The knife came dancing down on the plate. “Better?” she said; “not at all; we are worse. Why, when I was young we used constantly to have processions and carry le Bon Dieu, and I tell you the harvest was different from what it is now. And the young girls were modest then; they all wore aprons, and our curé used to insist on them wearing aprons, for, said he, all women should wear aprons.”
“All women should wear aprons,” I repeated mechanically, as my thoughts flitted back to Babylon.
Marie-Joseph saw and misinterpreted my disappointment. “Did you grasp what I
said?” she asked; “there is no modesty nowadays. And you people who come from England,” she added sternly, “with your short skirts and your peculiar ways, don't improve matters.”
I felt duly rebuked, and during the rest of the hour which Marie-Joseph wasted on me, I sought to re-establish myself in her opinion by discoursing on the merits of soupe au fromage.
We all have our chosen test of moral worth, and perhaps our judgment of the decline and rise of social virtue is as easily swayed by personal predilection as was that of Marie-Joseph. To me the persistence of the same cruel and stupid customs throughout the centuries is a source of perplexed pessimism. I cannot brush aside the problem by a facile reference to reincarnation. If John the brigand was a cut-throat and a robber in his twentieth appearance on this planet, why should he persist in these idiosyncrasies in his twenty-third return as George the politician and successful captain of industry? This is not at all a fair representation of the theory of reincarnation, I shall be told. It is not, but it is one of those to which we are
driven in the desperation of impatience. A friend of mine, a high authority on matters theosophical, knows of a potent explanation and anodyne for moral impatience. Humanity, he tells me, is always being recruited from Mars. Mars, in spite of its canals, is a low and wicked planet, with a reptilian population. When the Martians advance a little beyond the moral status of their fellow-creatures and close their bloodthirsty eyes in death, their spirits are wafted to our planet, there to take on new garments of flesh. The influx of brutal souls is perennial. This explains why, Churches and missionary effort notwithstanding, we have always savages, cannibals, and barbarians (and Prussian militarists?) with us. But there is comfort in the other side of the picture. When we in our turn have learnt all the lessons of this miserable globe of folly, when we have mastered all the virtues and shed all the vices, when we long to be free from the trammels of sense and appetite and sickness and ambition, we are transferred to Mercury. Mercury is a highly evolved planet, a spiritualized existence, free from the obsessions of sex and greed, an abode of love and freedom.
Oh, how I sigh for Mercury!
Supposing this sinful earth is only a school for reformed Martians; supposing human nature and history always repeat themselves, and the end is as the beginning and the beginning as the end? The first steps in education accomplished, the scholars would be removed to better premises, and to a more advanced course of instruction. But the old school would receive new pupils and go on in the same humdrum way. There would be the same harsh teachers, the same ignorance and obstinacy, the same punishment and suffering. The worst of it is that Mercury does not seem exempt from the general curse of nothingness which seems to brood over all physical existence. There is no stability even in solar systems. Even we puny creatures can divine something of their birth and death. Out of whirling nebulæ suns and planets are born; souls slowly evolve on worlds which were once balls of fire. There are endless diversity and specialization, myriads of creatures rise out of the furnace of life. Some gain ascendancy and lay claim to mental supremacy, to science and religion and the overlordship of the universe. I am sure