Part 3

All human love is more or less riotous and selfish; the passion is like an ocean, whose billows roll high, or rock in a gentle lullaby, but never, never an unbroken calm. Also, ardor and warmth are the fruit of desire, not necessarily sinful, but of the leaven of humanity.

He felt, in the presence of these spirits of purity, the taint of the world clinging to him like a soiled garment; he fancied he could smell the mold of the grave, the odor of his decaying body.

He looked with amaze upon those spirits from whom no thought emanated save eternal worship of the Eternal One, seated forever on a “Great White Throne” in their midst; before which even the fronded palms seemed to lift up their heads in adoration.

All have read that the floor of heaven is laid over “with gold and precious stones;” and whose “walls are of jasper and onyx, and all things costly and precious.”

All other emotions now gave place to wonder. How could the earthly be so mixed up with the spiritual? How could the love of “all things costly” remain, and no taint of humanity linger? The desire for gold was born of greed; and the love of precious stones was sired by selfishness.

No one of all that vast throng seemed to observe him; the spiritual vision of all seemed to be fixed upon Him who sat on high. A great number seemed to have no vocation except to float around and around the throne; the concourse seemed incessant, interminable. Another mighty number twanged invisible harps.

Here was fresh cause for amazement. How could a bodiless spirit touch the strings of a harp? How could sound exist where there were no ears? Does not science demonstrate that there is no such thing as noise, unless there are ears to hear? This then was another figment of the spiritual intelligence.

His ideas became so tangled that it worried him, but he finally summed up in this manner; each intelligence received that which was desired purely, or believed implicitly; music, worship, beauty; each but an expression of adoration. A narrow limit, truly!

Many vapory forms floated around him, gently touching him with shadowy wings. One sweet spirit ever pressed closely to his side as they neared him in their slowly circling around that central figure—like motes in the sun. A thought wave flowed from her intelligence to him, which he interpreted, “Come join with me. Let us worship together!”

He hesitated; the movements looked very dreamy and poetic, but what had that to do with spirituality?

Each spirit beamed with benignant light; eternal sweetness wafted around them like the odor of innumerable flowers heavy with dew. Thought waves rippled from spirit to spirit, transparent as a pellucid sea, gentle as when the sweet south wind fans it into low, languid swells; pure as are the lilies, and sweet unto faintness, as is their odor. His desire hungered piteously: “Oh, for the scarlet of the passion flower and the gold of the homely dandelion!” The sweet spirit gently touched him with filmy wings; a thought wave reached his consciousness: “Cease rebelling; you disturb the heavenly harmony. Oh come! Come with me!”

It seemed that a sigh floated past him—it could not be—but oh, all things were so unreal! Even the holiness and perfection seemed dreamy and untrue—too cold and calm.

A shiver ran through his spirit, he felt his earthiness cling about his spirituality as had sodden garments adhered to his physical form; he was weighted down by a sense of unworthiness and imperfection. The teachings of his humanity so held him in thrall that he could not climb the heights of exaltation on a single thought as all these souls appeared to do.

The alluring spirit came again; pressing still more closely, pleading yet more fervently; a hint of earthly love in her prayer—vaguely suggestive—as were all things else.

He felt the Lofty Intelligence looking him through and through, and his mind turned with a mighty longing to his former habitation; to him it seemed that the limitations of the flesh were not so narrow as this circumscribed routine. In this place was no progression; on earth, one might at least make an effort.

Reproachfully, compellingly, the Immaculate gazed upon him.

Sweetly, gently, the fair spirit lured him, until his will was compelled, and side by side with her who had so sweetly entreated, he joined the slowly revolving circle.

Having once consented, turning back was an impossibility; therein they differed from those in the flesh. We easily slip from our effort after higher things, and when we fall, fall far; they, having once turned their spiritual gaze upward, could not turn away. As he floated on, side by side with the Beauteous One, her sweet magnetism enveloped him like the odor of wild wood flowers.

His amazement increased; what worth in all this if he possessed no free will? Compulsory virtue is of no avail. He wondered what purpose they served floating about like butterflies on a summer breeze; and if it was any particular pleasure to the Lord of All to behold them gyrate? Oh dear! And did He never tire of even the Great White Throne?

He thought, with a chill of repulsion, that the Perfect One, who did nothing but sit on a throne to be worshiped, was a less beautiful expression of the Deity than the flowers of the field, or the birds that wing their glad flight through the ether; also, that the incessant twanging of harps was not so sweet a music, or so filled with worship, as the babbling of the brook, or the whisper of the wind, to Him who created them.

He was so weary of it all, even to the vapory, melodious voices of the shadowy choir; he wondered if they never rested; also, if it was because of the taint of his humanity that he could not appreciate the beauty and sublimity of it.

He remembered that from childhood he had been taught that heaven was as he now saw it, and whenever he had been given a hard task it had appeared to him that the height of enjoyment would be in having nothing to do; and that heaven was a place of eternal rest, had ever been held out as an inducement to exalted virtue, and—excessive labor. He found the inactivity terribly irksome, it reminded him of worldly _ennui_; then, the unreality bewildered him—it was like pressing the fingers upon the eyelids—persons, places and things are vividly seen, and yet we know that it is but a chimera of the brain; a vision of the intelligence. So he grew to doubt the reality of everything. He could not keep his spirituality keyed up to the proper pitch; his intelligence would wander back to earth and mortal love. The purely spiritual seemed to him to be lacking. It is only given to humanity to burn hot and cold; to reach the heights of bliss and the depths of despair; even that which we call despair has its amelioration, for never yet was it so dark but, given a little time, humanity looks upward to where the sun is shining, and hopes and strives to reach the illuminated summit; but here—there could be but this endless sameness through all eternity, without even the pleasure of striving, “thus far shalt thou go, and no farther.”

He rebelled madly; he preferred the trials and the pains of the body, with the power to control his actions, to the spiritual and no will of his own. Eternal leisure has its unpleasant features, though many seem to suppose that eternal leisure and eternal felicity are synonymous.

He looked back with positive longing to the hard work, and consequent weariness; from bodily fatigue rest had been sweet; but the unending spiritual lassitude of eternity was terrible to contemplate. A sad, reproachful thought wave met his pessimistic, spiritual cry; with shame and terror, he felt that the Perfect One saw all his discontent and rebellion—still he could not but wonder. Had all these placid souls been as easily swayed while in the body, as they were in the spirit? Their very sweetness and complaisance exasperated him; he thought, with a very human perverseness, that he should like to see one of them get angry, so as to get up a little excitement; instead, they were as sweet as the dripping sap of the budding maple, and—as insipid. Things and persons can be too good. Better a thunderstorm and a purified atmosphere than a sultry, lifeless day.

The exasperation grew upon him. The thought wave from his companion was like a perpetual sigh; a curious blending of the wish to adore, and the desire to be loved. He felt the reproach of the myriad souls who brushed him with filmy wings. Sad reproof fell upon him from Him seated over all.

Waves of love and adoration rose and fell on the soft, enervating air, like strains of languid music, the perfect rhythm madly suggestive to him of the sweetness and longing of human love. This love of his companion spirit revolted him; it was like a draught of tepid water to the traveler dying of heat and thirst; her thought wave had the effect of clinging hands, which would not let him go, and he grew almost to hate her.

As they once more came around that endless circle he saw the door sliding noiselessly open, a spirit was for an instant outlined against the darkness without; the door had already commenced to close; he madly broke away from the compelling current of the She, who would have held him. His consciousness felt her despairing cry breaking the placidity of that spiritual atmosphere, as the tornado sweeps the ocean, lashing it into frightful waves.

The All Seeing looked at him with awful wrath and majesty. He but sped the faster. The door was closing rapidly; he forgot the terrors of the darkness without—he forgot the multitude of drifting souls, and their horrible contact—he forgot that he knew not where he should go in all that limitless gloom; he strove madly to reach the door ere it closed, to once more shut him into that horrible inactivity, and forced semblance of adoration.

He reached the door—yet a little space open; the guardian angel paused in amazement—it sufficed. He darted through; but instead of floating off on the magnetic current as he had expected, he plunged downward—down, down, down! Would he never reach a resting-place?

Oh, for a voice to cry aloud! Oh, for the company of even the gruesome shadows! Though he loathed and feared them, this absolute isolation held a greater terror, the fear that this state might be perpetual. One of the first principles of all life is resistance, and deprived of all motive—which is but another way of saying of all power of resistance—he felt as though in the throes of a spiritual vertigo.

He struggled frantically to cry aloud, he imagined that a ray of light pierced the gloom in the distance; with a mad effort he struggled upward, unseen hands caught and held him down, and still that tantalizing ray of light flickered and glowed like a beckoning ray of hope.

Within its radius grew a face—his swooning soul revived—it bore the lineaments of Aimee; she too must have passed over to the Beyond.

Like sweetest music a sound reached him; sweeter than all the mythical harps are the tones of the human voice—and succeeding the deadly silence through which he had passed—it flooded his whole being with delight. Aimee was stooping over him caressingly, her words were very simple: “August, dear, are you better?”

His fingers closed feebly over her hand, as he whispered faintly, “Oh, I fell so far! How came you to catch me?”

She answered him soothingly, and held an invigorating drink to his lips; he drank obediently and immediately dropped into a refreshing slumber.

* * * * *

When through the rush and roar of the storm the frightened men bore August’s body to the farmhouse there was no disfiguring trace upon him except a slight blue line, like a faint pencil mark, extending from brow to chin; he lay like one asleep, that faint, sweet smile still upon his lips. In a state of mental collapse Aimee accompanied them, and for days her condition bordered upon insanity; when they made preparations to bury August, she cried so piteously that he was not dead, that they were forced to delay the final ceremonies; this was repeated until her persistence won a measure of unwilling belief, and a council of physicians was called, who decided that he was in a cataleptic condition.

Aimee scarcely left his bedside until he recovered consciousness.

About a week after this occurred, as he lay on a couch drawn up to the open window, languidly looking at the softly rustling leaves, the green grass, the glowing flowers, he sighed restlessly.

Aimee was at his side instantly: “What is it, August? Are you in pain?”

“Oh, no! I was only thinking how much nicer this is than heaven, and wondering why it is that people are not more content in this beautiful world; we have such infinite variety, such happy conditions, and yet humanity is so unsatisfied.” He paused a moment, then asked, “Didn’t you know that I was in heaven while I was dead?”

“I know that you are talking fearful nonsense!” answered Aimee severely.

“Do you think it nonsense that I think this world so beautiful?” he asked teasingly.

“You know that I do not mean that; but that is nonsense about your going to heaven.”

“But I did go there and it made me awful tired! I am glad that I returned to earth again,” said he.

“Oh, August! You are perfectly horrid!” was Aimee’s shocked rejoinder.

He smiled, but went on to relate his strange experience.

“But you were not really dead, you know,” she replied as he finished the recital.

“Do you think that?” he answered thoughtfully; “I should like to have some one—some person who really knows—explain the difference between that which is called trance, and death, except as to duration. Where was my soul during all that time? Not in the body of a certainty. I know that my spirit went to heaven; everything there was just as I had been taught from childhood that it would be; that teaching could not by any possibility be wrong!” he added conclusively, but with a merry twinkle in his eye.

Later on, sweetly and seriously he said, “I shall always love and appreciate nature so much more for that experience; of things infinite we know not the method; we behold the result, and we know that the Creator _is_. All nature unites into a rhythm of grandest praise to Him who is part and parcel of all things good. The leaf on the tree whispers of his abiding presence; the flower that springs from the mold lifts its face to the sun and air, and speaks of the Life, glorifying Him with its beauteous colors. God is the very principle of all life. He is not an Idle God; his work goes on forever, without haste, without cessation. We are created in his image; not as to the physical, which must change its form, and subserve in other ways, but as to the spiritual, which, if we will not pervert our higher natures—will grow to sublime heights of purity and goodness—the higher we place our standard the nearer we approach the Divine.

“We sin continually against our better selves, our physical bodies and our spiritual natures, we gorge the body and starve the mind; we overwork the perishable physical, and let the mental and spiritual rust, while we heap up a little gold and silver for those who shall come after us to squander and quarrel over. We strive after a heaven in the future, and neglect that which only is ours to-day. Why wait for an impossible time, and a mythical place? We had best take a share of it each day; it is here if we will accept it; for, dearest Aimee, what does heaven mean but _happiness_?”

THE TRAGEDY OF THE GNOMES.

Many, many ages ago this fair old world of ours wore a solemn and forbidding aspect; no carpet of thick, green grass eased the footfall of man as he climbed the hills; no human voice was heard amid the desolation—ice, ice everywhere—from the North Pole to the center of that which is now the temperate zone, and only such life peopled this region as could endure the rigor of a more than arctic condition. Vast sheets of ice, in depth immeasurable, covered the surface of the hills and valleys, broken toward the tropics into serrated edges—the verdure running up an occasional valley, as though in laughing derisions of its neighbors the ice-imprisoned mountains.

In those days there existed only hideous animals and reptiles of size great and awful; animals whose terrible voice shook the mountains like an earthquake; slimy or scaly reptiles who walked on many feet, or dragged a hideous length along the ice-covered rocks. It seemed as if the great Creator must have fashioned all existent things in an hour of wrath, or that man, having existed, had been for some sin exterminated by that icy inundation, and that animal creation had so displeased him that he had fashioned them in grotesque caricature upon all grace and beauty.

Man esteems himself higher than all other created things; who shall say that the great, buzzing bluebottle fly does not think the same of himself, and perhaps, with as much reason; it is at most but a grade of intelligence; and what do we understand of that Intelligence which is above _us_?

In one of the green valleys running up into the foothills of what is now called the Rocky Mountains, frisked and played a band of Gnomes. These were but a fairy people, differing only from the fairies of woodland glade and dell in this; those fairy folk were things of beauty like imprisoned sunbeams; lighter than gossamer, they floated hither and thither, always trending toward the tropics, where the sun shone radiantly warm, and the silvery moon lighted the verdant carpet of grass, and the sweet south wind rang the lily bells in merry chime; there they idled away each sunny day—creatures of light and frivolity.

These Gnomes were a sturdier, darker folk, short in stature, but with a breadth of shoulder, a depth of chest, and muscles fit for giants. Though for an occasional frolic they danced and roughly tossed each other about in the valley, they better loved their homes in the heart of the ice-covered mountains, where they forged beautiful things from the yellow metal, or decked their cavern homes with softly glowing, or fiery-eyed jewels; thus from earnest labor their faces gained a look of firmness and determination; they were homely, but were good to look upon, lighted as their faces were by love and kindliness.

One among them was wondrously fair: Lilleela they called her. Her hair was like silk as it winds from the cocoon; her eyes were blue as the sky when it shows between the fleecy clouds of summer; her cheeks were as though they had been kissed by the wild rose blooms, which left their dainty stains upon the fair skin. She was as sweet and pure as the breath of the dawn.

Walado was her lover; a short, deep-chested giant, with a face like a ripe walnut—all seams and puckers; not with age, but with jolly laughter, and intent, hard work. Lilleela must have the finest of rubies, on strings of beaten gold; tiny silver bells must be made, to ring their sweet chimes with every joyous movement; dainty chains of gold—set with amethyst, rubies and diamonds—must be wrought to bind the floating cloud of hair. Away down in the heart of the mountain Walado plied his little hammer of polished stone—clink-clink-clink all day long like a refrain it accompanied his happy song.

One fair day the troop of Gnomes went down into the green valley for a holiday.

Walado objected: “No, no! You can go, but I must finish this golden girdle for my Lilleela, and then, there are sandals of gold to be set with precious stones for her feet—they are too sweet and fair to be bruised by the rocks,” he had answered, screwing up his face into a funny little smile.

“Oh, do come, Walado! The girdle and sandals can wait! The sun is so cold and sorrowful up here, but down in the valley it is so beautiful!” pleaded Lilleela.

Her blue eyes moulded his will like warm wax, and over the ice they sped away many, many miles, to where its broken edges lay like icicles flattened out with huge rollers; some having sharp, sword-like points, others rounded and scalloped, as though in fanciful adornment. All along the border of the valley, reaching in places high up on the mountain side—wherever there were breaks in the ice—hardy trees had planted their feet, and lifted their heads to catch a breath of the warmer air of the tropics; some few, essaying to climb still higher, or being less hardy—reached their dead arms abroad, or pointed with ghostly fingers toward the icy desolation in warning to their kind.

These happy, childlike beings, instead of walking, had a gliding movement which carried them over the ground very rapidly; laughing, tumbling, pushing one another in merry sport, they sped on as though wings were attached to their feet. Hand in hand went Walado and Lilleela; his nut-brown face drawing into a nest of comical wrinkles, which were so many happy smiles; her look was like the sun, bright and warm.

Of a sudden she stopped and shivered: “Oh, my Walado, what was that?” From off the mountain height had come a long, low wail, and a chill was borne with it which froze them with fear.

Walado gathered her in his embrace, and shading his eyes with one hand, looked back over the mountain: “Fear not, my Lilleela, ’tis but the voice of the storm on its way from the far north. See! We shall soon be in the beautiful valley, where he cannot come!”

“Let us hasten, then, for in my heart I feel a chill which is like death.”

Walado gathered her closer to him: “Little sun beam! Am I not able to shield you from the shadow of the dark cloud?”

She patted his brown face with her wee, rose-leaf palms, and kissed the wrinkles on his brown cheeks lovingly.

“Yes, my Walado; your arm is as strong as your heart is brave, but—” she broke off abruptly: “Let us fly!” she finished with a sound between a laugh and a sob as the wailing came borne from the mountain heights once more.

Turning their affrighted glance backward, they saw the tall pines at the foot of the hills swaying wildly; some which stood so tall and straight were snatched off like a brittle weed and tossed down the mountain side.

Lilleela shivered again, remembering the look the fearful Ice King had given her as he rode above the mountain height upon which she stood at twilight hour; he was seated upon a cloud of inky blackness; his eyes shot forth red and yellow flame, like the terrible light which streamed up from the far north; his lips were blue and hideous, and his matted hair, and long, tangled beard, were a mixture of frost and ice. He pointed a finger at her which looked as though belonging to the hand of one long since dead—so rigid and bloodless it appeared—the nails showed blue and ghastly. With a voice like the whistling north wind, he said, “You’ll make a bonny bride for the Ice King! Your youth will warm my old blood finely! o-We-ee, Y-e-ss!” The cloud passed on, and bore him from her view, but the deadly chill remained, for well Lilleela knew that his love meant death, as his hate meant destruction.

For this reason the wailing sound shook her with an awful fear, but she dared not tell Walado; she feared that he would turn and seek the terrible monarch whose simple touch was death; once more she caught Walado’s hand, crying gayly, “Come, come, before the storm god overtakes us!”

They romped and played through all that happy day; they climbed the steep inclines, and sitting on the glittering ice dashed down to the valley below, tumbling over and over, with laughter sweet as the tinkling of silver bells; it seemed strange to hear such sweet and musical sounds issuing from those queer little bodies, but the sound fitfully represented the sweet harmonious souls within.