THE TRUTH AND THE LADY
By Elia W. PeattieAUTHOR OF "THE BELEAGUERED FOREST," THE SHAPE OF FEAR," ETC.
I HAVE a friend who has often said to me that she cared nothing for allegories, parables or symbols.
"I want the truth," she declared. "I live by the truth. Nothing less will do for me."
My friend was sitting in her home one day not long ago, when there came a ringing at her bell; and, as her one servant was away for the afternoon, she herself answered the door. Without stood an old man with kind eyes and a cruel mouth — a very old man, greatly wrinkled, and with a huge pack on his back.
"I was sent here by a neighbor," he said, "who told me that I had just the sort of wares for which you cared the most. She said she thought I would find you a generous purchaser."
There was a curious accent in the old man's speech which my friend could not quite place. It was at once familiar and unfamiliar, and she could not tell whether she liked or disliked it. But she bade him enter, for he was old, and, besides, she thought he might, indeed, have something that she wished to buy.
"My wares," he said, "are very ancient. It would be difficult to find anything more antique."
"Then I hope they are beautiful," cried my friend, "for I have no use for ugly things, no matter what their history may be. It is only beauty that can reconcile me to mold and tarnish and dustiness."
"Some are beautiful and some are grotesque," he said. "But I perceive by looking about your rooms that you have a fancy for the grotesque as well as the beautiful."
"One is the face, the other the obverse of the coin," said my friend. "But pray show me your wares."
So from his pack the old man with the kind eyes and the cruel mouth took many packages, wrapped and tied with the cunning of the old races.
"I am a Merchant of Truth," he declared proudly, "and these are my wares. If you will permit me I will show you the contents of this one, which tells the truth about your home."
"Oh," sighed the woman eagerly, "if you please!"
When he had undone the curious wrappings, the old man took forth a shining sphere of crystal, and held it before the woman so that she saw a thing which the old man described in this wise:
"Your home," he said, "is a badly built little house, standing in a third-rate suburb of an ill-ordered city. It is much too expensive for the amount of comfort it gives, and even so, it is not really yours. It is mortgaged, and you must pay interest as well as taxes. It is never as clean as it should be, by reason of the mills and factories near at hand. There is much incongruity in the furnishing and decoration of the rooms, and in winter some of these rooms are chilly and damp. In summer you have no garden to which to retire. It is, you perceive, a poor place."
"Oh," cried the woman, "how mistaken you are! I see truly, the things of which you speak, but do you not appreciate that here is the door at which I bid my friends welcome? And within is my fire, burning sweetly on the hearth. There is my bed where I sleep so deliciously, there the dear window at which the dawn looks in. Here is my kitchen where I cook the food by which we live, and here is the table at which we eat it, with talk and laughter, and even, when we are so disposed, with song. Everything in this house belongs to me. My husband bought these things and gave them to me — except such as are the gifts of friends. I can walk about the rooms and put my hands on this and on that and tell you the most beautiful stories imaginable about the friends who gave me these things. It is curious, but I know of no one who has such friends as I. Really, this place, which looks so poor as reflected in that sphere and in your words, stands to me for home — home — home!" She sighed with happiness.
The cruelty deepened about the old man's mouth and the kindness glowed in his eyes.
"You mean," he said, "that this common place is a Symbol of Home. In this respect, I perceive it is not Truth which you desire, but the Symbol. It is the possession of that which makes you content. But come, perhaps I have something more to your liking. Here, madam, is the portrait of your husband as he is." And he undid another wrapping and held up another sphere.
There she saw shadowed forth the figure of a man — a man small of stature, inefficient in his actions, petulant, narrow, affectionate, fairly honest, rather discouraged; a man with no strong passions, no deep or original thoughts, no brave sins, no capacity for great sacrifices. Yet one going faithfully his quiet way, returning always to his home at night, and, in his pallid fashion loving his wife, though often forgetting to tell her so by word or look.
"You see!" cried the Merchant of Truth. "This is a very revealing little trinket. It will, if looked at often enough, liberate you from that domestic servitude which you now endure with maudlin patience. Will you buy it?"
"No, indeed!" cried the woman indignantly. "That man is the only one who ever kissed me on the lips. I remember well the first time he did so. It was at sunset, in a beautiful grove. The golden light fell down between the tree trunks, making them black. I felt all the beauty of the world throbbing through me and I comprehended how incomplete it would be without love, and how I was blessed. A wonderful vision came to me and I knew what life and work meant, so I put my hand in the man's, and always he and I have kept together. And now we have a son and are a part of the future. Oh, you have no idea what this man stands for to me!"
The old man smiled significantly.
"He also is a Symbol, I see," he said with contempt. "It is not what he is that makes him dear. It is, as you say, what he stands for. It is because you wish to be arrayed with the lovers, because you must feel the wifeliness in you, because he gives you an excuse for your feminine sacrifices, that you cherish him. He is the Symbol of noble and protecting love — no more."
Then he revealed to her — somewhat doubtingly, for he was beginning to see that he should not find in her a ready purchaser — a little wondrous iridescent sphere.
"Here," he said, "is the Truth about your son."
Now, so curious a thing was this, that even the sphere of Truth had been affected by dreams, and it was some time before their beautiful prisms dispersed and showed her the pitiful facts — a little spindling child, petulant like his father, narrow of brow, with a face in which selfishness and affection ever kept war. The woman spoke in great anger:
"I have a mind to show you the door," she said. "Do you not know that is my little child? He is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, and sweeter to me than the night or the day. Why, when his little hands tug at my skirt and I feel myself his prisoner, I would not change my service for all the freedom in the world. When I hear him cry out in the night, I am filled with poignant joy, and at morning when his bare feet come pattering down to my room I give thanks for the day that brings me this delight. It is true he is not so bright as some children, and that he is fretful and often ill, but, after all, he is the core of life to me."
"He is a Symbol," said the old man in terrible accents. "It is not what he is but what he stands for that makes him so unutterably dear. Any other child would do as well to quench the mother-thirst."
The woman was about to make a passionate disclaimer, but the old man took a dark and fateful glass from his pack and held it up before her.
Here, from tenebrous confusion the woman presently saw emerging a certain sad, historic Shape, and her heart contracted with sorrowful love. A strange white passion shook her. Upon this glass appeared curious writings, and though they were in tongues both known and unknown to the woman, she could in that hour, read them all. And now she wept:
"No, no," she sobbed; "you shall not take from me this Faith. It reconciles me to every sorrow. It keeps me from being afraid. These writings say that my belief is discredited by history, rejected by science, belied by human experience. But what has it done for the world — this Faith? All of compassion and patience and hope that we know is inspired by it. Does not that give it authority enough? Oh, see, old man, if we lose this, we are adrift on a dark sea, rudderless, and may as well cast ourselves at once into the waves. I assure you, you can have no notion of what this Faith means to the world — and to me!"
"I know what it means," said the old man in taunting accents. "It means a symbol. It is, I confess, the Symbol of purity and love by which a good half of the world lives. It is very seldom I sell one of these spheres, illuminating as they are." And he looked with regret at the murky glass which began to cloud again until the etiolated figure on the instrument of shame, standing among low blue hills, was obscured in shadows.
There was silence for a few moments, and then the man drew forth another glass.
"This is quite a modern affair," he said briskly, "and I dare say, being a woman of intelligence, you will feel a strong interest in it. Here is the Truth about your country. At first it is a trifle confusing, but if you will be good enough to concentrate your attention on it, madam, you will soon see the details of the picture. Behold the greedy, ignorant mob which rules your land! Observe the misrule, the selfishness, the subjugation of every ideal to the mad desire for wealth. Note how seldom disinterestedness plays any part, how few statesmen you have, how a base machine dominates citizens and officers."
"Oh, these are ephemeral conditions," protested the woman. "To-morrow they will be forgotten. My country, how I love it! It has often been a pain to me that I could not die for it. I weep when I hear the national airs, remembering how little I can do to serve the land of my birth and my devotion. What liberty, what happiness do I enjoy here! I love to think of it as the asylum for the unfortunate, and my heart expands when I reflect on all it means to me."
"Ah!" sneered the man. "It is also a Symbol. The country in which you delight exists only in your heart and in the hearts of others. What you desire to die for is not the country as it is, but the country as you symbolize it. Really, madam, I am much disappointed. I see your friend misled me when she said you were a lover of Truth. But here are some things of quite a different character which you may enjoy. They are merely a lot of plays which I got at a great discount and will sell to you at a proportionate reduction. The beauty of them is, that instead of being written out they are shadowed in these large and shining spheres. In one of these you may see a whole drama enacted before your eyes. If you will permit me, I will arrange them upon this table."
Now indeed the woman was delighted, and for an hour the two sat in silence, watching, till at length the woman was able to make her choice. She thought she had now compensated the Merchant for all disappointments by making these purchases, but when he saw what her selections were, he was greatly irritated.
"You haven't a thing there that I wished you to have," he complained. "The plays you have chosen were not selected by me, but were thrust upon me by the exigencies of the sale of which I spoke to you. You have passed by all the true stories of men and women, all the probable and understandable things, and taken those foolish old stories of 'Faust,' of 'Tannhäuser,' of 'Hamlet,' 'Everyman,' and 'The Sunken Bell.' You have even one play which has not classicism to recommend it, the most inartistic thing Stevenson ever wrote, 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.'"
"I have seen almost every play put upon the stage in my time," said the woman. "For the play is my one extravagance. And I realize now for the first time that the dramas of the realists have been quite forgotten by me. They are all run together in a curious confusion, and I can not so much as remember the names of the characters. It is, after all, only these Symbols that interest me and find a place in my memory — it is these on which I think when I lie wakeful in bed, these that sustain me in right-doing and keep me faithful to the things that are eternal."
"I am done with you, madam!" shouted the man. "Yet, no, upon reflection, not quite done. For your disregard of the value of my wares you shall be properly punished. Behold, here is the Truth about yourself!"
And he held up to view another sphere. The woman looked long and the color came and went in her face. Her little hands clasped and unclasped, and once she would have fallen had not the old man supported her. But after a time she pushed the sphere away.
"There is a mistake somewhere," she said, in a voice at once joyous and humble. "All of these things are true, I know, yet, somehow, that is not I. There is something within me, not seen by any one, not understood by myself, which makes me different from that. It is the thing that causes me to be careful of my life, which leads me to believe that I shall live again and which lets me walk among my fellows with my head held high. It is the innermost self, the secret and eternal Me."
"It is a figment of your brain," scoffed the old man, "a piece of legerdemain of the psychologists, a ghost conjured up by the churchmen!" He was trembling with anger, yet his eyes betrayed a defeat. "Come," he cried, "confess!"
"I can confess nothing sir, except that as soon as you are gone I shall comfort myself for all the Truth you have shown me, with my sweet Symbols. I did not know till now that I lived by them. But now that I know it I am all the more protected against sorrow and sin and falsehood. I am only a poor woman and ignorant, yet this I know, that in my Symbols hides a greater truth than your Truth knows. Farewell, sir, and come this way no more."
The Reader, Dec. 1904, 5XML: ep.ss.0034.xml
