THE WORKING OF LOVE

When I was nine years old I remember a certain thing that happened. I was sitting somewhere behind the old field schoolhouse with three other little girls. We were making wishes and telling our fortunes by pulling the petals from daisies. I made a wish and tried it out by the daisy petals. But I would not tell what it was.

‘I know,’ said one little girl.

‘You never could guess,’ I retorted.

She bent over and whispered, ‘You wished for a husband!’

It turned out that we had all wished for husbands. We were the simplest, most innocent of little creatures, at the doll-mothering, playhouse stage of development, totally ignorant of love and lovers. But we felt the need of husbands, as, I suppose, the Eastern Hemisphere might have longed for the Western Hemisphere to make the world complete. We felt incomplete.

The florescence of nature came to me as it does to all youth, unbeknowingly. What I remember about that is the quantities of romantic poetry I consumed, practicing at the same time a very strong virginal antagonism toward young men.

At last love and the lover did come to me. I have written all the experience out in another place, and of my marriage at the age of seventeen.

Love does something to the mind. But it is something that you cannot use so long as it lasts as a vital part of your experience. During the first ten years of my married life it seemed to close the intellectual pores of my mind. I lived according to that definition of faith which says it is ‘the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’ I passed through many joys, poverty, fear, and great tribulations according to that ritual of one sentence. I did not think in the terms of ideas, but only in the terms of love. I was guided entirely by my husband’s mind, which was one you may say literally stricken by the Holy Spirit. He was a preacher and made only one use of his mind, that of finding God and teaching sinners the way of salvation.

This was not as you may suppose a drab and monotonous existence, but one filled with strange and lofty experiences.

I was destined to discover that mother’s ideas of religion were coldly platonic as compared with the passionate fervor of my circuit rider in his devotion to God. Mother believed in behaving yourself and keeping the Commandments and walking according to the ordinances of the church to which she belonged. He believed in literally living the life of Jesus Christ--and could not do it. This brought on the struggle that lasted for him more than twenty years. I tried to keep up with him. The first time he fasted and prayed all day after we were married, I fasted also, but could not pray that long. Protracted prayers are a mystery to me. I can simply fall upon my knees and let that be a prayer any time. What is the good of words to God? They are symbols we use to one another because we neither know nor are known to one another as He knows us.

This was the last time I ever fasted, because at the end of the day I was exhausted, nervous and in no Christian mood.

I cannot tell in years how long it took me to do it, but I finally adjusted myself about my husband like a small protesting world and so stood the siege. Love held us as close together as if we had one heart in common. But I do not remember that we ever had the same mind about anything. The point at last with me was to get mine disentangled from the bondage of his brave, beautiful, but impractical religious beliefs. I never succeeded. All these years after his death I am still more conscious of the truth that led him than of my own right mind. I am still beholden to his God; I have never got round to serving my own God with a free mind and a comfortable, cheerful spirit. I must fall into a state of anguish once in so often, make sacrifices that do not ease the pain, and go about wondering where the witness of my spirit is. I have the feeling sometimes that at last I may be dragged through the gates of heaven, spent, woeful, and humble, by the very power of his spirit; that I shall not stride in with my hat on and my head up, bearing a good conscience with me in token of a well-spent life.

If you have been born in the twentieth century and have a good deal of human dust sticking to your soul, if you really love the world, remembering that God made it and blessed it, as others think they love only Heaven; if you like human beings, good and bad, better than you do saints--it is a queer feeling to know that you are forever involved in a mediæval religion of asceticism, sacrifice, and sufferings.

By this time it is my very nature to work up hardships and great spiritual struggles for myself which only involve me deeper and higher in the will of my husband’s God--all the time remembering the child I used to be, so sure of a kinder God, so peacefully at home beneath His kind heavens. It is a queer situation which will end very creditably, I suppose, with my funeral.