A Daughter of the Land
Page 232She and her mother had agreed that there was "something." Now
Kate tried as never before to understand what, and where, and why,
that "something" was. Many days she would sit for an hour at a
time, thinking, and at last she arrived at fixed convictions that
settled matters forever with her. One day after she had arranged
the fall roses she had grown, and some roadside asters she had
gathered in passing, she sat in deep thought, when a car stopped
on the road. Kate looked up to see Robert coming across the
churchyard with his arms full of greenhouse roses. He carried a
big bunch of deep red for her mother, white for Polly, and a large
sheaf of warm pink for Nancy Ellen. Kate knelt up and taking her
flowers, she moved them lower, and silently helped Robert place
those he had brought. Then she sat where she had been, and looked
at him.
Finally he asked: "Still hunting the 'why,' Kate?"
enough of a fatalist to believe that Mother is here because she
was old and worn out. Polly had a clear case of uric poison,
while I'd stake my life Nancy Ellen was gloating over the picture
she carried when she ran into that loose sand. In each of their
cases I am satisfied as to 'why,' as well as about Father. The
thing that holds me, and fascinates me, and that I have such a
time being sure of, is 'where.'"
Robert glanced upward and asked: "Isn't there room enough up
there, Kate?"
"Too much!" said Kate. "And what IS the soul, and HOW can it
bridge the vortex lying between us and other worlds, that man
never can, because of the lack of air to breathe, and support
him?"
"I don't know," said Robert; "and in spite of the fact that I do
the soul."
"Oh, yes," said Kate. "If there is any such thing in science as a
self-evident fact, that is one. THAT is provable."
Robert looked at her eager face. "How would you go about proving
it, Kate?" he asked.
"Why, this way," said Kate, leaning to straighten and arrange the
delicate velvet petalled roses with her sure, work-abused fingers.
"Take the history of the world from as near dawn as we have any
record, and trace it from the igloo of the northernmost Esquimo,
around the globe, and down to the ice of the southern pole again,
and in blackest Africa, farthest, wildest Borneo, you will never
discover one single tribe of creatures, upright and belonging to
the race of man, who did not come into the world with four primal
instincts. They all reproduce themselves, they all make something
the exercise we call dance, they all believe in the after life of
the soul. This belief is as much a PART of any man, ever born in
any location, as his hands and his feet. Whether he believes his
soul enters a cat and works back to man again after long
transmigration, or goes to a Happy Hunting Ground as our Indians,
makes no difference with the fact that he enters this world with
belief in after life of some kind. We see material evidence in
increase that man is not defeated in his desire to reproduce
himself; we have advanced to something better than tom-toms and
pow-wows for music and dance; these desires are fulfilled before
us, now tell me why the very strongest of all, the most deeply
rooted, the belief in after life, should come to nothing. Why
should the others be real, and that a dream?"