The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (Literature) (18 page)

"Well, that he-that he is not like anybody else."

She snatched at that as triumphantly as if I had given my whole
case away:

"You've said it! Very well, then, since he is not like anybody else,
it is argument that he is governed by laws that are not the laws
which govern other people's actions. Do we know what the laws are
which govern him?"

Of course I knew, but it was not my privilege to let out that fact,
so I blinked the truth and said no.

"Very well, then, you see where you have landed. You don't
know, and can't know, that he will never love me; so you need not
bother yourself any more about the matter. Through my sympathies, my perceptions and my love I know him; know him as no one
else knows him; know him as no one else can ever know him. And
you shall not take my golden hope from me-no one shall! He will
love me yet, and only me."

There was a glory in her eyes that made her beautiful. I had not
the heart to spoil it; so I kept back the words that were upon my
lips: "Marget is probably saying these same things herself."

I went to my bed with heavy thoughts. What a lot of dismal haps
had befallen the village, and certainly Satan seemed to he the
father of the whole of them: Father Peter in prison, on account of
the money laid in his way by Satan, which furnished Father Adolf
the handy pretext he needed; Nlarget's household shunned and
under perilous suspicion on account of that cat's work-cat furnished by Satan; Father Adolf acquiring a frightful and odious
reputation, and likely to be burnt at the stake presently-Satan
responsible for it; my parents worried, perplexed, distressed about
their daughter's new love-freak and the doubtfulness of its outlook;
Joseph crushed and shamed; Wilhelm's heart broken and dissipation laying its blight upon his character, his ambition and his fair
repute; Nlarget gone silly, and our Lilly following after; the whole
village prodded and pestered into a pathetic delirium about nonexistent witches and quaking in its shoes: the whole wide wreck and
desolation of hearts and hopes and industries the work of Satan's
enthusiastic diligence and morbid passion for business. And he, the
author of all the trouble, was the only person concerned that got
any rapture out of it. By his spirits one would think he was grateful
to be alive and improving things.

I fell asleep to pleasant music presently-the patter of rain upon
the panes and the dull growling of distant thunder. Away in the
night Satan came and roused me and said-

"Come with me. Where shall we go?"

"Anywhere-so it is with you."

Then there was a fierce glare of sunlight, and he said-

"This is China."

That was a grand surprise, and made me sort of drunk with
vanity and gladness to think I had come so far-and so much,
much further than anybody else in our village, including Bartel
Sperling, who had such a great opinion of his travels. We buzzed
around over that Empire for more than half an hour and saw the
whole of it. It was wonderful, the spectacles we saw; and some were beautiful, others too horrible to think. For instance-however, I
will go into that by and by, and also why Satan chose China for this
excursion instead of another place-it would interrupt my tale to
do it now. Finally we stopped flitting, and lit.

We sat upon a mountain commanding a vast landscape of mountain-range and gorge and valley and plain and river, with cities and
villages slumbering in the sunlight, and a glimpse of blue sea on
the further verge. It was a tranquil and dreamy picture, beautiful to
the eye and restful to the spirit. If we could only make a change
like that whenever we wanted to, the world would be easier to live
in than it is, for change of scene shifts the mind's burdens to the
other shoulder and banishes old shop-worn wearinesses from mind
and body both.

We talked together, and I had the idea of trying to reform Satan
and persuade him to lead a better life. I told him about all those
things he had been doing, and begged him to be more considerate
and stop making people unhappy. I said I knew he did not mean
any harm, but that he ought to stop and consider the possible consequences of an act before launching it in that impulsive and random
way of his; then he would not make so much trouble. He was not
hurt by this plain speech, he only looked amused and surprised, and
said-

"What, I do random things? Indeed I never do. I stop and
consider possible consequences? Where is the need? I know what
the consequences are going to be-always."

"Oh, Satan, then how could you do those things?"

"Well, I will tell you, and you must understand it if you can.
You belong to a singular race. Every man is a suffering-machine
and a happiness-machine combined. The two functions work together harmoniously, with a fine and delicate precision, on the
give-and-take principle. For every happiness turned out in the one
department the other one stands ready to modify it with a sorrow or
a pain-maybe a dozen. In most cases the man's life is about
equally divided between happiness and unhappiness. When this is
not the case the unhappiness predominates-always; never the
other. Sometimes a man's make and disposition are such that his misery-machinery is able to do nearly all the business. Such a man
goes through life almost ignorant of what happiness is. Everything
lie touches, everything he does, brings a misfortune upon him. You
have seen such people? To that kind of a person life is not an
advantage, is it? it is only a disaster. Sometimes, for an hour's
happiness a man's machinery makes him pay years of misery. Don't
you know that? It happens every now and then. I will give you a
case or two, presently. Now the people of your village are nothing
to me-you know that, don't you?"

I did not like to speak out too flatly, so I only said I had suspected
it.

"Well, it is true that they are nothing to me. It is not possible
that they should be. The difference between them and me is
abysmal, immeasurable. They have no intellect."

"No intellect?"

"Nothing that resembles it. At a future time I will examine what
man calls his mind and give you the details of that chaos, then you
will see and understand. Men have nothing in common with methere is no point of contact. They have foolish little feelings, and
foolish little vanities and impertinences and ambitions, their foolish
little life is but a laugh, a sigh, and extinction; and they have no
sense. Only the Moral Sense. I will show you what I mean. Here is
a red spider, not so big as a pin's head; can you imagine an elephant
being interested in him; caring whether he is happy or isn't; or
whether he is wealthy or poor; or whether his sweetheart returns
his love or not; or whether his mother is sick or well; or whether he
is looked up to in society or not; or whether his enemies will smite
him or his friends desert him; or whether his hopes will suffer
blight or his political ambitions fail; or whether he shall die in the
bosom of his family or neglected and despised in a foreign land?
These things can never be important to the elephant, they are
nothing to him, he cannot shrink his sympathies to the microscopic
size of them. Man is to me as the red spider is to the elephant. The
elephant has nothing against the spider, he cannot get down to that
remote level-I have nothing against man. The elephant is indifferent, I am indifferent. The elephant would not take the trouble to do the spider an ill turn; if he took the notion he might do him a
good turn, if it came in his way and cost nothing. I have done men
good service, but no ill turns.

"The elephant lives a century, the red spider a day; in power,
intellect and dignity, the one creature is separated from the other
by a distance which is simply astronomical. Yet in these and in all
qualities man is immeasurably further below me than is the wee
spider below the elephant.

"Man's mind clumsily and tediously and laboriously patches
little trivialities together, and gets a result-such as it is. My mind
creates! Do you get the force of that? Creates anything it desiresand in a moment. Creates without materials; creates fluids, solids,
colors-anything, everything-out of the airy nothing which is
called Thought. A man imagines a silk thread, imagines a machine
to make it, imagines a picture, then by weeks of labor embroiders it
on a canvas with the thread. I think the whole thing, and in a
moment it is before you-created.

"I think a poem-music-the record of a game of chess-anything-and it is there. This is the immortal mind-nothing is
beyond its reach. Nothing can obstruct my vision-the rocks are
transparent to me, and darkness is daylight. I do not need to open a
book; I take the whole of its contents into my mind at a single
glance, through its cover; and in a million years I could not forget a
single word of it, or its place in the volume. Nothing goes on in the
skull of any man, bird, fish, insect or other creature which can be
hidden from me. I pierce the learned man's brain with a single
glance, and the treasures which cost him three-score years to accumulate are mine; he can forget, and he does forget, but I retain.

"Now then, I perceive by your thoughts that you are understanding me fairly well. Let us proceed. Circumstances might so fall out
that the elephant could like the spider-supposing he can see
it-but he could not love it. His love is for his own kind-for his
equals. An angel's love is sublime, adorable, divine, beyond the
imagination of man-infinitely beyond it! But it is limited to his
own august order. If it fell upon one of your race for only an instant
it would consume its object to ashes."

I thought of poor Marget and poor Lilly.

"Give yourself no uneasiness," he said, "they are safe. No, we
cannot love men, but we can be harmlessly indifferent to them; we
can also like them, sometimes. I like you and the boys, I like Father
Peter, and for your sakes I am doing all these things for the
villagers."

He saw that I was thinking a sarcasm, and he explained his
position.

"I have wrought well for the villagers, though it does not look
like it on the surface. Your race never know good fortune from ill.
They are always mistaking the one for the other. It is because they
cannot see into the future. What I am doing for the villagers will
bear good fruit some day; in some cases to themselves, in others to
unborn generations of men. No one will ever know that I was the
cause, but it will be none the less true for all that. Among you boys
you have a game: you stand a row of bricks on end a few inches
apart; you push a brick, it knocks its neighbor over, the neighbor
knocks over the next brick-and so on till all the row is prostrate.
That is human life. A child's first act knocks over the initial brick,
and the rest will follow inexorably. If you could see into the future,
as I can, you would see everything that was ever going to happen to
that creature; for nothing can change the order of its life after the
first event has determined it. That is, nothing will change it,
because each act unfailingly begets an act, that act begets another,
and so on to the end, and the seer can look forward down the line
and see just when each act is to have birth, from cradle to grave."

"Does God order the career?"

"Foreordain it? No. The man's circumstances and environment
order it. His first act determines the second and all that follow after.
But suppose, for argument's sake, that the man should skip one of
these acts; an apparently trifling one, for instance: suppose it had
been appointed that on a certain day, at a certain hour and minute
and second and fraction of a second he should snatch at a fly, and
he didn't snatch at the fly. That man's career would change utterly,
from that moment; thence to the grave it would be wholly different
from the career which his first act as a child had arranged for him. Indeed it might be that if he had snatched at the fly he would have
ended his career on a throne; and that omitting to do it would set
him upon a career that would lead to beggary and a pauper's grave.
For instance: if at any time-say in boyhood-Columbus had
skipped the triflingest little link in the chain of acts projected and
made inevitable by his first childish act, it would have changed his
whole subsequent life and he would have become a priest and died
obscure in an Italian village, and America would not have been
discovered for two centuries afterward. I know this. To skip any
one of the billion acts in Columbus's chain would have wholly
changed his life. I have examined his billion of possible careers, and
in only one of them occurs the discovery of America. You people do
not suspect that all of your acts are of one size and importance, but
it is true: to snatch at an appointed fly is as big with fate for you as
is any other appointed act-"

"As the conquering of a continent, for instance?"

"Yes.

"Now then, no man ever does drop a link-the thing has never
happened; even when he is trying to make up his mind as to
whether he will do a thing or not, that itself is a link, an act, and
has its proper place in his chain; and when he finally decides and
acts, that also was the thing which he was absolutely certain to do.
You see, now, that a man will never drop a link in his chain. He
cannot. If he made up his mind to try, that project would itself be
an unavoidable link-a thought bound to occur to him at that
precise moment, and made certain by the first act of his
babyhood."

It seemed so dismal!

"He is a prisoner for life," I said, sorrowfully, "and cannot get
free."

"No, of himself he cannot get away from the consequences of his
first childish act. But I can free him."

I looked up wistfully.

"I have changed the careers of a number of your villagers."

I tried to thank him, but found it difficult, and let it drop.

"I shall make some other changes. You know that little Lisa
Brandt."