He got up and walked to and fro nervously, and as he moved and talked he became transformed. The timid, shrinking little figure vanished and in its place strode one whose step was firm and eye fearless.
“There are hundreds like me. The woods—the city’s accursed woods are full of them. They run over each other in their eagerness to do the bidding of some master who can drop a coin or so into their flabby purses. Faust sold his soul to the devil for a good price; but we, miserable wretches, sell it daily for a song. Why? Because we are such pitiful cowards that we can’t face the scarecrow that goes by the name of starvation. We live so far below our true selves that we don’t know the law that would carry us through, which is, give the best to get the best. Why not trust the soul? The ideal is the real; it is the voice of the soul, otherwise the voice of God, and it must have expression. If not here and now, then sometime, somewhere. Its account is bound to be presented and must be paid. Death itself can’t prevent the final settlement.
“What do they do at school with the lazy boy who slights his lessons? After a while they turn him back in his books and he has his road to retrace. We shall have the same experience, if we have heard the voice of the ideal and heeded it not. We shall be sent back to do it all over again—yes, from beyond the grave, for what can there be on the other side for him who has betrayed his trust, but contempt and a command to go back and try again?”
He stopped before Cartice, and with blazing eyes and uplifted finger said, “In this moment I determine to outrage my ideals no more, come what may. I have new light. We all have been acting on the assumption that we knew what would happen if we didn’t do thus and so. In point of fact nobody knows. With results we have nothing to do. We have only to follow our highest leading and leave the rest to God. To ignore or debase a noble gift that has been entrusted to us is a sin against our souls, which many of us have stupidly committed day after day, and we are daily paying the penalty. You shall see me here no more, bartering work in which I have no heart for a few miserable dollars. Never again; no, never again.”
“You are right, Mr. Bardell, a thousand times right,” said Mrs. Doring, with throbbing heart and glistening eyes. “I have long known that one should never give less than the best, and that an outraged ideal will be avenged. Yet I daily commit that sin. I used to feel that I had something more than common to do in the world. I had ideals; but I put them off, always waiting for a time when I could see my way clear to devote myself entirely to them. I waited too long. Now they come less frequently and are less urgent, and I have grown weary and indifferent. I wasted my time hunting happiness.”
“Happiness belongs to the ideal,” said Bardell. “It is a matter of subjective appreciation, so is its opposite, misery. Perhaps it would be clearer to say that happiness exists in the idea one forms of it, hence it is purely ideal. We are happy, when we believe ourselves happy. But for the most part all the world thinks happiness is to be found in externals; that it can be secured in thick slices which we can eat like bread, while comfortably seated in good houses. Money and marriage are supposed to have a monopoly of it. What idiocy!”
“Yes, idiocy,” Cartice echoed. “Thackeray says, ‘For my own part I know of nothing more contemptible, unmanly or unwomanly and craven than the everlasting sighing for happiness.’ When a child, I had a consciousness or memory of a world in which I had once lived where there was no such word as happiness, and yet none were unhappy. I understand that now. It means that happiness only exists where it is not thought of, talked about or pursued. I believe it is intended that we shall be happy; but not in our own foolish way. Freedom is the destiny of the human race, and that freedom holds for us a happiness infinitely greater and higher than we now can imagine, because it contains our full development, our perfected intellectual and spiritual growth. It is the freedom of truth, long since prophesied. When we know the truth, we are free, and happiness comes with freedom. Heaven is within one; it consists in the soul’s unfolding or coming into a knowledge of itself. We reach that through expression. In this way we grow, as every plant struggles to do. So you see, if we strangle our ideals, we stunt our growth, and shall be cut down like the bent, and imperfect tree,—cut down, to come again perhaps, for another trial, and still another and another until our destiny is accomplished. Therefore it is that doing our best should be our religion, as it is nature’s religion. It is the only road we can take which leads to the goal at which we must arrive, sooner or later. It is the price each soul must pay who would be saved. Instead of that, most of us have gone about hunting happiness on a childish plane, and making a great plaint, when we didn’t find it. ’Twould be laughable, were it not so pitiful.”
“Isn’t it plain enough,” said Bardell, “that if a wholesome civic and social spirit prevailed, we should be sufficiently enlightened to find our reward in doing our best, whether it were to raise potatoes, polish door knobs or paint pictures. All great men and women who have helped humankind have done so. They gave their best and nothing less, even when the world did not want it, and stoned them for it. They had a far greater reward than human appreciation. They grew to heroic, mental and spiritual stature. If Jesus of Nazareth had not given the best that was in Him, even at the cost of crucifixion, He could not have been the light of the world.
“How would it be with the world to-day, if all the great spirits that make up the enlightened minority, had merely jogged on doing something that secured the necessities of the body, rather than run any risk of being short of bread by pointing to a new road? The soul must follow its best light, taking no thought for the result. I shall do that henceforth.”
“I rejoice in your emancipation,” Cartice said, looking at him with glowing eyes. “I begin to see what it means to be born again. May it not be to awaken a knowledge of our own being, value and work?”