company of Susy and Langdon.
DECEMBER 26TH. The dog came to see me at eight o’clock this
morning. He was very affectionate, poor orphan! My room will be
his quarters hereafter.
The storm raged all night. It has raged all the morning.
The snow drives across the landscape in vast clouds, superb,
sublime–and Jean not here to see.
2:30 P.M.–It is the time appointed. The funeral has begun.
Four hundred miles away, but I can see it all, just as if I were
there. The scene is the library in the Langdon homestead.
Jean’s coffin stands where her mother and I stood, forty years
ago, and were married; and where Susy’s coffin stood thirteen
years ago; where her mother’s stood five years and a half ago;
and where mine will stand after a little time.
FIVE O’CLOCK.–It is all over.
When Clara went away two weeks ago to live in Europe, it was
hard, but I could bear it, for I had Jean left. I said WE would
be a family. We said we would be close comrades and happy–just
we two. That fair dream was in my mind when Jean met me at the
steamer last Monday; it was in my mind when she received me at
the door last Tuesday evening. We were together; WE WERE A
FAMILY! the dream had come true–oh, precisely true, contentedly,
true, satisfyingly true! and remained true two whole days.
And now? Now Jean is in her grave!
In the grave–if I can believe it. God rest her sweet
spirit!
—–
1. Katy Leary, who had been in the service of the Clemens family
for twenty-nine years.
2. Mr. Gabrilowitsch had been operated on for appendicitis.
—————————————————————–
THE TURNING-POINT OF MY LIFE
I
If I understand the idea, the BAZAR invites several of us to
write upon the above text. It means the change in my life’s
course which introduced what must be regarded by me as the most
IMPORTANT condition of my career. But it also implies–without
intention, perhaps–that that turning-point ITSELF was the
creator of the new condition. This gives it too much
distinction, too much prominence, too much credit. It is only
the LAST link in a very long chain of turning-points commissioned
to produce the cardinal result; it is not any more important than
the humblest of its ten thousand predecessors. Each of the ten
thousand did its appointed share, on its appointed date, in
forwarding the scheme, and they were all necessary; to have left
out any one of them would have defeated the scheme and brought
about SOME OTHER result. It know we have a fashion of saying
“such and such an event was the turning-point in my life,” but we
shouldn’t say it. We should merely grant that its place as LAST
link in the chain makes it the most CONSPICUOUS link; in real
importance it has no advantage over any one of its predecessors.
Perhaps the most celebrated turning-point recorded in
history was the crossing of the Rubicon. Suetonius says:
Coming up with his troops on the banks of the Rubicon, he
halted for a while, and, revolving in his mind the importance of
the step he was on the point of taking, he turned to those about
him and said, “We may still retreat; but if we pass this little
bridge, nothing is left for us but to fight it out in arms.”
This was a stupendously important moment. And all the
incidents, big and little, of Caesar’s previous life had been
leading up to it, stage by stage, link by link. This was the
LAST link–merely the last one, and no bigger than the others;
but as we gaze back at it through the inflating mists of our
imagination, it looks as big as the orbit of Neptune.
You, the reader, have a PERSONAL interest in that link, and
so have I; so has the rest of the human race. It was one of the
links in your life-chain, and it was one of the links in mine.
We may wait, now, with baited breath, while Caesar reflects.
Your fate and mine are involved in his decision.
While he was thus hesitating, the following incident