Philip Dru: Administrator, Edward Mandell House [top 100 books of all time checklist .txt] 📗
- Author: Edward Mandell House
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“No, never mind,” replied Philip. “There’s nothing to cheer me up about. The question is simply this: Can I stand a period of several years’ enforced inactivity as a mere pensioner?”
“Yes!” quickly said Gloria, “as a pensioner, and then, if all goes well, you return to this.” “What do you mean, Gloria? Don’t you like Army Post life?” asked Jack.
“I like it as well as you do, Jack. You just haven’t come to realize that Philip is cut out for a bigger sphere than—that.” She pointed out across the parade ground where a drill was going on. “You know as well as I do that this is not the age for a military career.”
Jack was so disgusted with this, that with an exclamation of impatience, he abruptly strode off to the parade ground.
“You are right, Gloria,” said Philip. “I cannot live on a pension indefinitely. I cannot bring myself to believe that it is honest to become a mendicant upon the bounty of the country. If I had been injured in the performance of duty, I would have no scruples in accepting support during an enforced idleness, but this disability arose from no fault of the Government, and the thought of accepting aid under such circumstances is too repugnant.”
“Of course,” said Gloria.
“The Government means no more to me than an individual,” continued Philip, “and it is to be as fairly dealt with. I never could understand how men with self-respect could accept undeserving pensions from the Nation. To do so is not alone dishonest, but is unfair to those who need help and have a righteous claim to support. If the unworthy were refused, the deserving would be able to obtain that to which they are entitled.”
Their talk went on thus for hours, the girl ever trying more particularly to make him see a military career as she did, and he more concerned with the ethical side of the situation.
“Do not worry over it, Philip,” cried Gloria, “I feel sure that your place is in the larger world of affairs, and you will some day be glad that this misfortune came to you, and that you were forced to go into another field of endeavor.
“With my ignorance and idle curiosity, I led you on and on, over first one hill and then another, until you lost your way in that awful desert over there, but yet perhaps there was a destiny in that. When I was leading you out of the desert, a blind man, it may be that I was leading you out of the barrenness of military life, into the fruitful field of labor for humanity.”
After a long silence, Philip Dru arose and took Gloria’s hand.
“Yes! I will resign. You have already reconciled me to my fate.”
Officers and friends urged Philip to reconsider his determination of resigning, but once decided, he could not be swerved from his purpose. Gloria persuaded him to go to New York with her in order to consult one of the leading oculists, and arrangements were made immediately. On the last day but one, as they sat under their favorite fig tree, they talked much of Philip’s future. Gloria had also been reading aloud Sir Oliver Lodge’s “Science and Immortality,” and closing the book upon the final chapter, asked Philip what he thought of it.
“Although the book was written many years ago, even then the truth had begun to dawn upon the poets, seers and scientific dreamers. The dominion of mind, but faintly seen at that time, but more clearly now, will finally come into full vision. The materialists under the leadership of Darwin, Huxley and Wallace, went far in the right direction, but in trying to go to the very fountainhead of life, they came to a door which they could not open and which no materialistic key will ever open.”
“So, Mr. Preacher, you’re at it again,” laughed Gloria. “You belong to the pulpit of real life, not the Army. Go on, I am interested.”
“Well,” went on Dru, “then came a reaction, and the best thought of the scientific world swung back to the theory of mind or spirit, and the truth began to unfold itself. Now, man is at last about to enter into that splendid kingdom, the promise of which Christ gave us when he said, ‘My Father and I are one,’ and again, ‘When you have seen me you have seen the Father.’ He was but telling them that all life was a part of the One Life—individualized, but yet of and a part of the whole.
“We are just learning our power and dominion over ourselves. When in the future children are trained from infancy that they can measurably conquer their troubles by the force of mind, a new era will have come to man.”
“There,” said Gloria, with an earnestness that Philip had rarely heard in her, “is perhaps the source of the true redemption of the world.”
She checked herself quickly, “But you were preaching to me, not I to you. Go on.”
“No, but I want to hear what you were going to say.”
“You see I am greatly interested in this movement which is seeking to find how far mind controls matter, and to what extent our lives are spiritual rather than material,” she answered, “but it’s hard to talk about it to most people, so I have kept it to myself. Go on, Philip, I will not interrupt again.”
“When fear, hate, greed and the purely material conception of Life passes out,” said Philip, “as it some day may, and only wholesome thoughts will have a place in human minds, mental ills will take flight along with most of our bodily ills, and the miracle of the world’s redemption will have been largely wrought.”
“Mental ills will take flight along with bodily ills. We should be trained, too, not to dwell upon anticipated troubles, but to use our minds and bodies in an earnest, honest endeavor to avert threatened disaster. We should not brood over possible failure, for in the great realm of the supremacy of mind or spirit the thought of failure should not enter.”
“Yes, I know, Philip.”
“Fear, causes perhaps more unhappiness than any one thing that we have let take possession of us. Some are never free from it. They awake in the morning with a vague, indefinite sense of it, and at night a foreboding of disaster hands over the to-morrow. Life would have for us a different meaning if we would resolve, and keep the resolution, to do the best we could under all conditions, and never fear the result. Then, too, we should be trained not to have such an unreasonable fear of death. The Eastern peoples are far wiser in this respect than we. They have learned to look upon death as a happy transition to something better. And they are right, for that is the true philosophy of it. At the very worst, can it mean more than a long and dreamless sleep? Does not the soul either go back to the one source from which it sprung, and become a part of the whole, or does it not throw off its material environment and continue with individual consciousness to work out its final destiny?
“If that be true, there is no death as we have conceived it. It would mean to us merely the beginning of a more splendid day, and we should be taught that every emotion, every effort here that is unselfish and soul uplifting, will better fit us for that spiritual existence that is to come.”
The trip north from Fort Magruder was a most trying experience for Philip Dru, for although he had as traveling companions Gloria and Jack Strawn, who was taking a leave of absence, the young Kentuckian felt his departure from Texas and the Army as a portentous turning point in his career. In spite of Gloria’s philosophy, and in spite of Jack’s reassurances, Philip was assailed by doubts as to the ultimate improvement of his eyesight, and at the same time with the feeling that perhaps after all, he was playing the part of a deserter.
“It’s all nonsense to feel cut up over it, you know, Philip,” insisted Jack. “You can take my word for it that you have the wrong idea in wanting to quit when you can be taken care of by the Government. You have every right to it.”
“No, Jack, I have no right to it,” answered Dru, “but certain as I am that I am doing the only thing I could do, under the circumstances, it’s a hard wrench to leave the Army, even though I had come to think that I can find my place in the world out of the service.”
The depression was not shaken off until after they had reached New York, and Philip had been told by the great specialist that his eyesight probably never again would pass the Army tests. Once convinced that an Army career was impossible, he resigned, and began to reconstruct his life with new hope and with a new enthusiasm. While he was ordered to give his eyes complete rest for at least six months and remain a part of every day in a darkened room, he was promised that after several months, he probably would be able to read and write a little.
As he had no relatives in New York, Philip, after some hesitation, accepted Jack Strawn’s insistent invitation to visit him for a time, at least. Through the long days and weeks that followed, the former young officer and Gloria were thrown much together.
One afternoon as they were sitting in a park, a pallid child of ten asked to “shine” their shoes. In sympathy they allowed him to do it. The little fellow had a gaunt and hungry look and his movements were very sluggish. He said his name was Peter Turner and he gave some squalid east side tenement district as his home. He said that his father was dead, his mother was bedridden, and he, the oldest of three children, was the only support of the family. He got up at five and prepared their simple meal, and did what he could towards making his mother comfortable for the day. By six he left the one room that sheltered them, and walked more than two miles to where he now was. Midday meal he had none, and in the late afternoon he walked home and arranged their supper of bread, potatoes, or whatever else he considered he could afford to buy. Philip questioned him as to his earnings and was told that they varied with the weather and other conditions, the maximum had been a dollar and fifteen cents for one day, the minimum twenty cents. The average seemed around fifty cents, and this was to shelter, clothe and feed a family of four.
Already Gloria’s eyes were dimmed with tears. Philip asked if they might go home with him then. The child consented and led the way.
They had not gone far, when Philip, noticing how frail Peter was, hailed a car, and they rode to Grand Street, changed there and went east. Midway between the Bowery and the river, they got out and walked south for a few blocks, turned into a side street that was hardly more than an alley, and came to the tenement where Peter lived.
It had been a hot day even in the wide, clean portions of the city. Here the heat was almost unbearable, and the stench, incident to a congested population, made matters worse.
Ragged and dirty children were playing in the street. Lack of food and pure air, together with unsanitary surroundings, had set its
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