Part 5

As one gazes with holy admiration at this theophany of truth in renewed manifestation, and watches the changing effects, the action of the Spirit of New Life becomes apparent; the adaptation of the new growth to progress becomes a living experience, the facts become vital in significance to help others to live beautifully and truly. The pure white light from the azure sky, the composite of all colors, differentiates itself when touching the new growth and youthful forms. Topaz flowers, and garlands of ruby blossoms, rich golden stamens set in sapphire corollas, the royal purple, bloomed upon the garments of Hope, turquoise opaque tints and alexandrite changing hues took proper place as life took time.

The New Life advances, treading the way all plants and men should follow--must follow. The always true, always good, always beautiful, in motion or effect. And at times the theophany is seen in effects too dazzling for mortal eye to gaze upon with sight in nakedness--the naked eye cannot see and live. From behind the cumuli of clouds such radiant outbursts of effulgent splendor that a transfiguration of the Presence itself seems imminent, a veritable foresight of what the pure in heart above can see and live,--a glimpse of what is implied by the immanence of the Creator of all life. It is then that scintillations of brilliancy shine forth from every gem, from every good thought, from every beautiful action, responsive to Him who created them. It is then that the truth is visible to the naked eye so that man can see upon the earth that for which he prays, “as it is in heaven.” It is then that the Spirit of New Life becomes enveloped as with a halo around her own presence, and vision is blinded by the increasing effulgence of the truthful atmospheric effects.

Man closes his eyes, his vision is too weak, too limited in power and scope, to behold that which is actually before his eyesight. And while his sight is sealed by the very glory of the fact itself, and his mental vision strives to retain permanently that which he has been permitted to witness, then the Spirit speaks, speaks into the heart-life of those who have sought by striving to learn how to hear as well as to see. It is then when the eye is closed, yet all in the presence of New Life, that the avatar, theophany, renaissance, resurrection of truth in springtime, speaks the pure word of the Mind of Nature, the Creator Father,--the still small voice is heard.

Softly as a murmur it comes from all directions. To him whose life work is in one field it is a voice profound and comprehensive in nature, and he calls it the music of the spheres. To another, it seems as tender, loving and true as parental affection in its holiest moments, and this one takes his children into the fields and wood to see and hear. It pervades all life, this Voice of Thought, Being, Joy, in the resurrection of New Life. It is heard in the bird-notes from every bush as the little songsters sing to their mates, rejoicing in renewed virility and hope of cozy nests amid the youthful foliage; it is the voice of renewed youth speaking unto itself, yet not itself, but through itself into those whom it had created, preserved, saved,--a simple, child-like voice, asking questions.

Man pauses to listen. What are the questions asked in the early childhood of springtime?

Oh, how pure, sincere! Transparent, clear! How loving the motive and desire which prompts the children of men when close to nature to look up wistfully for an answer.

“Whence comes this Spirit of New Life?”

And lo! the inner voice:

“All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made.”

And lo! again the voice:

“In Him was Life, and the Life was the Light of Men.”

And lo! yet again the voice--for the third time,--the voice of a man to his brother man:

“I am the Resurrection and the Life. Come unto Me.”

Adele heard this inner voice,--the Trinity in Nature operative, speaking to her, to her personally.

She closed the book, pressing it against her heart, and wended her way homeward, absorbed in thought, verily as one in the world, yet now above it, spiritually.

Her father had spoken to her of the Light of the World, as Intelligence and Righteousness. He who is the Light of the World had said to her, spiritually:

“I am the Resurrection and the Life.”

She had sought the sunshine, and heard the Voice;--the Voice of the Trinity in the springtime of her youth.

Not until next morning did the practical application of what Adele had heard take hold upon her as something demanding prompt attention. The concept once accepted, at once acted like a seed-word, producing new life, and the beautiful blossoms of a new intelligence appeared. She herself became a part of this springtime resurrection. Being what she was, youthful, intelligent, sincere, it of course took form, naturally, in connection with that phase of life and activity which was uppermost in her own environment at the time,--but the motive now much more heartfelt and spiritual.

She had longed to go abroad, and often said so, merely, however, for the hope of enjoyment, now the desire was to see and learn more of humanity at large for a given purpose; and especially that region, the Orient, from which such thoughts, so practical yet spiritual, had originally come. She wanted a broader knowledge of the world and of the great religions; of the Light of the World as a universal spiritual as well as physical experience, and this, simply in order to live better, truer, and to help others.

“I must go!--really must,” she whispered, “even if I have to make the circumstances.”

“_Oh, ye who may survive me when the spring returns, Remember how I loved its loveliness._”

VII

OFF TO ASIA

It was at the Club, only a few days later, where the Doctor met Professor Cultus. The usual preliminaries of greeting had hardly passed from hearing before the Professor seemed unusually anxious to know certain details about the Far East, details about modes of travel and such things,--in fact, asked so many questions quite unlike his usual mode of conversation, that the Doctor pricked up his ears with delight, evidently having some suspicions, and finally asked the direct question: “Why don’t you go and see for yourself?”

Professor Cultus laughed, and then frankly acknowledged the situation: “Mrs. Cultus and Adele are so bent on seeing the Orient before it becomes civilized, as they evidently expect, that I have no peace. Mrs. Cultus is reading ‘O. K.’ between the lines of ‘The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney,’ as if one ought to throw some light upon the other. She says she wants to make the acquaintance of some of those Khidmatgars and Maharajas while they yet stand upon their native heath. I’ve told her they don’t wear kilts like MacGregor, but ’twas no use. She immediately wished to know what they did wear. I suppose I’m in for it. They’ve been talking the matter over at intervals all winter, but now! now! O now! we have it from thin soup to thick coffee.”

“Better give in,” said the Doctor, laughing heartily.

“Well, just between us, I have;--but I haven’t told them so, not as yet. I rather take to the notion myself since I can see my way to get off, but I don’t quite understand the _modus operandi_--how one man can manage civilized women in a land where women don’t generally count for much. Did you say the Taj could now be seen without an elephant ride? That’s the sort of thing I must know beforehand; two civilized women on one wild beast might demoralize the beast.”

The bare possibility of having the Cultus party in the East at the same time with themselves, sent Paul to call upon Adele as quickly as he could pick up his hat and rush out. These two young members put their heads together and practically settled all details, both possible and impossible, before the older members of the party could well realize what they were talking about. Youth forever! American style! Action! Action! Action! with occasional application of the brake.

Mrs. Cultus was greatly in favor of having four in their own party.

“_Une partie carree_ is always so much more workable when travelling,” she said, “and besides, Adele ought to have some one nearer her own age. I don’t intend to follow Adele into every dirty native haunt she may take a notion to visit. Now if we can only find some one of the modern Investigating-Civil Club, or of the Literary-Reformation Reportorial Society, we shall be in clover all through the tour; we can report progress in print whenever we wish, and have a book ready as soon as we return.”

“But, Mother, you are too grasping,” exclaimed Adele, “only a literary corps can assimilate the whole thing.”

“No! Not quite!” said Mrs. Cultus. “We need only report our own progress, not the rotation-progress-of-the-earth. Now that I come to think of it, perhaps I’d better do the reporting myself. The society column generally puts in what I send them,--and then I’m sure of what is said. Oh! I have an idea! It’s a companion for you, Adele, that troubles me! Now I come to think of it, whom would you like?” But before any one could reply, Mrs. Cultus continued:

“Why, Miss Winchester, of course! Now if she can be persuaded,--Adele, you know how to coax her,--that will be the very thing.” Professor Cultus made no objection, and the delighted Adele took it up as if the persuasion of Miss Winchester were a foregone conclusion.

Adele and Paul found Miss Winchester in her own study, her writing-table littered with odds and ends, apparently, really notes such as literary workers are apt to jot down when a passing thought or phrase seems worth keeping; loose slips of paper and packages held by gum bands, pieces pinched at the ends with mysterious folds, also things tucked away under blotters where she couldn’t find them, and so forth. The Persuasion Committee, Adele Chairman, entered,--a gale of wind among the papers. Action first and the ideas picked up afterwards. Rapturous greeting between the girl chums;--then Adele exclaimed, “Oh! Frank! If you love me do consent to come with us.”

“Caramels or Gibraltars? Which is it this time?” laughed Miss Winchester.

“Please put on your bonnet and come,” gushed Paul, manly mindful of the importance of such things.

“O Frank! We’re just wild to have you.”

“Well, please become sane again, take a seat;--no, not on that box, it’s precious!”

Adele dashed her hat and gloves on the writing-table, utterly regardless of pens, ink, papers or blotters. “Now, my dear, no nonsense,--do say yes.”

“My dear Adele, I do love you very much, but I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

Adele produced a printed list of routes for travellers. “There!” Miss Winchester noticed an illustration of the Sphynx on the cover. “I never made her acquaintance,” said she, and a comical expression played over her features as she tried to divine what Adele expected the Sphynx to tell.

Adele took it up at once. “You never met the Sphynx! Why, that’s just it! Now’s our chance,--don’t you see?” And the Committee started in, one hundred and twenty words to the minute, to explain matters.

Miss Winchester, somewhat confused by the rapidity of Adele’s jumps from place to place in mental travelling, but as responsively elastic as either of the others, took several turns in her office-chair while the others were chatting; but when they landed her among the Himalaya mountains as part of the journey, she gasped for utterance:

“Bless me! You take my breath away.”

“Never mind! Catch it again. Oh, do please! Please do! and come along!”

“But you must give me time to think,” and Miss Winchester began cogitating how she would turn an apparent impossibility into an assured fact.

“Oh, don’t think too much,” exclaimed Adele, when the result of thinking looked precarious. “Just do it,--why, don’t you see? The opportunity of our lives! We shall learn so much.”

Now it so happened, the circumstances being favorable, that Adele’s last appeal touched upon a matter in Miss Winchester’s past experience, and excited a far more potent incentive to join the party than any amount of contagious enthusiasm could ever have accomplished.

Miss Winchester had not long before published a successful novel based upon results of travel, including character sketches, the result of careful observation amid episodes of ordinary life. She had given it the whimsical title of “Upside Down.” Now what could possibly be more opportune than to follow this with others,--say on “Downside Up,” or, better still, “Outside and Inside”? And where could more be found of circumstantial interest than in the Orient? Who knows!--it might lead to still another, “Turned Inside Out,” for the East undoubtedly had many examples of that sort of thing. Being already a member of the literary craft, the opportunity was altogether too good to be lost, every nerve must be strained to reach the other side. It goes without saying that the Chairman of the Persuasion Committee was caught dancing an impromptu tarantelle when Miss Winchester finally told them it might, possibly might, be arranged.

“Oh, then it’s settled positively,” exclaimed Adele; “for if you hesitate you’re lost.”

Paul thought Adele a little witch as she danced with glee, all the time encouraging her friend. He remembered how Adele had bewitched himself also not long before, when she was in quite another mood. Paul laughed outright, but could not keep his eyes from noticing her every movement.

As to Miss Winchester, she took hold of the problem with a vim characteristic of some of the characters of her own creation; she tackled at once the ubiquitous problem known to all men on both sides of the globe as, “How to make both ends meet,” and of course solved it satisfactorily. Some few of the craft-literary, and in some degree all women of whatever persuasion, usually do. So Adele was right,--that settled it. Miss Winchester finally saw her way clear, and joined their party.

It would have been difficult to find a more congenial and vivacious group than Professor and Mrs. Cultus, Miss Winchester and Adele, with their friends the Doctor and Paul, as they met in the salon of the steamer on the eve of departure. Henri Semple, who looked forward to meeting them later on the other side, led the party of chosen friends who came to see them off, and while trying to aid the Doctor and Paul with their hand-baggage, kept dodging Mr. Hammond, one of those antipathetic, ghostly individuals who throw cold water upon such occasions. Mrs. Maxwell sent her butler with an exquisite kedge anchor in rose-buds for Adele, “in case you have no wireless telegraph when wrecked, my dear.”

Amid friends, and flowers sent in kind remembrance, with many kind messages “bon voyage,” there was, nevertheless, just a touch of regret when some one asked Adele how she liked leaving America. She had thus far thought of it as leaving home. Now home was “America” in reference to where she was going,--her first sensation of the broadening effects of travel.

A few moments later all were on deck in gay spirits, Miss Winchester striving to avoid an impolite kodak-fiend in search of celebrities, who was taking snap-shots from the bridge; but she only succeeded in getting herself into a most unconventional attitude, almost doubled up with laughter, strongly suggestive in a finished picture that some one had the _mal de mer_ already. “One ought never to judge by appearances,” remarked the Doctor, as he attempted to shield Miss Winchester from the kodak.

The bell sounded, only passengers were permitted to remain longer on board. The Doctor was saying “I trust we meet again” to one of his trunks, when Semple hurried down the gang-plank waving back “au revoir”; a gamin on the dock instantly echoed back what sounded like “moo-swore, take moo-swore.” Adele waved her handkerchief to Semple, and a Frenchman near by took off his hat, smiling as if the salute were intended for him.

The steamer swung out from the wharf and glided into midstream; amid cheers, and adieus waved in many directions, and kisses thrown to loved ones left behind. America and home, now one and the same, began to recede. They were actually on their way to the Far East.

VIII

A STUDIO FOR IMPRESSIONS

The voyage across the Atlantic from New York to the Gibraltar proved a constant series of sapphire days. Skies light azure often cloudless, the ocean a richer shade with enough wind to curl the sea-foam into delicate lace-like patterns. When the billows rose into the domain of direct sunlight, myriads of brilliant points scintillated like sparkling gems decorating the wave crests,--the sea-foam not unlike flossy embroidery or ruffles of lace upon silk of blue.

Adele’s first experience of things as they are in the great motion constant, onward, ever forward, in the very being of the boundless deep; also her first impressions of the ways and means amid a cosmopolitan crowd on board an ocean-flyer. Nature and humanity, each in constant movement, the former with majesty and potency profound, the latter on the grand rush, often to obtain something to eat.

Towards sunset she stood with the Doctor watching the crimson disk grow less and less in brilliancy, and finally through a veil of luminous atmosphere disappear in the mysterious beyond.

They spoke little, as if under some fascination. The varied movements in the sky and unstable water-foundation were indeed somewhat hypnotic in effect, but a psychologist would have been puzzled to detect the outcome of their meditations. While they gazed, a passing breeze crossed the surface immediately before them, changing the delicate traceries in nature’s handiwork. The Doctor at once responded, for the complications appealed to him, and most naturally he spoke in terms of his own previous experience of similar impressions.

“Those changes in the wave curves are not unlike harmonic modulations, and I can actually hear the difference.” Adele seemed surprised.

“Yes,” continued the Doctor, “the slow, dignified progression is certainly symphonic in character, yet the infinite variety in less melodic forms piles up little by little until the greater movement is itself influenced. How wonderful, majestic, yet exceedingly subtle, and always refined! It is certainly sound-color or color as sound, and the drawing of the design--well, ’pon my soul, the drawing is too quick for me. I can’t see how it is done, it flits from me, is gone, living only in memory, not unlike the technical element in the rendition of music. But the sound-color, the real harmony. Ah! that I hear in my mind’s ear and see in my mind’s eye for long afterwards.” Adele, much younger than the Doctor, was also working out her own impressions according to previous experience, the experience of youth.

“Oh, yes! I see what you see,--very artistic,--you can talk about it in that style if you choose, but----” and she seemed in doubt how to describe what she really felt. The Doctor waited till she was ready.

“It’s so awfully real! It’s alive!”

“H’m!”

“Yes, a great real picture, that which I like in pictures.”

“No doubt an original,” remarked the Doctor, smiling. “The original of many marines.”

Adele called attention to the magnificent contour lines which themselves swayed to and fro over the curved surface.

“Don’t you see, it’s alive; the whole thing moves, it’s so true; and you and I with it, we’re all going. Isn’t that just glorious!”

“Oh!” exclaimed the Doctor, “in Him we live and move and have our being,--that’s what you mean?”

“Just so,” and she paused before continuing: “He was the Artist, and it is a living picture, a real one, just ready to be painted.”

It was the apparent living earth, the breathing of the deep sea which had impressed Adele, the suppressed emotion of the planet, ever existing, ever apparent to those who had eyes to see and ears to hear for observation; and this over the whole vast expanse.

“Of course,” whispered Adele, “a living picture, by so great an Artist, must be sublimely artistic.”

“True,” mused the Doctor, “the greater will include the less,--a masterpiece, an original, to lead the artistic sense onward and upward.”

* * * * *

But there were few on board who gave even a passing thought to this physical breathing of the earth, nor to the invisible moisture ascending by evaporation. The majority thought no more of it than they did of their own individual breathing; they took it as a matter of course, no more, no less. They had, however, other impressions, quite as mundane, and equally apparent. Some sought impressions from watching card-sharpers in the smoking-room; others by listening to fluent talkers who really abused good natural endowments by promiscuous discussion of any and every subject that came up; men who did not hesitate an instant to suggest what they considered to be improvements upon nature. The conceit of some seemed indeed colossal, especially when they, too, waved their arms about, forming contour lines over curved ideas, to carry their impressions far beyond the briny deep. Even such, however, were really small harmless game compared to what Mrs. Cultus soon encountered.

IX

A BUDGET OF NEW SCIENCES

Previous to leaving home Mrs. Cultus had flattered herself she was taking the Professor abroad to obtain rest from his arduous scientific pursuits--alas! only to find herself at once in a very vortex of new sciences and arts, so-called. Authorities discussed Ping Pong as an art, also skittles, and the nomenclature of golf was quite enough in matter of differentiations to establish it as a science. Then there were new methods in the practice of medicine. Thoughts warranted to cure were for sale under the title of Mental Science;--and even a religious science, said to be popular and quite new to the orthodox Science of Religions. All were on board and much in evidence.

None of these things would have much troubled the Professor, but to Mrs. Cultus they afforded a glorious opportunity to pick up odd bits of information. She herself was certainly not suffering from fatigue from the perusal of scientific publications, so when the book of experience opened a chapter new to her, written by folk who prided themselves upon the especial efficacy of their own mental efforts, why, that appealed as the sort of science and art quite in her line rather than the Professor’s. Having no lack of worldly wisdom in her own mentality she at once took her stand. With regard to any new phase of religious science, so-called, she would be very inquisitive, not opinionated, much less dogmatic; but as to any mental racket, scientific or otherwise, she thought she might venture further. In fact ought to have some opinion of her own, being entitled to it, _ex-officio_, as a Professor’s spouse. Such was Mrs. Cultus’ point of view.

Matters were soon brought to a focus. She overheard repeated remarks about patients who had been healed simply by receiving new mental impressions easily obtained, generally by correspondence, fixed charge, five dollars for epistolary impression. Some one who had been victimized had told her of a bushel-basket full of impressions shipped by mail each day from a single office.

“There must be some good ones in the lot,” thought Mrs. Cultus. “We must investigate a little.”