Ellis Meredith

For the race is run by one and one and never by two and two.

Kipling.

"Do you remember the name of that man we knew," said Adam one day, "who wrote a book to prove the immortality of the body? He did prove that various people had lived well on to two hundred years. If we were sure of that, we might get the earth very fairly started."

Robin laughed. "We are not apparently growing any older," she said; "but we can hardly count on more than a hundred years each."

"There is one thing you haven't taken into consideration," said Adam. "Our children would be several thousand years ahead of the original children of the Garden; they would be further along than you and I in a good many ways."

"No," she said, "I haven't forgotten, but I do not know how much of a load they would bring with them into the world. We called it heredity, the Hindoos called it karma, and, though that is different, educators called it the recapitulation theory."

Adam shook his head. "I understand heredity," he said, "but karma and recapitulation are too much for me."

"Karma is our heritage from former existences," she answered, "that may have been lived here or elsewhere. It is the sum of our past, good and bad. It is based on a belief in reincarnation, and it is the law that whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap. It is justice untempered by mercy, and it is at variance with the doctrine of vicarious atonement, though one may believe it and worship Christ as the highest type of love the world has ever known. Naturally, it does not appeal to the people who are willing to let some one bear the cross for them, and yet I have wondered whether, if we were sure we should not gather figs from thistles, we should sow the thistles so freely. The recapitulation theory makes the child pass through the evolutionary stages of the nation or nations he represents. It has a kind of seven ages of man of its own, and brings him down through all phases,—the savage, the hunter, the explorer, the conqueror, the builder. I don't pretend fully to understand it. I heard one of its ablest exponents say once, 'The soul of the German nation is in the German boy.' Heredity curses or blesses, sometimes both. Before any of these theories prospective parents might well hesitate."

"Which do you believe?" asked Adam, curiously.

She reflected a moment. "A little of all three; not all of any of them; one would have to be a profound student to understand fully what their adherents claim for them. Heredity plays strange freaks now and then. It is easier to account for Abraham Lincoln by the second theory than by either of the others. His shiftless, untidy mother and commonplace father do not explain such a soul as his; nor was there any reversion in his childhood to the original savage instincts that make children dismember grasshoppers—rather the reverse. I like better to think that, like that other Deliverer, who was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, he came to do the will of his and our Father which art in heaven,—came gladly, freely, knowing the end from the beginning."

Adam sat up suddenly and looked at her with startled eyes. "Then you think—you mean—you don't believe—surely you don't believe we have anything to do with our coming here?"

She smiled. "Surely I do. Our coming is sad enough when we do it voluntarily. It would be quite intolerable to have existence thrust upon us. Besides, it seems blasphemous to me to believe that God has given to every human being the power to bestow an eternal existence. The responsibility is great enough when it is simply a matter of so living that noble souls may seek to be born of us, and undertaking to give them sound minds and bodies."

Adam looked unconvinced and troubled. "Where on earth did you get all that?" he asked.

"Well, it is to my mind only an elaboration of Descartes' 'I think, therefore I am.' I am, presupposes that I have been, and will be. If you can't destroy one drop of water, you can't destroy me. If you drop the water on red-hot iron, it instantly becomes an imperceptible mist, the mere ghost of itself, but it will ultimately become fluid again. It seems to me that the scientific fact gives a sound basis for the psychologic probability."

"But think of all the miserable human beings born daily. Do you think any one would choose such surroundings?"

"You and I never wanted to go anywhere badly enough to crowd ourselves under the cow-catcher, or upon the trucks, but there were those who did. We didn't want to see the parade badly enough to stand on the street corner for hours; but you worked your way through college, and we have both sat in the top gallery to hear 'TannhÄuser.' We were willing to put up with the whips and scorns, which is another way of saying the garlic and tobacco, for the sake of the music. In any event the experiment was of brief duration. No one gets more than a fragment in an ordinary lifetime."

"If you think that," said Adam, "I can't see that there is any responsibility about it. We should not thrust life on any one."

"True," she assented. "Your position is unassailable, but still it seems to me the responsibility remains. In the first place, granting that my hypothesis is true, how can we tell whether to live is gain? How do we know that the next generation would be better and stronger than we are? Moreover, I only give this to you as my idea. I do not say it is true; I believe it to be so, but I do not know anything whatsoever about it. I can't prove it, and it may be transcendental rubbish. I rather imagine you think it is."

"Not exactly that," he said, coloring and laughing, "but certainly it is rather amazing when one hears it for the first time. I daresay I shall come to believe it too. So far as I can see, you are about as unorthodox as I am."

"I have times of relapse," she said. "Then I think we are being tempted like the first Adam and Eve. They were commanded to multiply and reign. You and I wouldn't ask anything better, but as a rule one's duty is not attractive. It seems to me just as likely that we are to prove that the lesson is learned, and a man and woman may love each other unselfishly and nobly, foregoing their own desires to save others. Under the old dispensation it was said, 'Greater love hath no man than this;' is it not possible now that the greatest love is that which lays down its life untransmitted? If Christ could pray that the cup of suffering and death might pass from Him, dare we press the bitter draught of being to other lips?"

"Dare we dash the full goblet of joy and opportunity from them?" asked Adam, gravely.

"I wish I knew," she said. "I wish I knew!"

"Have you ever thought what it will mean," he said, "if we adopt the other alternative? Have you thought of the desolation and loneliness of growing old and helpless and finally—" He stopped, and she threw out her hands as if to ward off the thoughts he called before her.

"Oh, yes, yes, I have thought, and it is terrible. I keep remembering a picture I saw in the French Exhibit. It was of a man and a woman; the woman was dead, and he had dug her grave, his broken sword lay at his side, and he had wrapped her in his coat, and begun to cover her over. He could not go on, and knelt, looking at her with a despair on his face that has haunted me ever since. The name, Manon Lescaut, meant nothing to me then, but the story of the picture was enough by itself. All last year I kept seeing that terrible picture. Sometimes it was you, sometimes it was I, that dug the grave and went mad looking into it."

"I should not bury you," said Adam, grimly. "I should carry you to the cliff and take you in my arms and jump. The sea is deep and cruel there."

"Sometimes," she hesitated a moment, then went on,—"sometimes I think that would be the best way for us now, I mean if we decide we have no right to be happy in the old way; for I should be afraid we could not always be strong."

"Very well," he answered; "when we decide, it shall be literally life or death."