The Open Question Part 71

"Ah-h-h!"

"Such men are no worse off than Plato, and Christ, and Buddha. The great thing was to know there was light."

"I wonder the memory of those old hopes doesn't lessen your faith in the new."

"Why? Progress isn't a pa.s.sing fas.h.i.+on; it's the _life_ principle, another name for the power that makes for righteousness, the impulse towards the light, the force that pushes the acorn sprout out of the mould, and goads man night and day towards some ultimate good. As long as there's life, my boy, it will be better and ever better life. _It's the law._"

As he stood with arm extended, girt about with sudden authority, Ethan had a vision of Moses on Mount Sinai. This was too old an aspect of her father for Val to be much impressed. She watched the effect on her cousin, however, with feverish interest.

"You're an incurable optimist, uncle," he was saying.

"Ah, don't mistake me. I'm not one of those who drug themselves with dreaming." No Hebrew prophet now; it was the keen, practical-minded American who spoke. "The new order won't be brought about by idle optimism any more than by prayers, or politics, or private magnanimities."

"How, then?"

"It will be the direct result of a higher standard of public health."

He spoke briskly, as one making a business proposition.

"_Health!_" echoed Ethan sharply--"health of the public conscience, I suppose you mean."

"Health of the body first of all," growled the prophet. "Health mental and moral as the natural result. But since the Maker of the world established the physical basis aeons before he bothered about the soul, the first thing _we_ have to do is to make strong our foundations, since for ages we've systematically neglected them, when we haven't occupied ourselves in actively undermining them. The halt, the blind, the diseased, are not for this New Jerusalem. Its first condition of citizens.h.i.+p will be _mens sana in corpore sano_. And the beauty of it is that, to attain this health, no one man's welfare will avail. All men must share it, or all men are menaced. It means a perfect Socialism."

"Ah, Socialism!"

"Not the travesty that masquerades with banners and bra.s.s bands, and issues pamphlets against property; but the Socialism that is the true science of life, and that will make possible the men I see in the future."

Ethan regarded the rapt look of the seer with a kindly cynicism. The absent eyes of the elder fell upon the critical young face with a gleam of suspicion. Again and again since his arrival something in Ethan's easy, lounging att.i.tudes had not only roused an obscure antagonism in the older man, but had seemed the most irritating expression of his nephew's habit of mind. His nonchalant grace seemed to say with smiling superiority: "What's your hurry? Why should _I_ exert myself? Let the other man walk." John Gano, looking at him now, felt, in addition to the unreasoning rage at Ethan's _laissez aller_ way of taking life, a kind of half-morbid, half-fanatical desire to p.r.i.c.k the young man into action, into some likeness to that desperate American strenuousness that had died so hard with John Gano.

"The men I'm thinking of aren't grown in arm-chairs or under gla.s.s, any more than they are made in filthy workshops or in thieves' alleys; they are the sons of happy, voluntary toil, and pure air, and honest dealing."

"Ah," said Ethan, "very likely."

"Not very likely--_certain_. It's one of the few things a man may be dogmatic about. It ought to be the prime article of faith. Now, you're a rich man, and you say you're going into politics--you're going to help prescribe for this sick old world. Very good. You have the more need to mark well how man's oppression of his brother recoils upon himself. It is accounted prosperity--'getting on in the world'--to be able to have a horde of grown-up, hardy men and women about you in your hot-house homes to wait upon you, to prevent you from doing any part of that work which alone will keep you whole. Why, as I think of it"--he tossed back his lion's mane with a fine contempt--"it sounds incredible this should be the rich man's _own_ desire. It's like some cunning artifice practised by a nimble-witted slave upon an imbecile and cruel master, a slow but certain process of undoing. You not only pay another man to take away your means of health, you usually maltreat him. _Think_ of it from the point of view of economy, you who are going into politics. The precious contrivance spoils two const.i.tutions, not to speak of possible heirs.

One man dying for lack of physical exercise, another killing himself by doing two men's--ten men's--share. You don't believe me. You are sitting there hugging some mental reservation."

"No, no," said Ethan, "I was only turning it over."

"I a.s.sure you I know whereof I speak. These men who grind the faces of the poor; these railroad magnates, manufacturers, corn kings, bankers, toiling day and night in stuffy offices--oh, I saw them in New York; I lived among them; I see them still"--his eyes blazed--"toiling, oppressing, cheating, to lay up riches. What have they in reality left to their children--a h.o.a.rd of yellow gold? More than that; more than an inheritance of strained nerves and bending backs. They have left them the means of gratifying their sloth and their gluttony."

He took a turn up and down the room, shaking his head. He stopped suddenly before his nephew with a look of grim pleasure.

"It's poor comfort, but let the beggar in the street know himself revenged. The rich man, who has just refused him a dime to buy a dinner, goes home, and what he overeats and overdrinks, that would feed and revive the beggar, provides your rich man with his gout and fifty fine disorders unknown among the poor. When he refuses to share his dinner with the hungry, your Dives gets not only curses, but diseases of the digestive organs."

Ethan burst out laughing at the vindictive satisfaction of the climax.

"Come, can you deny it?" his uncle urged. "Drugs, kurs, baths--these are needed only to repair the waste of stupid living; they are subst.i.tutes for the right kind of labor and of fare, but they only patch the breach that simpler living would make whole."

"You make me think of James Benton. You know him by reputation?"

"Specialist?--nerves? Yes, very good man."

"Well, he'd been attending a fas.h.i.+onable woman in New York--for about ten years, he told me. She'd paid him enormous fees to run over from Boston and 'keep her going.' He was rather sick of it, and one day he said: 'Oh yes, I can vary the tonic and bolster you up for the season; but I _could_ cure you, you know.' 'Brute!' she screamed, 'then why haven't you in all these years?' 'You won't take my medicine.' 'Which medicine?' 'Six months' service as housemaid in a farm-house in the White Mountains.'"

"Well," said John Gano, with interest, "and the woman?"

"Oh, she only laughed. However, there are a certain number of people, I find over here, who do care about physical culture. Fellows at the universities think a lot more about athletics than they did in my time.

Girls' colleges pay tremendous attention to that sort of thing. Haven't you noticed? Our women are finding out it touches the 'beauty question.'

That's done more than all the books and doctors in creation. Oddly enough, our society women in particular, as I saw at Newport--"

"Yes, yes," interrupted his uncle. "We're moving in the right direction, but slowly--very slowly. Even health is little more with us as yet than a newly discovered prerogative of the prosperous. They're finding out it's the condition of survival. Oh, give us time, and it'll come all right."

"Perhaps. But even in the Old World, where you'd think they'd had time enough, they've got at only one aspect of the evil. They're alive to the need of mere exercise, especially in England. Oh, the devices!" laughed the young man, "by which the idle well-to-do may, in default, as you would say, of trees to fell or coal to dig and bricks to lay, develop, notwithstanding, their biceps and their chests! I've seen many a fellow, with a quite ludicrous absence of enjoyment, doing dumb-bell whim-whams, or shouldering his golf-clubs, or going off to play rackets, with the stern resolve to get his quantum of exercise, whether it amuses him or not."

"Yes, yes, yes," John Gano broke in, "mere cultivators of muscle don't interest me much, though they go a step in the right direction. A man must face and overcome hards.h.i.+p, _real_ hards.h.i.+p, before he's good for anything. Man is like the good wheat, he flourishes where it's cold enough to give him a good pinching frost once a year. Your finest-flavored fruits are grown where man contends with Nature, not as in the tropics, where she drops her insipid increase into his idle lap.

Those games that men play at while their brothers starve are well enough for those who like 'em, but the great majority of average boys and girls, and even, to some extent, perverted men and women, too, are never so well amused as when they're _making something_. If every one had some bit of manual labor to do, something he could do with love, studying to bring it to perfection--"

"Ah yes," said Ethan, with a livelier interest, "that might bring men back a sense of beauty."

"At all events," said the elder, st.u.r.dily, "it would bring man back to the bed-rock of wholesome endeavor; and while he was strengthening his muscles and his morals, and laying up a fit inheritance for his children, he would be helping to solve the industrial problem of the world. The vulgar stigma would be lifted from the laboring cla.s.s."

"Ah--h'm--yes," murmured Ethan, with a somewhat lackadaisical air.

John Gano studied his nephew's long, careless, lounging figure with a growing disapproval.

"In the time to come," said John Gano, significantly, "the only idle will be the few, and ever fewer, sick, and the very old. Chronic disease will be looked upon as the only lasting disgrace. The evil will hide their complaints as carefully as to-day they hide their crimes. They will be more ashamed of an attack of indigestion or of gout than a man is to-day of being seen drunk in public, or caught robbing a till. He who pa.s.ses a disease down the line will be looked upon as a traitor, the only criminal deserving capital punishment."

Ethan looked up quickly, scrutinizing the grim face for a moment, and then, unaccountably to himself, his own look went down.

Val had lost the sense with which she awoke of overhearing something not intended for her, and of being under the necessity of making her presence known in the first pause. The talk was just an amplification of views to which her father had accustomed her from childhood. She would have gone to sleep again, or come out and said good-night, but for the interest of seeing their effect on Ethan, who had already been wrought upon to the extent of saying that he "hated" the beautiful world. Why was he looking so black-browed and forbidding now? She must pay attention and follow this.

"There'll be fewer hospitals," her father was saying, with staccato emphasis, "and less vapid sentimentalizing over those who suffer from violation of the plain laws of health."

"Well, it strikes me," said Ethan, "that if the poor devil has got his weak digestion, or his gout, or what not, from some unenlightened ancestor--"

"It must strike you that in that case he's in the position of the man whose father died in debt, in disgrace. The loyal son must wipe out the score."

"It's devilish hard on the son. He'll say he has his own debts to pay--an obligation to himself."

"As a man of honor, or"--with a gesture of impatience--"of mere sense, he will know he has no obligation so binding as to end the evil with his life, leaving no offshoot to sow the seeds anew. It is civic duty, it"--the stern voice wavered--"it is fatherly pity. When I see my little girl's eyes bright with fever--with this old fever that's been wasting me these forty years--do you suppose I find much comfort in thinking I had it from my father, and have by foolish living only augmented a little my inheritance?"

He shook his lion's head fiercely. The break in her father's voice, even more than the words with their dimly comprehended menace, brought back a quick realization to the girl that her father had no notion of her presence. Should she come out now? It would be embarra.s.sing to them all, for he was strangely moved. If she waited a few moments he would get back to generalities, and then she would come out and say good-night.

But under this playing at expediency was an eager curiosity to hear more, to understand better.

"What do you mean by 'this old fever'?" Ethan asked.

"Well"--his uncle turned his rough head slowly to the door to a.s.sure himself it was shut--"I mean something that my mother and I agreed not to talk about. There is a word that no one ever hears mentioned under this roof. We don't mention the word because"--he sunk his voice to a whisper--"because the thing itself is here."

"What is the word?"