven," said the man.

A long silence followed. "It's not hell, is it?" said Sandy, at last.

The man apparently did not choose to answer the question. "Come," said he, "you waste time in talk. Get up. Wrap the sheet around you, and come with me."

"Where are you going to take me?" said Sandy.

"No matter," said the other. "Do as I tell you." His voice was calm, dispassionate; there was nothing of anger in it, but there was that which said he must be obeyed.

Sandy drew the sheet upon which he lay about him, and then shuddering, half with nervous dread and half with cold, arose from the warm bed in which he lay.

The other turned, and without saying a word led the way down the length of the room, Sandy following close behind. The noise of talking ceased as they passed by the various beds, and all turned and looked after the two, some smiling, some laughing outright. Sandy, as he marched down the length of the room, heard the rustling laugh and felt an echo of the same dull humiliation he had felt when he had marched with the other guests of the East Haven Refuge to their daily task of paving Main Street. There as now the people laughed, and there in the same manner as they did now; and as he had there slouched in the body, so now he slouched heavily in the spirit after his conductor.

Opposite the end of the room where was the door through which the friends and visitors came and went was another door, low and narrow. Sandy's guide led the way directly to it, lifted the latch, and opened it. It led to a long entry beyond, gloomy and dark. This passageway was dully lighted by a small square window, glazed with clouded glass, at the further end of the narrow hall, upon which fronted a row of closed doors. The place was very damp and chill; a cold draught of air blew through the length of it, and Sandy, as the other closed the door through which they had just entered, and so shut out the noise beyond, heard distinctly the sound of running water. Without turning to the left or to the right, Sandy's guide led the way down the hall, stopping at last when he had reached a door near the further end. He drew a bunch of keys from his pocket, chose one from among them, fitted it into the lock, and turned it.

"Go in there," said he, "and wash yourself clean, and then you shall have clothes to wear."

Sandy entered, and the door was closed behind him. The place in which he found himself was very cold, and the floor beneath his feet was wet and slimy. His teeth chattered and his limbs shuddered as he stood looking around him. The noise of flowing water sounded loud and clear through the silence; it was running from a leaden pipe into a wooden tank, mildewed and green with mould, that stood in the middle of the room. The stone-walls around, once painted white, were now also stained and splotched with great blotches of green and russet dampness. The only light that lit the place came in through a small, narrow, slatted window close to the ceiling, and opposite the doorway which he had entered. It was all gloomy, ugly, repellent.

There were some letters painted in red at the head of the wooden tank. He came forward and read them, not without some difficulty, for they were nearly erased.

This is the water of death!

Sandy started back so suddenly that he nearly fell upon the slippery floor. A keen pang of sudden terror shot through him; then a thought that some grotesque mockery was being played upon him. A second thought blew the first away like a breath of smoke, for it told him that there could be no mockery in the place to which he had come. His waking and all that had happened to him had much of nightmare grotesquery about it, but there was no grotesquery or no appearance of jesting about that man who had guided him to the place in which he now found himself. There was a calm, impassive, unemotional sternness about all that he said and did—official, automatonlike—that precluded the possibility of any jest or meaningless form. This must indeed be the water of death, and his soul told him that it was meant for him.

He turned dully, and walked with stumbling steps to the door. He felt blindly for a moment for the latch, then his hand touched it, and he raised it with a click. The sharp sound jarred through the silence, and Sandy did not open the door. He stood for a little while staring stupidly down upon the floor with his palm still upon the latch. Was the man who had brought him there waiting outside? Behind him lay the water of death, but he dared not open the door and chance the facing of that man. The sheet had fallen away from him, and now he stood entirely naked. He let the latch fall back to its place—carefully, lest it should again make a noise, and that man should hear it. Then he gathered the now damp and dirty sheet about him, and crouched down upon the cold floor close to the crack of the door.

There he sat for a while, every now and then shuddering convulsively with cold and terror, then by-and-by he began to cry.

There is something abjectly, almost brutally, pathetic in the ugly squalor of a man's tears. Sandy Graff crying, and now and then wiping his eyes with the damp and dirty sheet, was almost a more ugly sight than he had been in the maudlin bathos of his former drunkenness.

So he sat for a long time, until finally his crying ended, only for a sudden sob now and then, and he only crouched, wondering dully. At last he slowly arose, gathering the sheet still closer around him, and creeping step by step to the tank, looked down into its depth. The water was as clear as crystal; he dipped his hand into it—it was as cold as ice. Then he dropped aside the sheet, and stood as naked as the day he was born. He stepped into the water.

A deathly faintness fell upon him, and he clutched at the edge of the tank; but even as he clutched his sight failed, and he felt himself sinking down into the depths.

"Help!" he cried, hoarsely; and then the water closed blackly over his head.

He felt himself suddenly snatched out from the tank, warm towels were wrapped about him, his limbs were rubbed with soft linen, and at last he opened his eyes. He still heard the sound of running water, but now the place in which he was was no longer dark and gloomy. Some one had flung open the slatted window, and a great beam of warm, serene sunlight streamed in, and lay in a dazzling white square upon the wet floor. Two men were busied about him. They had wrapped his body in a soft warm blanket, and were wiping dry his damp, chilled, benumbed hands and feet.

"What does this mean?" said Sandy, faintly. "Was I not then to die, after all? Was not that the water of death?"

"The water of death?" said they. "You did not read the words aright; that was the water of life." They helped him dress himself in his clothes—clothes not unlike those which the East Haven Refuge had given its outgoing guests, only, somehow, these did not make him feel humiliated and abased as those had made him feel. Then they led him out of that place. They traversed the same long passageway through which he had come before, and so came to the bedroom which he had left. The tenants were all gone now, and the attendants were busied spreading the various beds with clean linen sheets and coverlets, as though for fresh arrivals.

No one seemed to pay any attention to him. His conductors led the way to the anteroom which Sandy had seen beyond.

A woman was sitting patiently looking out of the window. She turned her head as they entered, and Sandy, when he saw her face, stood suddenly still, as though turned to stone. It was his wife!

VI.

With Colonel Singelsby was no such nightmare awakening as with Sandy Graff; with him, were no such ugly visions and experiences; with him was no squalor and discomfort. Yet he also opened his eyes upon a room so like that upon which they had closed that at first he thought that he was still in the world. There was the same soft bed, the same warmth of ease and comfort, the same style of old-fashioned furniture. There were the curtained windows, the pictures upon the wall, the bright warm fire burning in the grate.

At first he saw all these things drowsily, as one does upon newly awakening. With him, as with Sandy, it was only when his conscious life had opened wide and clear enough to observe and to recognize who they were that were gathered around him that with a keen, almost agonizing thrill he realized where he was and what had befallen him. Upon one side of his bed stood his son Hubert; upon the other side stood his brother James. The one had died ten, the other nineteen years before. Of all those who had gone from the world which he himself had just left, these stood the nearest to him, and now, in his resurrection, his opening eyes first saw these two. They and other relatives and friends helped him to arise and dress, as Sandy had seen the poor wretches in the place in which he had awakened raised from their beds and dressed by their friends.

All Colonel Singelsby's teachings had told him that this was not so different from the world he had left behind. Nevertheless, although he was prepared somewhat for it, it was wonderful to him how alike the one was to the other. The city, the streets, the people coming and going, the stores, the parks, the great houses—all were just as they were in the world of men. He had no difficulty in finding his way about the streets. There, in comfortable houses of a better class, were many of his friends; others were not to be found; some, he was told, had ascended higher; others, he was also told, had descended lower.

Among other places, Colonel Singelsby found himself during the afternoon in the house of one with whom he had been upon friendly, almost intimate terms in times past in the world. Colonel Singelsby remembered hearing that the good man had died a few months before he himself had left the world. He wondered what had become of him, and then in a little while he found himself in his old friend's house. It had been many years since he had seen him. He remembered him as a benign, venerable old gentleman, and he had been somewhat surprised to find that he was still living in the town, instead of having ascended to a higher state.

The old gentleman still looked outwardly venerable, still outwardly benign, but now there was under his outer seeming a somewhat of restless querulousness, a something of uneasy discontent, that Colonel Singelsby did not remember to have seen there before. They talked together about many things, chiefly of those in the present state of existence in which they found themselves. It was all very new and vivid upon Colonel Singelsby's mind, but the reverend gentleman seemed constantly to forget that he was in another world than that which he had left behind. It seemed to be always with an effort that he brought himself to talk of the world in which he lived as the world of spirits. The visit was somehow unpleasant to Colonel Singelsby. He was impressed with a certain air of intolerance exhibited by the other. His mind seemed to dwell more upon the falsity of the old things than upon the truth of the new, and he seemed to take a certain delight in showing how and in what everybody but those of his own creed erred and fell short of the Divine intent, and not the least disagreeable part of the talk to Colonel Singelsby was that the other's words seemed to find a sort of echo in his own mind.

At last he proposed a walk, and the other, taking his hat and stick, accompanied him for a little distance upon the way. The talk still clung much to the same stem to which it had adhered all along.

"It is a very strange thing," said the reverend gentleman, "but a great many people who have come to this town since I came hither have left it again to ascend, as I have been told, to a higher state. I think there must have been some mistake, for I cannot see how it is possible—and in fact our teachings distinctly tell us that it is impossible—for one to ascend to a higher state without having accepted the new truths of the new order of things."

Colonel Singelsby did not make answer. He was not only growing tired of the subject itself, but of his old friend as well.

They were at that moment crossing an angle of a small park shaded by thin, spindly trees. As the Colonel looked up he saw three men and a woman approaching along the same path and under the flickering shadows. Two of the men walked a little in advance, the other walked with the woman. There was something familiar about two of the group, and Colonel Singelsby pointed at them with his finger.

"Who are they?" said he. "I am sure there is somebody I know."

The other adjusted his glasses and looked. "I do not know," said he, "except that one of the men is a new-comer. We somehow grow to know who are new-comers by the time we have lived here a little while."

"Dear me!" cried Colonel Singelsby, stopping abruptly, "I know that man. I did not know that he had come here too. I wonder where they are going?"

"I think," said the reverend gentleman, dryly—"I think that this is one of those cases of which I just spoke to you. I judge from the general appearance of the party that they are about to ascend, as they call it here, to a higher state."

"That is impossible!" said Colonel Singelsby. "That man is a poor wretched creature whom I have helped with charity again and again, it cannot be that he is to go to a higher state, for he is not fit for it. If he is to be taken anywhere, it must be to punishment."

The other shrugged his shoulders and said nothing, he had seen such cases too often during his sojourn to be deceived.

The little party had now come close to the two, and Colonel Singelsby stepped forward with all his old-time frank kindness of manner. "Why, Sandy," said he, "I did not know that you also had come here."

"Yes, sir," said Sandy; "I died the same night you did."

"Dear me!" said the Colonel, "that is very singular, very singular indeed! Where are you going now, Sandy?"

"I don't know," said Sandy; "these gentlemen here are taking me somewhere, I don't know where. This is my wife," said he. "Don't you remember her, sir?"

"Oh yes," said the Colonel, with his most pleasant air, "I remember her very well, but of course I am not so much surprised to see her here as I am to see you. But have you no idea where you are going?" he continued.

"No," said Sandy; "but perhaps these gentlemen can tell you." And he looked inquiringly at his escort, who stood calmly listening to what was said.

So far, the Parable, as I had read it, progressed onward with some coherence and concatenation, a coherence and concatenation growing perhaps more disjointed as it advanced. Now it began to be broken with interjectory sentences, and just here was one, the tenor of which I could not altogether understand, but have since comprehended more or less clearly. I cannot give its exact words, but only its general form.

"O wretched man," it said, "how pitiful are thy vain efforts and strivings to keep back by thine own strength that fiery flood of hell which grows and increases to overwhelm thy soul! If the inflowing of good which Jehovah vouchsafes is infinite, only less infinite is the outflowing of that which thou callest evil and wickedness. How, then, canst thou hope to stand against it and to conquer? How canst thou hope to keep back that raging torrent of fire and of flame with the crumbling unbaked bricks of thine own soul's making? Poor fool! Thou mayst endeavor, thou mayst strive, thou mayst build thy wall of defence higher and higher, fearing God, and living a life of virtue, but by-and-by thou wilt reach the end, and then wilt find thou canst build no higher! Then how vain shall have been thy life of resistance! First that flood shall trickle over the edge of thy defence; then it shall run a stream the breadth of a man's hand; then it shall gush forth a torrent; then, bursting over and through and around, it shall sweep away all that thou hast so laboriously built up, and shall rush, howling, roaring, raging, and burning through thy soul with ten thousand times the fury and violence that it would have done if thou hadst not striven to keep it back, if thou hadst not resisted and fought against it. For bear this in mind: Christ said he came not to call the good to repentance, but the evil, and if thou art full of thine own, how then canst thou hope to receive of a God that asketh not for sacrifice, but for love?"

Hence again the story resumed.

Colonel Singelsby had not before noticed the two men who were with Sandy, now he observed them more closely. They were tall, middle-aged men, with serious, placid, unemotional faces. Each carried a long white staff, the end of which rested upon the ground. There was about them something somehow different from anything Colonel Singelsby had ever seen before. They were most quiet, courteous men, but there was that in their personal appearance that was singularly unpleasant to Colonel Singelsby. Why, he could not tell, for they were evidently gentlemen, and, from their bearing, men of influence. He turned to Sandy again.

"How has it been with you since you have been here?" said he.

"It has been very hard with me," said Sandy, patiently; "very hard indeed; but I hope and believe now that the worst is over, and that by-and-by I shall be happy, and not have any more trouble."

"I trust so, indeed," said the Colonel; "but do not hope for too much, Sandy. Even the best men coming to this world are not likely to be rid of their troubles at once, and it is not to be hoped for that you, after your ill-spent life, should find your lot easier than theirs."

"I know, sir," said Sandy, "and I am very sorry."

There was a meek acceptance of the Colonel's dictum that grated somehow unpleasantly upon the Colonel's ears. He would rather that Sandy had made some protest against that dictum. He approached half a step and looked more keenly at the other, and then for the first time he saw that some great, some radical, some tremendous change had happened. The man before him was no doubt Sandy Graff, but all that was low-browed, evil, foul, was gone, as though it had been washed away, and in its place was a translucent, patient meekness, almost like—There was something so terribly vital in that change that Colonel Singelsby shuddered before it. He looked and looked, and then he passed the back of his hand across his eyes. "All this is very unreal," said he, turning to his friend the minister. "It is like a dream. I begin to feel as though nothing was real. Surely it is not possible that magic changes can go on, and yet I cannot understand all these things in the least."

For answer, the reverend gentleman shrugged his shoulders almost sourly.

"Gentlemen," said Colonel Singelsby, turning abruptly upon Sandy's escort, "let me ask you is this a certain man whom I used to know as Sandy Graff?"

One of the men nodded his head.

"And will you tell me," said he, "another thing? Will you kindly tell me where you are taking him?"

"We are about to take him," said the man, looking steadily at the Colonel as he answered—"we are about to take him to the outskirts of the First Kingdom."

At the answer Colonel Singelsby actually fell back a pace in his amazement. It was almost as though a blow had fallen upon him. "The outskirts of the First Kingdom?" said he. "Did I understand you? The outskirts of the First Kingdom? Surely there is some mistake here! It is not possible that this man, who died only yesterday, filthy and polluted with iniquity, stinking in the nostrils of God with ten thousand indulged and gratified lusts—it is not possible that you intend taking him to that land, passing by me, who all my life have lived to my best endeavors in love to God and my neighbor?"

It was the voice of his minister that broke the answer. "Yes, they do," said he, sharply; "that is just what they do mean. They do mean to take him, and they do mean to leave us, for such is the law in this dreadful place. We, the children of light, are nothing, and they, the fuel of hell, are everything. Have I not been telling you so?"

Colonel Singelsby had almost forgotten the presence of his acquaintance. He felt very angry at his interference, and somehow he could no longer govern his anger as he used to do. He turned upon him and fixed him with a frown, and then he observed for the first time that a little crowd had begun gathering, and now stood looking on, some curious and unsmiling, some grinning. The Colonel drew himself to his height, and looked haughtily about him. They who grinned began laughing. And now, at last, it was come Colonel Singelsby's turn to feel as Sandy Graff had felt—as though all that was happening to him was happening in some hideous nightmare dream. As in a dream, the balancing weights of reasoning and morality began to melt before the heat of that which burned within; as in a dream, the uncurbed inner motives began to strive furiously. Then a sudden fierce anger, quite like the savage irrational anger of an ugly dream, flamed up quickly and fiercely. He opened his lips as though to vent his rage, but for an instant his tottering reason regained a momentary poise. Checking himself with an effort ten thousand times greater than that he would have used in his former state and in the world, he bowed his head upon his breast and stood for a little while with fingers interlocked, clinching his trembling hands together. So he stood for a while, brooding, until at last Sandy and his escort made a motion as if to pass by. Then he spoke again.

"Stop a bit!" said he, looking up—"stop a bit!" His voice was hoarse and constrained, and he looked neither to the right nor to the left, but straight at that one of the men to whom he had spoken before. "Sir," said he, and then clearing his husky voice—"sir," again, "I have learned a lesson—the greatest lesson of my life! I have looked into my heart, and I have seen—I have seen myself—God help me, gentlemen!—I—maybe I am no better than this man."

The crowd, which had been increasing, as crowds do, began to jeer at the words, for, like most crowds, it was of a nether sort, and enjoyed the unusual sight of the gentleman and the aristocrat abasing and humiliating himself before the reformed drunkard.

At the sound of that ugly jeering laugh Colonel Singelsby quivered as though under the cut of a lancet, but he never removed his eyes from the man to whom he spoke. For a moment or two he bit his nether lip in his effort for self-control, and then repeated, in a louder and perhaps harsher voice, "I am no better than this man!" He paused for a moment, and the crowd ceased its jeering to hear what he had to say. "I ask only this," he said, "that you will take me where you are taking him, and that I may enjoy such happiness as he is about to enjoy."

Instantly a great roar of laughter went up from the crowd, which had now gathered to some twenty or thirty souls. The man to whom Colonel Singelsby had spoken shook his head calmly and impassively.

"It cannot be," said he.

Colonel Singelsby turned white to the very lips, his eyes blazed, and his breath came thick and heavily. His nostrils twitched spasmodically, but still, with a supreme effort—a struggle so terrible that few men happily may ever know it or experience it—he once more controlled the words that sprang to his lips and struggled for utterance. He swallowed and swallowed convulsively. "Sir," said he at last, in a voice so hoarse, so horribly constrained, that it seemed almost to rend him as it forced utterance—"sir, surely I am mistaken in what I understand; it is little I ask you, and surely not unjust. Yesterday this man was a vile, debauched drunkard; surely that does not make him fitter for heaven! Yesterday I was a God-fearing, law-abiding man, surely that does not make me unfit! I am not unfit, am I?"

"You are not yet fit for heaven," answered the man, with impassive calmness. And again, for the third time, the crowd roared with evil laughter.

Within Colonel Singelsby's soul that fiery flood was now lashing dreadfully close to the summit of its barriers. His face was as livid as death, and his hands were clinched till the nails cut into his palm. "Let me understand for once and for all, for I confess I cannot understand all this. You say he is to go, and that I am not to go! Is it, then, God's will and God's justice that because this man for twenty years has led a life of besotted sin and indulgence, and because I for sixty years have feared God and loved my neighbor, that he is to be chosen and I am to be left?"

The man did not reply in words, but in the steady look of his unwinking eyes the other read his answer.

"Then," gasped Colonel Singelsby, and as he spoke he shook his clinched and trembling fist against the still, blue sky overhead—"then, if that be God's justice, may it be damned, for I want none of it."

Then came the end, swiftly, completely. For the fourth time the crowd laughed, and at the sound those floodgates so laboriously built up during a lifetime of abstinence were suddenly burst asunder and fell crashing, and a burning flood of hell's own rage and madness rushed roaring and thundering into his depicted, empty soul, flaming, blazing, consuming like straws every precept of righteousness, every fear of God, and Colonel Edward Singelsby, the one-time Christian gentleman, the one-time upright son of grace, the one-time man of law and God, was transformed instantly and terribly into—what? Was it a livid devil from hell? He cursed the jeering crowd, and at the sound of his own curses a blindness fell upon him, and he neither knew what he said nor what he did. His good old friend, who had accompanied him so far and until now had stood by him, suddenly turned, and maybe fearing lest some thunderbolt of vengeance should fall upon them from heaven and consume them all, he elbowed himself out of the crowd and hurried away. As for the wretched madman, in his raging fury, it was not the men who had forbidden him heaven whom he strove to rend and tear limb from limb, but poor, innocent, harmless Sandy Graff. The crowd swayed and jostled this way and that, and as madness begets madness, the curses that fell from one pair of lips found an echo in curses that leaped from others. Sandy shrunk back appalled before the hell-blast that breathed upon him, and he felt his wife clutch him closer. Only two of those that were there stood unmoved; they were the two men who acted as Sandy's escort. As the tide of madness seemed to swell higher, they calmly stepped forward and crossed their staves before their charge. There was something in their action full of significance for those who knew. Instantly the crowd melted away like snow under a blast of fire. Had there not been two men present more merciful than the rest, it is hard to say what terrible thing might not have happened to Colonel Edward Singelsby—deaf and dumb and blind to everything but his own rage. These two clutched him by the arms and dragged him back.

"God, man!" they cried, "what are you doing? Do you not see they are angels?"

They dragged him back to a bench that stood near, and there held him, whilst he still beat the air with his fist and cried out hoarse curses, and even as they so held him, two other men came—two men dark, silent, sinister—and led him away.

Then the other and his wife and his two escorts passed by and out of the gate of the town, and away towards the mountain that stood still and blue in the distance.

So far I read, and then I could bear to read no more, but placed my hand upon the open page of the book. "What is this dreadful thing?" I cried. "Is, then, a man punished for truth and justice and virtue and righteousness? Is it, then, true that the evil are rewarded, and that the good are punished so dreadfully?"

Then the man who held the book spoke again. "Take away thy hand and read," said he.

Then I took away my hand, and read as he bade me, and found these words:

"How can God fill with His own that which is already filled by man? First it must be emptied before it may be filled with the true good of righteousness and truth, of humility and love, of peace and joy. O thou foolish one who judgest but from the appearance of things, how long will it be before thou canst understand that while some may be baptized with water to cleanliness and repentance, others are baptized with living fire to everlasting life, and that they alone are the children of God?"

Then again I read these words:

"Woe to thee, thou who deniest the laws of God and man! Woe to thee, thou who walkest in the darkness of the shadow of sin and evil! But ten thousand times woe to thee, thou who pilest Pelion of self-good upon Ossa of self-truth, not that thou mayst scale therefrom the gate of Heaven, but that thou mayst hide thyself beneath from the eye of the Living God! By-and-by His Day shall come! His Terrible Lightning shall flash from the East to the West! His Dreadful Flaming Thunder-bolt shall fall, riving thy secret fastnesses to atoms, and leaving thee, poor worm, writhing in the dazzling effulgence of His Light, and shrivelling beneath the consuming flame of His Loving-kindness!"

Then the leaf was turned, and there before me lay the answer to that first question, "What shall a man do that he may gain the kingdom of Heaven?" There stood the words, plain and clear. But I did not dare to read them, but turning, left that place, shutting the door to behind me.

Never have I found that door or entered that room again, but by-and-by I know that I shall find them both once more, and shall then and there read the answer that forever stands written in that book, for it still lies open at the very page, and he upon whose knees it rests is Israfeel, the Angel of Death.

But what of the sequel? Is there a sequel? Are we, then, to suffer ourselves to do evil for the sake of shunning pain in the other world? I trow not! He who sets his foot to climb must never look backward and downward. He who suffers most must reach the highest. There must be another part of the story which lies darkly and dimly behind the letter. One can see, faintly and dimly but nevertheless clearly, what the poor man was to enjoy—the poor man who from without appeared to be so evil, and yet within was not really evil. One can see a vision faint and dim of a simple little house cooled by the dewy shade of green trees forever in foliage; one can see pleasant meadows and gardens forever green, stretching away to the banks of a smooth-flowing river in whose level bosom rests a mirrored image of that which lies beyond its farther bank—a great town with glistering walls and gleaming spires reaching tower above tower and height above height into the blazing blue, the awful serenity of a heavenly sky. One can know that toward that town the poor man who had sinned and repented would in the evenings gaze and wonder until his soul, now ploughed clean for new seed, might learn the laws that would make it indeed an inhabitant of that place. It is a serene and beautiful vision, but not different from that which all may see, and enjoy even, in part, in this world.

But how was it with that other man—with that good man who had never sinned until his earthly body was stripped away that he might sin and fall in the spirit—sin and fall to a depth so profound that even one furtive look into that awful abysm makes the minds of common men to reel and stagger? When that God-sent blast of fire should have burned out the selfhood that clung to the very vitals of his soul, what then? Who is there that with unwinking eyes may gaze into the effulgent brilliancy of the perfect angelhood? He who sweats drops of salt in his life's inner struggles shall, maybe, eat good bread in the dew of it, but he who sweats drops of blood in agony shall, when his labor is done, sit him, maybe, at the King's table, and feast upon the Flesh of Life and the very Wine of Truth.

Was it so with that man who never sinned until all his hell was let loose at once upon him?

Clyx.com