The Voice in the World of Pain

by Elizabeth G. Jordan

THE VOICE IN THE WORLD OF PAIN

THEY had told her that only an operation could save her life, and that it must bee performed at once. The voice of the physician who first spoke seemed a trifle strained and unnatural as he delivered this decision. He hesitated imperceptibly over his words, and his eyes moved restlessly as she fastened hers upon them. Even in the sudden mental panic that had seized her, and which she was controlling so well, she realised his discomfort, and felt a vague gratitude for the sympathy that caused it.

It could not be easy, she reflected, to tell a young woman for whom life held as much as it did for her that a mortal disease had fastened on her. She, who had always analysed herself and others, discovered that even at this crisis she was dreamily trying to follow the mental process of the famous surgeon, who had begun to roam restlessly about the room.

"He will say nothing for a moment," she thought. "He is giving me time to pull myself together. I can, but I do need the time. He needs it too. He has had to tell a woman who is young and rich, one who is ambitious and in love, something that may mean the loss of all these things. He has made her feel as if the world were slipping under her feet. The only thing that may save her—the knife. My work must stop, my friends must stand by helplessly. Even Jack can do nothing for me —dear Jack, who would do anything. …"

The objects in the room grew suddenly dim. She sank deeper into the big chair that held her, while despair, sudden and unreasoning, filled her soul. The question which has so often come to men and women in agony, through all time, rose in her. Why, oh, why had existence begun at all, if it must end like this? To her the grim implacability of fate was as awful a revelation as if she were the only one to whom it had ever come. To be projected into the world through no volition of one's own; to be danced about like a puppet on a string; to have the body to which one is tied seized by disease, and to bee forced to watch one's own decay, helpless to arrest or avert it—that was a horror before which the soul itself must shrink.

Her strong soul was appalled by the prospect. Many had leaned on it in the course of her young life, whose brightness had not made her heedless of the gloom in which some have to walk. Her strength had never failed them; but in this tragedy it was failing herself, and she found no helper. She had made her appointment with the specialists, and had come to them without a word, even to those who were nearest to her. "Why should I go to them with my trouble?" she had asked herself. It may not he what I fear, and I should alarm them unnecessarily. If it is—well, there will be time enough to tell them when I know myself."

She thought of them now—at least, she thought of Jack. Was it only last June they had been married? It seemed as if they had always been together, as if they had always belonged to each other, as if life had only really begun when she met him. He came vividly before her—gay, debonair, his brown eyes full of the tenderness she knew so well. She pictured the change that would come in them when she told him—the thought wrung from her what her own suffering had not done. She groaned, and the three physicians at once assumed an air of professional interest.

In the interval of silence they had worn their usual calm. They were suave, polished, hopeful. In this atmosphere of cool, scientific interest, the woman's will asserted itself, and she set her teeth with the determination to meet these men with a calmness equal to their own. She asked that the operation might be performed three days later, and found them thoroughly in accord with her wish to have the matter hastened. Every detail was arranged; the strain was lightened to the extent of a mild professional jest or two, dropped with the friendly wish to convince her that the situation was not hopelessly tragic. Then she went to her carriage, while three pairs of eyes looked after her, and then at each other, with an expression it was well she did not see. She directed the coachman to drive home, and, drawing her furs around her, gave herself again to reflection. Unconsciously she drooped forward a little in her seat, staring at the falling snow outside with eyes which hardly saw the streets and scenes through which she passed At one point in the journey up town the carriage was stopped for a moment by a sudden congestion of traffic, but she was not conscious of it. Her beautiful face, outlined against the dark collar of her fur coat, and framed by the carriage window, drew the eyes of another woman who stood at the curb waiting for an opening in the lines of vehicles. She, too, was miserable; but something in the expression of the eyes looking over her head made her forget her own burden in a sudden thrill of unselfish sympathy.

Nevertheless, she might have failed to recognise the face had she seen it three hours later, when Mrs. Jack Imboden turned it toward the young Englishman whom her hostess of the evening had assigned to take her in to dinner. She herself knew that she never had looked better, and Jack had confirmed this conviction when he folded her wrap about her as they were leaving home. She had told him nothing of the afternoon's experience; she could not, she discovered. There were limitations even to her courage. She could dress, she could meet a dinner engagement, she could look her best and be her brightest—that much she could and would force herself to do. But tell Jack—no, not yet. Perhaps after all she could arrange it so that he need not know.

She was aroused from her reverie by the soft laughter of the young Englishman at her side. "That is delicious," he said, appreciatively; and she became conscious that she had been talking brightly, as usual, and that what she had just said was rather clever. Jack had caught it, too, and was looking at her with the expression she most loved to see in his eyes—a look of proud and tender proprietorship. Her own expression changed so suddenly that both men noticed it, and Effingham, the Englishman, commented upon it the next morning as he was giving an account of the dinner to his cousin.

"Mrs. Jack Imboden, who wrote that clever society novel last year, was in her best form," he said. "But for all that, I don't believe she is happy. I can't explain it, but every now and then there was something—and once she looked at Imboden in the strangest way. Do you suppose they have quarrelled, or that he is not treating her right?"

His cousin, the Honourable Cuthbert Effingham, yawned widely. He had not met Mrs. Imboden, and the subject did not especially interest him.

"The germ of an idea," evolved during the dinner that evening, developed well, by taking Jack's partner into her confidence, a rapid change of telegrams between the East and West made Mrs, Imboden's plan succeed so well that she drove with her husband to the station the day before the operation, and saw him whirled away in a Westward-bound train. He had rebelled loudly over going; the subtle instinct that is the twin of perfect love has told him something was wrong. Once or twice she had almost faltered, almost confessed—it would have been so great a comfort to have him to lean upon. But she had sent him away, playing her part perfectly until the end.

There was much to be done that last night,—she thought of it, somehow, as the last night, absolutely. Her mental process refused to go beyond the events of the next day; and though she did not allow her thoughts to take on more than a hypothetical foreboding of death, she made her will, gave definite instructions to the friends who were now aware of what was to take place, and wrote a long letter to Jack, which was to be mailed to him, "unless," as she put it to her maid, "within three days I myself give you instructions to the contrary."

The great surgeon came in the evening. He was deeply interested in the woman as well as in the case. He persuaded her to take a sleeping draught, mixing it himself with a solicitude which would have surprised his colleagues had they seen it.

"You must sleep well to-night, you know," he said to her, "and you would not do it without this. You'd say you would, and you would try, but you would lie awake all night and think—which would be bad for you."

It was a long speech for the great surgeon. He was a little surprised at himself, and was was still more so when late that night he found himself giving his wife the history of the case. It was his rule not to carry professional matters into his home, and he was sorry he had broken it when he saw the tears his remarks called forth.

"I need not tell you to be brave," he said, looking down encouragingly at Mrs. Imboden the next day, a moment before the anæsthetic was administered. "You will be that, I know. But you must be hopeful. We are going to bring you through all right."

The saturated cone settled over her face, and the sweet fumes of the anaesthetic filled her nostrils and crept into her lungs.

"Take a deep breath," she heard a voice say. "Take a deep breath, and count. Begin with one, and count as long as you can."

She counted steadily to eight, drawing in the fumes with each breath, and, unconsciously, breathing as little as possible. At nine a sudden panic came upon her. Her strong will broke, and a sense of darkness and horror filled her. She opened her mouth to shriek, and a great cold wave seemed to lift her and carry her away. She heard some one say "twelve—thirteen—fourteen"—and her heart was filled with pity for a wretched woman, who, far off in another world, was suffering. The words seemed to be forced by a tremendous will from a body in agony. "Seven-te—e—n," "eighteen," "n—i—ne—te—en," moaned the distant voice. Then all was blackness and oblivion.

When she again became conscious of her own identity she was one of a vast number of souls floating through a long, dark valley, at the distant end of which gleamed a ray of light. She seemed, like the others, to he propelling herself toward this light with the dimly defined conception that it marked her objective point But the journey was endless. Centuries seemed to pass, empires to rise and fall, worlds to appear and disappear as she travelled on. At first all was silence; then the air was fi1led with a low moan, increasing in violence as she drew near the end of the valley, until it swelled to a vast diapason of human agony. Before the horror of it her brain reeled: she grasped blindly at the shadowy forms about her. but each swept on unswervingly. She felt herself falling, and as she sank, the conviction settled upon her that this was at last the end. She did not know why, but she realised that if she lost her place in that dim procession she would never get back into the brightness of the world she was seeking. She must wander for ever alone in darkness.

Suddenly a voice, rich and musical, spoke beside her. It was a deep, strong baritone—a human voice. It rose and fell softly, persistently. She did not hear the words, but she knew at once that it was meant for her, that it was striving to reach her and help her. To its humanity and sympathy she responded as a frightened child in the dark responds to the touch of its mother's hand. She felt strong, well poised, resolute. She found herself again a part of the throng around her, hurrying towards the light, which grew brighter as they approached the exit from the valley. Through it all the voice remained beside her, uplifting and sustaining. As it grew stronger the whole valley seemed to her to be full of it, but the other shadows took no heed. The conviction strengthened that it was for her alone—that she alone heard it. A buoyant hope and strength took possession of her, and the appalling sense of loneliness departed. She floated calmly onward, out of the dense gloom into a grey twilight, then at last through the great arch at the end of the valley and into a broad green field over which lay the blessed light of day.

As her eyes grew accustomed to the brightness around her, she saw that the light came not from a sun, but from a brilliant dome arching over the field, and from which radiated myriads of golden wires converging to a vast instrument in the centre. These wires threw out blinding and many-coloured lights. At the instrument sat a woman of heroic size, in flowing white robes that melted into the brilliance around her. Her great face was calm, beautiful, benign. On the greensward in front of her were thousands of men, women and little children. Each was dressed in white, each face was distorted, and from each open mouth came cries of agony. From time to time the ranks parted, and one person was swept into the space directly before the instrument. The mighty hand of the woman sitting there struck a key, and as the note sounded one of the wires faded, and the shrieking, foremost figure sank from sight.

Florence Imboden stood on the outskirts of the throng and looked at those near her, forgetting her own physical suffering in the sight of theirs. She seemed to understand at once what it all meant, and she accepted without question the explanation that suggested itself, as one accepts the strange experiences that come in dreams.

"This is the World of Pain," she told herself, "and these are the souls of men and women whose tortured bodies are lying on operating tables in our world below. The surgeons tell us when we come back that we have not suffered—but we do, we do!"

The young girl standing next to her was suddenly swept by some invisible force to the open space before the instrument. The woman left behind knew that her time was coming, and braced herself to meet it. But fear, hideous, sickening, demoralising, again claimed her. The head of the woman at the instrument bent to her, and she felt herself propelled forward. The pandemonium around her grew wilder. She realised now that the distant echo of it was what she had heard in her journey through the valley. She saw the mighty hand before her move towards the key, and her eyes followed it. The surface of the key was a transparent crystal. Looking through, she saw a room, bare, marble lined, with a table in the centre around which were grouped hail a dozen white-robed figures. Four were men and two were women—nurses. On the table lay a figure. As she looked, the cone in the hand of one was lifted; a sudden stir of excitement was noticeable in the tense circle. Under the raised cone she saw her own face, white, still, terrible. There was a quick rush to and fro, the body was raised, something that looked like a galvanic battery was produced and used. The great surgeon turned from the table and threw up his hand in a gesture of hopelessness.

The mighty finger at the instrument moved implacably towards the key, shutting off the glimpse into the world below. She felt herself sinking, going, when again the wonderful voice that had sustained her sounded in her ear—melodious, golden, with musical inflections never heard in any other world, but never to be forgotten now. This time she could hear the words.

"Give her strength for the ordeal before her, and if it be Thy will restore her to the life in which she has done so much good, to the husband whom she has so greatly blessed. We ask it in the name. …"

She raised her head Without fear, and looked into the calm eyes of the woman at the instrument. The voice went on. She heard the words no longer, but those to which she had listened were enough. She would live. She would live for Jack, "the husband whom she had greatly blessed." Some benign, some powerful influence was behind her, strengthening and upholding her. She would live.

"She is coming round at last," said a voice softly.

"That was a close call, doctor," said another. "I never saw a closer one. I was certain for a few seconds that the pulse——"

She opened her eyes. The white-walled room was whirling round her. Faces, vaguely familiar, appeared and disappeared. One, mist-like, at first, gradually shaped itself into the feature of the great surgeon. His stern eyes smiled at her.

"It's all over," he remarked tersely. "Now you have only to get well."

"Doctor," she said dreamily, "there is a soul—there is a soul. I have never felt certain of it before. And that voice—that wonderful voice that saved me—the voice that prayed! Whose was it?

She saw them smile a little at her seeming incoherence.

"Never mind, dear Mrs. Imboden: that's the ether," one of the nurses said gently.

But she persisted and questioned until the surgeon himself came to her bedside.

"Who prayed?" she asked: "who was it that prayed?"

He laid lightly on hers the steady hand that had worked so well for her, and spoke to her as one speaks to a fretful child.

"Dear Mrs. Imboden," he said soothingly, "you must lie very quiet Don't talk. Don't think. As for this voice of yours—there has been no praying here."

He drew on his gloves as he added, with professional pride, We have been working."

She regained strength rapidly, and some of her old time brightness and buoyancy came with it. But when the news of the accident in which Jack Imboden had met his death was flashed to his New York home, they kept it from her as long as they dared. Before this double tragedy in her life her friends succumbed in silent despair. There was none among them strong enough to tell her, so they delayed while she talked of him constantly and counted the days that must pass before he could return to her.

When they finally told her, she turned her face to the wall without comment, and asked them to leave her alone. Through the weary days and nights that followed she lay there making no outcry, no complaint, accepting what was done for her without question—silent, tense, automatic.

"She's losing strength every hour," said the day nurse, uneasily, to one of her associates. "This has destroyed her only chance. They shouldn't have told her,—and yet how could they help it? She was constantly asking for him, and the anxiety and suspense would have been as bad as the truth. Her courage might have pulled her through. But this ends it: she will not have to mourn her husband long."

As the weeks passed, the same conviction came to Florence Imboden, like a flash of light across a midnight sky. After all, what matter? It would not be long. In any case she might not have lived more than a year or two, and if that were so the situation was as Jack himself would have wished it to be. He would have felt that he could not live without her—now she need not live on without him. It was well. Only a short time, and they would be together. But would they? The question loomed suddenly before her, black, forbidding, shutting out the light that had entered her soul.

Would they? Was there a hereafter? Was the soul immortal?—or was death merely the sinking of the mortal into that nothing which is poetically called eternal peace and sleep?

In her full, bright life she had never before had those questions come home to her. She had attended church, she had freely given from the abundance that was hers, she had felt deep respect for the aims and teachings of religion and for the convictions of her religious friends. But in her soul she was conscious that she did not know—that she had never been convinced that religion was not the vital thing to her it was to some Others. Now her heart cried out for faith, for conviction, for immortality.

"If I could be certain of meeting Jack again," she breathed, "how cheerfully, how gladly I could bear whatever comes!"

She recalled the firm conviction in which she had come back to life after her operation. "There is a soul, there is a soul," she had told the doctors, with her mind full of that experience in the upper world, her ears still hearing the tones of that marvellous voice. They had smiled over her words, telling her the episode was merely an ether vision and a common one at that. No doubt they were right, she told herself. The shock of Jack's death had pulled her down from any spiritual heights she might have reached to the earthly plane on which her only need was the sound of his voice, the touch of his hand. The mysterious voice had haunted her for a few days. She had thought of it—dreamed of it; but now that, too, was gone.

She was getting out of touch with every human thing—worse than that, with every spiritual thing. This, at last, was agony. What had gone before was nothing. She was alone, hideously alone. She had called on God, and heard no answer. She tried to pray, and the prayers seemed hollow mockery. She sank into lethargic despair.

Effingham found her so one day when he had begged to see her for a moment. It was the first time they had met since her illness, as he had unexpectedly sailed for England the day after her operation was performed. She had always liked the sympathetic, clean-souled, ascetic young Englishman, and she found herself speaking to him as she had spoken to no one else.

"You believe in a hereafter, do you not?" asked wistfully, while he was studying, with a sense of shock, the great changes in her.

He flushed a little, with the Englishman's disinclination to touch upon the subjects most sacred to him; but something in her eyes and face made him respond simply and fully.

"Dear Mrs, Imboden," he said, "I do indeed. The faith I have in God and heaven is very near to me. You know," he added slowly, "I am preparing for the Church, and I am here to study with a dear friend who has helped me more than any I have ever known. If you have doubts—if you are looking for strength and conviction, he can help you, I am sure. He is a wonderful man. Will you let me bring him to you, or, better still, will you go with me to his church some day? It is not far up town, and I would like to have you see him among his people. Just now he is giving a series of afternoon talks; every one of them is an inspiration. Perhaps," he added, "you would be willing to drive up there with me now?"

She hesitated. "I have gone out but a few times, you know," she said doubtfully. "I am perfectly able to go, but it seems so hard for me to move to arouse myself from the condition of lethargy I am in."

The tone and her expression made Effingham unusually persistent.

"Come," he urged; "we'll sit at the back of the church, and nobody will see us. You need not see Livingston afterwards unless you wish, although I fancy you will want to talk to him when you have heard him. People usually do."

She allowed herself to be persuaded, and they drove up town together to the little church, tucked modestly out of the way in an unfashionable side street. The winter day was drawing to a close, and the church was but dimly lighted. As they entered a pew near the door, they saw that all the seats were filled by shadowy figures, leaning forward as if in prayer. They settled themselves comfortably, and gave themselves up to the quiet and peace of the place. Through the door at the right of the sanctuary a man came. She could see his figure but dimly in the uncertain light. He stood for a moment looking over the assembly, and then began to speak.

At the first word, Florence Imboden started to her feet. The voice was a deep baritone, full of musical inflections, heard by her but once before, but not to be mistaken when heard again. It was the voice of the World of Pain—the voice that had comforted, the voice that had saved. She buried her face in her hands, while her brain reeled. Her mind was going at last, she thought; no mind could stand the accumulated horrors of these last few months. She tried to think calmly. It was the voice—but the other had been only "an ether vision." Had they not told her so? This man was strange to her; but that voice was not, could never be. She tried to pray, but could not. A nervous tremor convulsed her. She rose and groped her way out of the pew. Effingham, suddenly roused from his absorption, assisted her without question into the street, where her carriage stood waiting. She motioned the footman away.

"I want the air," she said to Effingham. "Let us walk up and down for a few moments."

They strolled along the deserted street, the young Englishman supporting her with friendly sympathy. He did not speak at first, but as he saw her grow calmer he broke the silence.

"I am afraid you did not like him," he said, with some disappointment, "and I am so sorry. I felt sure he could help you."

She made no reply, and he went on talking with the friendly purpose of giving her time to collect herself.

"He has helped me, as I have told you, more than any one else, and I have perfect confidence in him. I turn to him not only with my own troubles, but with those of my friends. I hope you won't mind my telling you," he went on, a little diffidently, "that I took yours to him. When I learned of your—your illness, I went to him the day before sailing and asked him to pray for you during the operation, which was to be performed that afternoon at two. When I had been in England a week I had a letter from him. He wrote that your case had strongly appealed to him—had 'taken hold of him,' as he put it. So much so, in fact, he said, that he had knelt down in his study and prayed for you for two hours while your operation was going on. Why, Mrs. Imboden——"

She reeled slightly, but his strong arm held her up. Her mind was not going, after all; it grasped as much of the strange experience as she could understand. She did not know why it should have come to her of all the world, but she did not question, either. It was for some great purpose, she felt. When the human soul was taxed beyond its powers something divine entered in and helped it. She was no mere atom whirling through space, to exist for a little time and perish. Behind the mystery of life was some benign power—she did not know what, but she was satisfied. In these dark hours of her life it had given her this proof that it existed. She could safely trust herself to it. She looked up into Effingham's eyes with a sudden light in hers which gladdened him.

"Your friend can help me," she said, "and he shall—more than any one else in the whole world. He shall teach me, and I will believe—I know it. Let us go to him now."

The people were coming out of the little church as they turned back together. They stood aside for a moment to let the others pass. Off in the darkness the street lamps began lo twinkle; above, the crescent of the moon hung pale in the twilight. Florence Imboden drew a deep breath as she looked up at it. The tragedy of life, of which her mind had been so full—what was it? Nothing. Fear, pain, loneliness—all these were swept away by the mental illumination that had come to her. The grim spectre of death itself was a benign friend, waiting smilingly beside her. Her prayers were answered. It was well with her—it was to be well with her. No matter what came, or how long or short the time, she could bear, she could wait. This little life was not the end. There must be another world, another existence—complete, perfect. She did not know where, but it was somewhere, and in it—Jack was waiting!

Elizabeth G. Jordan