“I can put a spoke in your wheel, for I came here with that intention myself, and have my tent permanently pitched. A pen and pencil like yours need never be idle. Come to our publishing house to-morrow at two o’clock—here’s a card—and we will lay the corner-stone of your future greatness.”
Cartice was wakeful far into the night nursing her gratitude, and thinking over the miracle. Farnsworth had been a lifelong friend to Prescott. Perhaps Prescott brought about their meeting, and put it into Farnsworth’s head to employ her. Who knows what the people we call dead may not be able to do? Perhaps they give us many of our thoughts, purposes and plans. Does not every event in our lives, however trivial and insignificant, hang upon thousands of preceding events, great and small?
And when it comes to a question of what a soul can or cannot do, embodied or disembodied, who can answer?
What is the soul of man? Before assigning it limitations it were well to know its composition. It is assumed to be the “immortal unit which represents personality”; but here and there have been men and women who demonstrated a marvelous complexity of ego, their visible body seeming a mere tenement for a variety of distinct personalities, all linked together by some mysterious chain of kinship, though not all resembling each other, and not always dwelling in harmony.
Stevenson makes Dr. Jekyll say, “I hazard a guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens.”
Are we not all conscious of a Mr. Hyde within us who breaks out at times and sadly stains the good record of Dr. Jekyll? May we not be harboring many Jekylls and Hydes, each differing in degrees of goodness and badness?
Thinking on this, Cartice remembered the answer of the nameless wise one to the question, “What is the soul?”—an answer that startled her, for it opened a vista so vast, since it meant that the soul is God, or absolute being revealing himself or itself.
This being granted, its personalities are beyond computation. Its Jekylls and Hydes and its millions which are neither Jekylls nor Hydes are past number.
In a sea of wonder like this is it worth while to ponder the causes of any miracle great or tiny?
The next day Cartice found herself installed at a desk in Farnsworth’s publishing house, pen and pencil both flying. The wished-for foothold was found, and she stood upon it, busy and grateful.