Part 6

From my experience in big-game hunting, I knew that he was done for. Yet, even in these moments when he was dying, the glorious soul of him was unafraid. Three hundred yards away he stopped and turned again, giving the cow and the calf a last chance to reach the timber. The girl fired her last shots, and missed. Then the bull swung after the cow and the calf and disappeared in the cover. But, as he went, there came back to us a terrible, deep-chested cough, and my heart gave up its hope. It told me the heroic old bull was shot through the lungs. I did not hurry after the girl and her father and brother as they ran over the blood-stained trail. I continued to hear the coughing for a few moments. Then it was silent. When I came up to them, just inside the timber, the three were standing in triumph close to the dead body of the bull. Hardly more than twenty paces from it was the yearling calf, dying, but not quite dead. The brother had ended it with a revolver-shot.

And then I looked at the creature who had committed this double murder. Many times I had done this same crime, but with me, crude and rough, with all the inborn savagery of man, killing had not seemed quite so horrible. And standing there, a little later,--red-lipped, her face aflame, her eyes glowing, exquisite in her beauty,--the girl had her picture taken in triumph as she stood with one booted little foot on the neck of her victim.

When I hear of the vaunted human soul, and when men and women tell me there is no soul but the soul of a human, my mind goes back to that day. I might tell of a hundred other instances that are convincing unto myself, but that one stands out with unforgettable vividness.

I am sure, for instance, that the soul of a flower once saved my life. This is not unusual, or even remarkable, for the souls of flowers have saved unnumbered lives, as well as giving cheer and courage to countless millions; and when we die it is still the Soul of the Flower that watches over us in our resting-places. No place in the world do flowers live more beautifully than in our gardens of the dead, cheering us when we come with our grief to the place of our lost ones, giving us courage to go on. Take the Soul of the Flower away from us, and the world would be hard and bleak to live in.

To me, the soul is synonymous with life. I do not disassociate the two. When we breathe our last, our life--our soul--is gone. The two, I believe, are one. When we pluck a flower we destroy neither, but when we tear it up by the roots so that it dies, then has its soul, or its life, gone the same way as that of man who dies. I have spent many wonderful hours in those gardens of the dead which every city, hamlet, and countryside must have. To me, there are only beauty and the glory of God in a cemetery. It seems to me that there, if never before, one must come to understand the brotherhood of all life. It seems to me that the very stillness and peace of a resting-place of the dead softly whisper to us the great secret which those who are lying there have at last discovered--that life is the same, that its only difference is in form and manifestation. I seem to feel that I have come into the one place where there are only charity and faith and good will, and I have always the thought--which to me gives courage and hope--that this is why the flowers and the trees are so beautiful and so comforting there. I have stood in other cemeteries which, to the passing eye, have been barren and ugly, where man has lent but very feebly a helping hand, but even there, if I looked a little closer, I have found the Soul of the Flower, the same peace, the same tranquillity, perhaps even greater courage to inspire one to “keep on.”

I have a case in point, so convincing to myself that all the preaching in the world could not change my sentiment in the matter. I happened, at this particular time, to be traveling alone in the Northland, and when a certain accident befell me, the nearest help I knew of was at a half-breed’s cabin between twenty and thirty miles away. Thirty miles is not a very great matter in a country of paved roads and level paths, but it is a far distance in a country of dense forest and swamp, without trails or guide-posts--and especially when one is badly crippled. Like the most amateurish tenderfoot, I took a chance along the face of a cliff near a small waterfall, slipped, fell, and came tumbling down a matter of thirty feet with a sixty-pound pack and my rifle on top of me. In the fall, my foot received a terrific blow, probably on a projecting ledge of rock.

The man who has faced many situations is usually the man who is cautious, and though I had just committed an inexcusable error in my carelessness, I now lost no time in putting up my small silk tent while I could still drag myself about. It was well I did so. For ten days thereafter, I was not able to rest a pound of weight upon my injured foot.

With the music and refreshing coolness of the waterfall less than a hundred feet from my tent door, and the creek itself not more than a quarter of that distance, I was most fortunately situated under the circumstances. The first morning after my fall found me almost helpless. Every move I made gave me excruciating pain. My entire foot and ankle, and my leg halfway to the knee, were swollen to twice their normal size. This first day I dragged myself to a sapling, cut it as I lay on my side, and made me a rough crutch of it. The second day, my entire lower limb was swollen until it had lost all semblance to form, and was so badly discolored that a cold and terrible dread began to grow in me. I had only thirty cartridges. I fired ten that first day, in the futile hope that some wandering adventurer might have drifted within the sound of my rifle. Occasionally I hallooed. Night of the second day found me in the beginning of a fever, and, at a cost of physical agony, I prepared myself for the worst--placed my possessions within the reach of my hands, and dragged myself up from the creek with a small pail of water.

I shall never forget the dawn of the third day. Racked with pain, with the fever in my blood, my leg now stiff as a board to the thigh, I was still not blind to the beauty of the morning. The rising sun first lighted up the waterfall, then it fell in a warm and golden flood where I had made my camp. In that silence, broken only by the music of the water, every soft note that was made by the wild things came to me distinctly. It was a morning to put cheer and hope into the heart of a dying man. Then my eyes turned, and, a few feet beyond the reach of my hand, I _found something looking at me_.

Yes; to me, in that moment, it was a thing living and vibrant with life, and yet it was nothing more than a flower. It grew on a stem a foot high, and the face of it made me think of one of our home-garden pansies; only, the flower was all one color, with longer petals--a soft, velvety blue. It seemed to have turned to face the morning sun, and, in facing the sun, it was squarely facing me--a piquant, joyous, laughing little face, asking me as clearly as in words, “What can possibly be the matter with you on this fine morning?”

I am not going into the psychology or soul-language of that flower. I am not going to argue about it at all, but simply tell what it did for me. Perhaps, if you want to lay it all to something, you may say it was because I was out of my head a part of the time with fever. But that flower was my doctor through the days of torture and hopelessness that followed. Now and then a bird sang near me; occasionally a wild thing would come and peer at me curiously, then go its way. But the flower never left me, and only turned its face partly away from me in the hours of its evening worship. For its God was the sun. It faced the sun in the morning, wide-awake and open. Late in the afternoon, it would turn a little on its stem, and with the setting of the sun, its soft petals would begin to close, and it would go to sleep, like a little child, with the coming of dusk. Day after day, it grew nearer and more of a beloved comrade to me.

After the fourth day, it did not, for an instant, allow me to think that I was going to die. Never for an instant did it lose its cheer and confidence. It was there to say “Hello!” to me every morning, and there to say “Good-night” to me when the shadows grew deep--and all through the day it talked to me, and bobbed its little head in the whispers of the breezes, and I had the foolish sentiment, at times, that it was actually flirting with me. I do not think I realized how precious it had become to me until, one day, there came a terrific thunder-storm. I thought the first blast of the wind and beat of rain were going to destroy my comrade, and, almost in a panic, I dragged myself right and left, forgetful of pain, until I had built a protection about my flower.

That was the sixth day, and, from that day, the swelling and the pain began to leave my limb. On the tenth, I could move about a little on my feet. On the fifteenth, I was prepared to undertake my journey again. I felt a real grief in leaving that solitary flower. It had become a part of me, had encouraged me in my blackest hours, had cheered and comforted me even in the darkness of nights, because I knew it was there--my little comrade--waiting for the sun. For me, it had individualized itself from among all the other flowers in the forest. And now, when I was about to go, I saw that the flower itself had about lived the span of its life; in a very short time it would fade and die. On the morning I left, the petals were drooping, and its tiny face did not look up at the sun and at me as brightly as before, and I fancied that I could hear its little voice saying, “Please take me with you.” And I did. Call it foolish and trivial sentiment if you will, but the flower and I went together, and afterward I wrote a novel and called it “Flower of the North.”

I have often heard strong men say, “Oh, that is merely a matter of sentiment. Life is too hard and real for a thing like that.”

I agree with them to an extent. Sentiment does not play a large part in the world to-day. For sentiment, as that word is understood by the millions, is the heart and soul of all that is good and great. Without sentiment in the hearts of a man and a woman, there cannot be the fullness of real love between them, even though the law has made them man and wife. Without sentiment, no good act is ever done from the heart out. Without sentiment--a sentiment that warms the soul as a fire warms a cold room--there will never be a deep and comforting faith. I have seen this “co-operation of rational power and moral feeling” make plain faces beautiful, and I have seen the lack of it make others hard as rock. Selfishness, egoism, the desire to get everything possible out of life, no matter at what expense to others, is its antithesis.

As I write these last pages, I have at hand facts which seem to show that sentiment, and therefore faith, is as nearly dead as it has ever been. For science in all the great nations of the earth is planning and plotting frantically for the extermination of their fellow men, and this, in the hour when all the world is crying out for a faith, is what is being achieved:

Deadly gases that will make gunpowder and the rifles anachronisms, that in the next war will depopulate whole regions, men, women, and little children alike.

Perfection of the lethal ray, which will shrivel up and paralyze human beings over vast areas, irrespective of whether they are combatants or not.

Development of plans for “germ-warfare,” whereby whole nations will be infected by plagues.

And then consider the words of one great military scientist of the English-speaking race: “Germ-warfare was tried on a small scale in the late war, and its results have been promising. The method of its use was in the poisoning of water supplies with cholera and typhus germs, and the loosing of dogs inoculated with rabies and of women inoculated with syphilis into the enemy country. _Here apparently is a promising beginning from which vast developments are to be hoped for._”

A promising beginning--vast developments expected for the future--typhus--rabies--the commercial breeding of diseased women.

Yes; the world is crying aloud for a great faith, even as it smashes itself into moral fragments on the rocks of its own egoism and its own selfishness. But there has come a rent in its armor, and as it commits crimes and plans for still greater crimes, it also begins to realize its colossal wickedness. And in its terror it shrieks aloud for a manifestation of the Divine Power. It demands proof.

And again I say that the proof is so near that the world looks over its head--and does not see it. Not until man’s egoism crumbles will he understand. For ghosts will not come back from the dead to quiet his frenzies, nor will angels descend from out of the heavens. The Divine Power is too great and all-encompassing for that. God, speaking of that Power as God, is not a trickster. He is not a mountebank. He is not a lawyer arguing his case. He is Life. And this Life That Never Dies has no favorites. Such is my humble faith.

* * * * *

A long time has passed since I wrote these pages. All day the countryside has lain in that sleepy, golden shimmer that is the pulse of Indian summer. The nights are touched with frost. There is glory in the warmth of the sun.

I am in a little valley that I love--Sleepy Hollow, I call it. The farmhouse is old and unpainted, and it has stood on its stone foundation for almost a century. The barn is sagging in the middle, and between the barn and the house is an old well that a long-dead grandfather rigged when the timber in the hollow knew the howl of wolves and the screech of bobcats. Crowding close up to the back of the old house is an orchard of apple and cherry trees, so old they could tell many an interesting story if they could talk.

And all about the sides and the front of the house are great trees--a huge cottonwood, and ancient oaks from which the Indians may have shot squirrels with their bows and arrows two hundred years ago. The “woman of the house” has been in an invalid’s chair for years, and the husband does little but care for her. Therefore Life has crept up and almost inundated the place. The grass grows high and uncut. Wild flowers bloom in the yard. Quail come to feed with the chickens. And beyond this, all about, is the whisper of corn fields in growing-time, the ripples of fields of wheat and oats and rye, the music of the mowing-machine and the lowing of cattle. In this little old house of Sleepy Hollow, there is a woman who has not walked for years, and who will never walk again; and there is a little man with a great fierce mustache who watches her tenderly, and who knows that he must go on watching her until the end of her time--and yet in this house there is happiness, and also _a great faith_. And nature seems to rejoice in that faith. Birds build their nests under the porches. There is melody in the trees. At night, crickets sing in the long grass under the open windows, and the whippoorwills come and perch on the roof under the old sycamore.

Here are suffering--and peace; few of the riches of man, but an unlimited wealth of contentment and faith. These two, prisoned to the end of their days, have found what all the world is seeking. The little old house of the hollow, even with its tragedy, is glad. And life has made it so, the understanding of life, the voice and living presence of life as it whispers about me now in the golden sheen of Indian summer.

And its whisper seems to be, “Men are seeking me, reaching out for me, crying for me--yet they do not find me. They are looking far, and I am very near--so far that they look over and beyond me when I am waiting at their feet. When at last they see me, and understand, then will they have discovered the greatest of all treasures--Faith!”

* * * * *

Transcriber’s Notes:

Punctuation has been made consistent.

Variations in spelling and hyphenation were retained as they appear in the original publication.