Arlo Bates - The Diary of a Saint

February 28. I have already had a chance to do something for George. I hope that I have not been unfair to my friends; but I do not see how I could decide any other way.

Old lady Andrews came in this afternoon, with her snowy curls and cheeks pink from the wind. Almost as soon as she was seated she began with characteristic directness.

"I know you won't mind my coming straight to the point, my dear," she said. "I came to ask you about George Weston's new wife. Do you think we had better call on her?"

The question had come to me before, but I confess I had selfishly thought of it only as a personal matter.

"Mr. Weston's people were hardly of our sort, you know," she continued in her gentle voice, "though of course after your father took him into his office as a student we all felt like receiving him. I never knew him until after that."

"I have seen a good deal of him," I said, wondering if my voice sounded queer; "you know he helped settle the estate."

"It did seem providential," Mrs. Andrews went on, "that his mother did not live, for of course we could hardly have known her. She was a Hardy, you know, from Canton. But I have always found Mr. Weston a very presentable young man, especially for one of his class. He is really very intelligent."

"As we have received him," I said, "I don't see how we can refuse to receive his wife."

"That's the way I thought you would feel about it," old lady Andrews answered; "but I wished to be sure. As he has been received entirely on account of his connection with your family, I told Aunt Naomi that it ought to be for you to say whether the favor should be extended to his wife. I am informed that she is very pretty, but she is not, I believe, exactly one of our sort."

"She is exceedingly pretty," I assured her. "I have seen her. She is not – Well, I am afraid that she is rather Western, but I shall call."

"Then that settles it. Of course we shall do whatever you decide. I suppose he will bring her to our church. I say 'our,' Ruth, because you really belong to it. You are just a lamb that has found a place with a picket off, and got outside the fold. We shall have you back some time."

"I am afraid," I said laughing, "that I should only disgrace you and injure the fold by pulling a fresh picket off somewhere to get out again."

She laughed in turn, and fluttered her small hands in her delightful, birdlike way.

"I am not afraid of that," she responded. "When the Lord leads you in, He is able to make you want to stay. I hope your mother is comfortable."

So that is settled, and Miss West – Why am I such a coward about writing it? – Mrs. Weston is to be one of us. George will be glad that she is not left out of society.

March 2. Mother's calmness keeps me ashamed of the hot ache in my heart and the restlessness which makes it so hard for me to keep an outward composure. Hannah is rather shocked that she should be so entirely unmoved in the face of death, and the dear, foolish old soul, steeped in theological asperities from her cradle, must needs believe that Mother is somehow endangering her future welfare by this very serenity.

"Don't you think, Miss Ruth," she said to me yesterday, "that you could persuade your mother to see Mr. Saychase? She'd do it to oblige you."

"But it wouldn't oblige me, Hannah."

"Oh, Miss Ruth, think of her immortal soul!"

"Hannah," I said as gently as I could, she was so distressed, "you know how Mother always felt about those things. It certainly couldn't do any good now to try to alter her opinions, and it would only tire her."

I left Hannah as quickly as I could without hurting her feelings, but I might have known that her conscience would force her to speak to Mother.

"Bless me, Hannah," Mother said to her, "I'm no more wicked because I'm going to die than if I were going to live. I can't help dying, you know, so I don't feel responsible."

When Hannah tried to go on, and broke down with tears, Mother put out her thin hand, like a sweet shadow.

"Hannah," she said, "I know how you feel, and I thank you for speaking; but don't be troubled. Where there are 'many mansions,' don't you think there may be one even for those who did not see the truth, if they were honest in their blindness?"

March 4. How far away everything else seems when the foot of death is almost at the door! As I sit by the bedside in the long nights, wondering whether he will come before morning, I think of the nights in which I may sometime be waiting for death myself. I wonder whether I shall be as serene and absolutely unterrified as Mother is. It is after all only the terror of the unknown. Why should we be more ready to think of the unknown as dreadful than as delightful? We certainly hail the thought of new experiences in the body; why not out of it? Novelty in itself must give a wonderful charm to that new life, at least for a long time. Think of the pleasure of having youth all over again, for we shall at least be young to any new existence into which we go, just as babies are young to this.

Death is terrible, it seems to me, only when we think of ourselves who are left behind, not when we think of those who go. Life is a thing so beautiful that it may be sad to think of them as deprived of it; but the more beautiful it is, the more I am assured that whatever power made the earth must be able to make something better. If life is good, a higher step in evolution must be nobler; and however we mourn, none of us would dare to say that our grief is caused by the belief that our friends have through death gone on to sorrow.

March 8. This morning —

March 11. Mother was buried to-day. I have taken out this book to try to set down – to set down what? Not what I have felt since the end came. That is not possible, and if it were, I have not the courage. I suppose the mournful truth is that in the dreadful loneliness which death has left in the house, I got out my diary as a companion. One's own thoughts are forlorn company when they are so sad, but if they are written out they may come to have more reality, and the journal to seem more like another personality. How strange and shameful the weakness is which makes it hard for us to be alone; the feeling that we cannot endure the brooding universe about us unless we have hold of some human hand! Yet we are so small, – the poor, naked, timorous soul, a single fleck of thistle-down tossed about by all the winds which fill the immensities of an infinite universe. Why should we not be afraid? Father would say, "Why should we?" He believed that the universe took care of everything in it, because everything is part of itself. "You've only to think of our own human instinct of self-preservation on a scale as great as you can conceive," he told me the day before he died, "and you get some idea of the way in which the universal must protect the particular." I am afraid that I am not able to grasp the idea as he did. I have thought of it many times, and of how calm and dignified he was in those last days. I am a woman, and the universe is so great that it turns me cold to think of it. I am able to get comfort out of Father's idea only by remembering how sure he was of it, and how completely real it was to him. Yet Mother was as sure as he. She told me once that not to be entirely at ease would be to dishonor Father's belief, and she was no less serene in the face of death than he was. Yes; it would be to dishonor them both to doubt, and I do not in my heart of hearts; but it is lonely, lonely.

March 12. It is touching to see how human kindness, the great sympathy with what is real and lasting in the human heart, overcomes the narrowness of creeds in the face of the great tragedy of death. Hannah would be horrified at any hint that she wavered in her belief, yet she said to me to-day: —