MERE MIND

The trouble is that I have been too much concerned in writing the scriptures of human hearts according to the light of my own heart. One cannot be such an interpreter and figure at the same time as the sophisticated heroine of an adventurous and highly colored existence. Will no one appreciate the delicacy and courtesy I have shown in failing to reveal his sins by not recording mine? Then, indeed, I should deserve the charge of having lived a particularly narrow and uninteresting life.

No one will bury me on top of a high mountain in honor of my brilliant transgressions or make a pilgrimage to lay wreaths upon my tomb later. Any respectable person could commit them and get away with it. I have a temper which perpetually glows like a coal of fire on my altar. The lies I tell as a rule are good little lies offered to comfort somebody, or to shield myself from the snooping eye of the uncharitable. I have no more conscience about that than softly closing the door of my chamber when the devil passes by.

I am an ungodly, intemperate and uncharitable woman when it comes to bearing with laziness and shiftlessness. I still believe an idle brain is the devil’s workshop. If I exposed some of the convictions I entertain along this line, they would forever bar me from polite society. I am so profoundly conscious of my own sex that I cannot endure the license of modern conversation on this subject. Not only that, but I am so mean-minded that I cannot believe the people who indulge in it have decent minds, no matter how high and noble they look at the time or what excellent diction they use.

I believe firmly in the fig leaves of language and that God still walks in the garden in the cool of the evening, looking for that damned Adam of us all. I believe the mere minds we have lead to mischief. They are roguish and unscrupulous. I believe that we are in touch with something else, spirit, which leads to righteousness, honor, and things of good report. I am not pretending, however, to keep up this connection.

Just let me make a good resolution, especially to the effect that I will exercise charity toward all and malice toward none, and I am sure to fly off the handle before that day is done to administer mortal justice merely, you may say, as a public service against a neighbor who has cheated, or beaten his horse unmercifully, or started a scandal, or gone a-fishing while his wife and children remain at home to work in the fields--none of which is my business. Still, I will attend to it as if it was.

I have long since made up my mind that there is more mortal relief in judging people and taking the consequences of having the same judgment meted to me again than sitting like an innocuous saint with my mouth shut. If that scripture should be literally and universally obeyed, how could we develop public opinion? And after all is said and done in the name of the law and religion, does not public opinion remain the strongest moral force we have for controlling the conduct of men?

I may be a trifle short now and then in my contributions to charity, but no one can accuse me of not being liberal and constant in my contributions to public opinion. The result is that, so far as I know, I have one of the worst-weathered reputations in this section. I am coming to that presently. In the meantime, if you take my word for it, there is nothing novel or inflammable in the sins I have committed.

I am not excusing myself for the lack of valor I have shown along this line, you understand; but I am offering an explanation, which relieves me in a large measure both from blame or praise in this matter. When you have had the Ten Commandments striped upon your conscience with a switch at a tender age, when you have spent nearly a quarter of a century practicing the beatitudes in spite of your own carnal desire to raise the dust occasionally with an instinct more effective in mortal affairs than a beatitude, and when you have spent the remaining years of your life serving a sentence to hard labor, a flirtation seems a frivolous waste of time, even if such an affair affords you the gratification of being a worldly wise and tragically experienced woman.

I have contemplated this kind of diversion much as one considers a wild speculation; but after mature reflection I have always decided not to invest, because it seems to me the man gets the diversion and the woman gets the black eye, no matter how sweetly and beautifully and modestly she conducts her romance, especially if it ends in marriage.

What I mean is that it is useless to pretend to be very good or very wise. We cannot be, and overcome one another as frequently as we do in the long competition of living. I suppose this is one reason why righteousness and wisdom make such slow progress in this world and have had so many backsets. The sensible thing to do is to choose a life within your capacity to achieve and do most of your thinking along the line you have chosen.

So I have gone on, writing a few books on the side, but laying the scenes of my mind in the valley. I can go out any day and trace my real thoughts for the last ten years. By the looks of them it is easy to infer that I have no great mind and not much money to spend. But it is also clear that I was thinking and planning for happiness, not for riches. The forests still stand taller and greener than when I came, though the timber in them is worth three times as much as my whole estate here. The red hillsides have been changed into green pastures. It has been like taking over the care and maintenance of an old, sick, and impoverished relative to restore the land to health and vitality. But it is fertile and willing now. I make no apologies for what it has cost. I have been too wise to keep books with Nature and the weather. But I doubt if what I have spent in buildings, dams and breaks in all this time equals what the average woman with the same income would have spent on clothes, operas, motors and journeys from her favorite summer resorts to her favorite winter resorts in half as many years. And I still have my investments, while she must repeat her expenses each season if she keeps up her indulgences. It all depends upon your taste in living and your idea of pleasure whether you spend lavishly for the splendors and gayeties of the fashionable world, or moderately for the long peace of a quiet place, round quiet days and starlit nights.

I do not appear to have been brilliant or very extravagant anywhere; but the only place where I fail to show at a modest advantage is on the banks of the creek which flows through this valley, gory with mud in the spring and winter floods, clear and sparkling as a happy woman’s eye at other seasons. Twice every year I contend with this treacherous watercourse, twice every year it rises and sweeps over the land. Afterwards there remains not a vestige of my works along the banks to restrain it.

Still, this valorous worm of a creek is near to being my dearest possession. The time was when my heart was filled with anxieties and fears for those whom I loved. Now there is no one to love and nothing to fear. The time was when I was at grips with poverty and every vicissitude. Now I am no longer very poor, and I do miss my vicissitudes as a demoted soldier misses his decorations for gallant service. And there was a time when the world inside the Church was fiercely critical of me and my works. Now the weather has changed and I miss the lash of the harsher saints. But I have a happy presentiment that when all my works are finished, and I am a memory grown faint in the minds of men, I shall still be an aged willful woman in this valley, prancing majestically back and forth along the banks of this creek, ordering fortifications raised against its violence. The world will have passed and I shall have been reduced to littleness of consequences there; but I shall have something to do, one last fight to win. This is something to which to look forward when you have nothing else to win.

This record, as truthful as I can make it, must read like a very well-constructed plan for a kind of happiness suitable for a person of my age and gender. But looking back through these years, I cannot recall any such experiences. It seems to me that I have always been in an anguish of labor or in a state of suspense, always looking for more burdens to bear, giving more bonds for title to my own life and liberties. It may be that happiness is a state of unconsciousness, and that I have been too consciously looking for it; but I am beginning to have a faint spiritual intimation that I have practiced my Scriptures to the wrong tune. I am not so sure now that the key-note of a good life should be self-sacrifice.

I am finally beginning to believe that the Scriptures were meant to preserve us from too many awful sacrifices, and that I may have used them too much like the shroud of my mortal mind. I am ready to concede that Nature is full of tricks to serve its own ends; but it does seem beneath the dignity of the good God to have persuaded the simple minority to sacrifice themselves for the profit and comfort of the indifferent and unrighteous majority, which is precisely what happens. It is really written that we shall present ourselves living sacrifices wholly acceptable to God.

I wish I had remembered and understood the meaning of that passage sooner. It would have saved me much hardship and left more space for human happiness. It comes to me now that it is less exhausting to make one’s self wholly acceptable to the Lord than to those of our fellow men who can fish for our services with these Scriptures. For they want as many sacrifices as you can make, and will give you as many of their burdens to bear as you will carry; but our heavenly Father only demands a right spirit toward Him to make us reasonably safe in our relations to our fellow men--which would by no means cover the terrific labors and sacrifices some of us have made along this line.

I am coming now to the closing scenes of my life as I have lived it in the past, because I mean to close these scenes. As a Christian, I have had the wrong training; as a middle-aged woman, it will be difficult to go against this training; but I do hope to have time to make the experiment.