The Mysterious Stranger, and Other Stories
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 farther
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 a thing 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 these things?”
“Well, I will tell you, and you must understand 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 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-machine is able to do nearly all
the business. Such a man goes through life almost ignorant of what
happiness is. Everything he 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 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 me--there 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, as 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 desires--and in
a moment. Creates without material. 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 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 the 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 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 threescore
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. 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
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 that it had been
appointed that on a certain day, at a certain hour and minute and second
and fraction of a second he should go to the well, and he didn't go.
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
gone to the well 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 an act, 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?”
“Oh yes, everybody does. My mother says she is so sweet and so lovely
that she is not like any other child. She says she will be the pride of
the village when she grows up; and its idol, too, just as she is now.”
“I shall change her future.”
“Make it better?” I asked.
“Yes. And I will change the future of Nikolaus.”
I was glad, this time, and said, “I don't need to ask about his case;
you will be sure to do generously by him.”
“It is my intention.”
Straight off I was building that great future of Nicky's in my
imagination, and had already made a renowned general of him and
hofmeister at the court, when I noticed that Satan was waiting for me
to get ready to listen again. I was ashamed of having exposed my cheap
imaginings to him, and was expecting some sarcasms, but it did not
happen. He proceeded with his subject:
“Nicky's appointed life is sixty-two years.”
“That's grand!” I said.
“Lisa's, thirty-six. But, as I told you, I shall change their lives and
those ages. Two minutes and a quarter from now Nikolaus will wake out of