DERRICK’S RETURN By GOUVERNEUR MORRIS From Cosmopolitan

DERRICK dreamed that Indians had captured him and had laid him face down in their camp fire and were slowly burning his head off. As a matter of fact a surgeon was working out a difficult problem in the back of Derrick’s throat, and for a little while, toward the end of the operation, anesthesia had not been complete.

The operation was a success. Something that ought not to have been in Derrick’s throat was now out of it, and an incorrect arrangement of this and that had been corrected. The only trouble was a slight, ever so slight bleeding which could not be stopped. The measures taken to stop it were worse than the dream about the Indians, and, still worse, they didn’t stop it. The thin trickle of blood kept on trickling until the reservoirs from which it came were empty, and then the doctors—there were a good many of them now—told the woman who sobbed and carried on that her husband’s sufferings were all over. They told her that Derrick was dead.

But Derrick wouldn’t have admitted that. Even the bleeding and the pain of which he seemed to have died were now but vague and negligible memories. The great thing was to get out of that body which had already begun to decay, and making use of a new and perfectly delightful power of locomotion, to get as far away from it as possible. He caught up with sounds and passed them. And he discovered presently that he could move a little more quickly than light. In a crumb of time some unerring intuition told him that he had come to the Place to which some other unerring intuition had directed him.

Among the beautiful lights and shadows and colours of that Place, he learned fast. There were voices which answered his questions just as fast as he could think them. And something wonderful had happened to his memory, because it was never necessary to think the same question twice. Knowledge came to stay. To discover how very little he had ever really known about anything didn’t humiliate him. It was funny. It made him laugh.

And now that he was able to perceive what insuperable obstacles there must always be between the man-mob and real knowledge of any kind, he developed a certain respect for the man-mob. It had taken them, for instance, so many millions of years to find out that the world on which they lived was not flat but round. The wonder was that they had made the discovery at all. And they had succeeded in prying into certain other secrets that they were not supposed to know—ever. As, for instance, the immortality of the soul, and how to commit race suicide.

To let the man-mob discover its own immortality had been a dreadful mistake. Everybody admitted that now. The discovery had made man take himself seriously and caused him to evolve the erroneous doctrine that the way to a happy immortality lay only through making his brief mortality and that of others as miserable as possible.

He thought a question and received this answer, only the answer was in terms of thought rather than in words:

“No, they were put on earth to be happy and to enjoy themselves. For no other reason. But for some reason or other nobody told them, and they got to taking themselves seriously. They were forced to invent all kinds of sins and bad habits so that they could gain favour by resisting them.... But with all respect to what you are now, you must perceive and admit what a perfect ass you were up to the time of your recent, and so called, death.”

He thought another question. The answer was a negative.

“No. They will not evolve into anything better. They have stood still too long and got themselves into much too dreadful a mess. As a pack they will never learn that they were meant only to be happy and to enjoy themselves. Individuals, of course, have from time to time had this knowledge and practised it, and will, but the others won’t let them practise it. But don’t worry. Man will die out, and insects will step in and succeed where he failed. Souls will continue for millions of years to come to this place, to learn what you are learning, and be happy to know that they have waked for ever from the wretched little nightmare they made for themselves on earth. And since happiness is inseparable from laughter, it will make them laugh to look back and see how religiously they side-stepped and ducked out of everything that was really worth while.”

II

In the first days of some novel, beautiful, or merely exciting experience a man misses neither his friends nor his family. And it was a long time, as time is reckoned here on earth, before Derrick realized that he had parted from all his without so much as bidding any one of them good-bye.

In time, of course, they would all come to the place where he now found himself, and share with him all that delicious wealth of knowledge and clear vision the lack of which now stood between them and happiness. Here the knowing how to be happy seemed the mere a b c of happiness. It was the first thing you learned. You not only learned how to be happy; but you applied your easily acquired knowledge and you actually were happy.

But how, the earth dweller asks, can the spirit of a man, separated from his wife and children and from the friends he loves, and conscious of the separation, be happy? Very easily. It was one of Derrick’s first questions, and the answer had been perfectly satisfactory.

He could always go back. He had learned that almost at once. There is no such thing as separation. If he chose to wait where he was, gathering the sweetest and delightfulest knowledge among the lovely lights and shadows and colours and perfumes, even as a man gathers flowers in a beautiful garden, in the course of time all those whom he had loved so greatly would come to him and be with him for ever. But if waiting would make him unhappy, here where no one need be unhappy, he could always go back. When? Now. Soon. Whenever he liked. Oh, it took a little time to get back; but not much. If, for instance, his wife at a given moment were about to lift her hands to her hair, and at that same moment he made up his mind to go back to her and actually started, he would get to her before her hands had moved more than a thousandth of an inch from her lap.

How could he communicate with her? As of old, if he liked. He could be with her. She could hear his voice, on occasions, if the actinic and electrical conditions were just right. She might actually see him. And of course he would be able to see her and to hear her. There was never any trouble about that. If he wanted to be with his family all the time, until they in turn got ready to come here, there was nothing to prevent—absolutely nothing. But had he, in his earth life, ever wanted to be with his dear ones all the time? Probably not. One of these days he would probably run into Romeo and Juliet. Very likely he would find them together. They were often together; but not always. Probably, like other loving spirits, he would not wish to be with his family all the time. He would probably do as other spirits did—go and come, and go and come.

About communicating? He would probably find that plain straight talk was too strong for earth dwellers. It had been tried out on them often, and usually disastrously. It was like forcing champagne and brandy on men who had always been content with beer. Straight talk from the spirit world often produced epilepsy among earth dwellers. It was too much for them to have all at once. And then such a very little was enough to content them, and he would find it far more satisfactory to furnish them with a little—a mysterious and nicely stage-managed little—than with a plain-spoken straight from the shoulder lot. To the wise, and he was now beginning to be wise, a hint is sufficient. Suppose, his wife being at her dressing table, he were to plant himself beneath and rap out a few words in the Morse code? Let him keep on with these rappings until she called in someone to interpret them for her.

He could not only comfort her about his death and reassure her as to his general whereabouts and activities, but he could have a lot of fun with her. There is no harm in having harmless fun with those you love. It is the fear of fun, the suspicion with which it is regarded, more than any one single thing, that has given the man-pack such a miserable run for its money. By means of the Morse code, he could persuade her to buy a ouija board. He would love that, and so would she and the children.

But Derrick kept putting off his return to the earth.

If a loving husband and father were turned loose in the finest jewellery store in the world and told to take his pick of the diamonds and rubies and pearls, as many as he could carry, he would not at once rush off to tell his loved ones of the astounding privilege that had been extended to him. He would stick to the store. He would hang about it possibly for days taking mental stock of all its precious contents. Blurring the tops of the glass show cases with his breath and staring till his eyes ached.

Derrick was in somewhat the same case. He had the impulse to rush off at once to his family to tell them of the extraordinary wisdom and mental equilibrium which were being lavished upon him; but he was restrained by the very natural wish to remain where he was until the last vestiges of earth marks had been rubbed from him.

He had been a very decent man as men go; but the amazing sense of purity which now pervaded his being was new in his experience. It was not so much a smug consciousness and conceit in personal purity as a happy negation of all that is not directly of the spirit in its most calm and lucid moments.

Here nothing soiled and nothing tired. An immense and delicious mental activity swept one past all the earthly halting places. There was no eating or drinking or love-making. There was no sleeping, and the mere fact of existence among the lights and shadows and colours was more cleansing than the most refined species of Oriental bathing.

Life here was mental. Burning curiosities and instantaneous satisfactions thereof seemed at once the aim and the end of existence. And since there can be no limit to the number and extent of the spirit’s curiosities, it was obvious that there could be no limit to existence itself. And Derrick together with those spirits which had passed into the Place at the same time with his own began to have a clear understanding of humanity.

Here, for instance, all that one learned about God was fact, but there was so much to learn that heaping fact on fact, with a speed unknown on earth—even in the heaping of falsehood upon falsehood—it would take from now until eternity to learn all about God. And this, of course, had to be the case. Since God is infinite, He can only be wholly revealed to those who, by pursuing knowledge to infinity, have acquired infinite knowledge.

The man-mob conception of God seemed very absurd to him. For man had formed it in the days when he still believed the earth to be flat, and had subsequently seen no good reason or obligation to change it. The man-mob had never gone beyond the idea that God was a definite person to whom certain things like praise and toadying were infinitely agreeable, and to whom certain other things like being happy and not very serious were as a red rag to a bull. This conception was the work of certain men who, the moment they had conceived a God in their own narrow and intolerant image, became themselves godlike. To men of that stamp simple and practical discoveries in geography, mechanics, or ceramics would have been utterly out of the question. But the greatest discovery of all with its precise descriptions and limitations lay to their credit. And from that time to this no very great number of men had ever taken the trouble to gainsay them, or ever would.

“I never did, for one,” thought Derrick, and he recalled with a smile the religious phases through which he had passed in his earth life. As he remembered that he had once, for a short period of his childhood, believed in the fiery, old-fashioned Hell of the Puritans, the smile broadened, and he burst into joyous and musical laughter.

III

There was one thing that he must be prepared to face. His wife and their three children would look just as they had looked when he last saw them, and as a matter of fact they would be just what they were; but to him, with all his new and accurate knowledge and his inconceivably clear vision, they would seem to have changed greatly.

He had always considered his wife an intelligent, well-educated, even an advanced woman, and he had considered his children, especially the youngest, who was a girl, altogether brighter and more precocious than his neighbour’s children. Well, along those lines he must be prepared for shocks and disillusionment.

It would not be possible, for instance, to sit down with his wife to a rational discussion of anything. She would seem like a moron to him: superstitious, backward, ignorant, and stubborn as a mule. He would find her erroneous beliefs and convictions hard to change. It would be the same with the children, but in less degree. The oldest was twelve, and his brain was still capable of a little development. He would have some inclination to listen to his father and to believe what his father told him. With Sammy aged ten, and Ethel, aged eight, much might be done.

He would begin by asking these young hopefuls to forget everything that had been taught them, with the exception of that one startling fact, that the world is round. He would then proceed to feed their eager young earth minds on as many simple and helpful truths as would be good for them, and he would show them, what was now so clear to him, how to find happiness on earth with a minimum of labour and worry.

A question carelessly thought and instantly answered caused him to return to earth sooner than he had intended. The answer to his question had been in the nature of a hard jolt. It had to do with sin.

Sin, he learned, is not doing something which other people regard as sinful, but something which you yourself know to be sinful. Lying, theft, arson, murder, bigamy may on occasion be acts of light, charity, and commiseration, no matter how the man-mob may execrate, judge, and punish them. But the same things may be also the worst of crimes. And only the individual who commits them can possibly know. That individual doesn’t even have to know. It is what he thinks that counts; not what he pretends to think, not what he swears in open court that he did think, but what, without self-deception, he actually did and does think.

And Derrick learned that if during his brief absence from them any of those earth persons whom he loved so dearly had sinned, committed some act or other which they knew for themselves to be sinful, there would be an opaque veil which neither his eyes nor theirs could pierce, nor the words of their mouths.

But he was not greatly worried.

As men count time he had been absent from the earth and from his loved ones only for a very short time. They would still be in the depths of mourning for him. And even if they were evilly disposed persons, which they were not, they would hardly have had time to think of anything but their grief and their loss.

IV

As he left the Place of the wonderful lights and shades and colours and perfumes, he realized that he could not have been perfectly happy in it. He could not have been perfectly happy, because he now perceived that by the mere act of leaving it behind he had become still happier, and that perfect happiness could only be his when he reached “home” and beheld his loved ones.

When he had been taken from his home to the hospital the buds on the pear trees had been on the point of bursting. The pear trees would be in full bloom now. When he had been taken away the shutters of the house had been taken from their hinges, painted a pleasant apple green and stood in the old carriage house to dry. They would be back on their hinges now, vying in smartness with the two new coats of white paint which the painters had been spreading over the low rambling house itself. How sweet the house would look among the fresh young greens of spring! Perhaps the peewees who came every year had already begun to build in the veranda eaves.

The little river which tumbled over the old mill dam and for a mile flowed tranquilly on with little slipping rushes through his farm, would be very full of water now. It would be roaring and foaming among the rocks at the foot of the dam. The elms which shaded the bridge and the ford beside it would be at their best, before the leaves became worm-eaten and cobwebby. Perhaps one of the cars would be in the ford to its hubs getting washed, with one of the children sitting in the front seat. The dark blue roadster with the special body looked especially gay and sporty in the ford under the shadow of the elms.

He had no more than time to think these things before he had come to the end of his journey.

Home had never looked so sweet or inviting. The garden was bounded on the south by a little brook; and beyond this was a little hill planted with kalmia and many species of native ferns.

It was on the top of this hill that he lighted, and here he paused for a while and filled his eyes with the humble beauty of the home which his earth mind had conceived and achieved.

Beyond the garden carpeted with jonquils and narcissuses between and above graceful pyramids of pear blossoms, the house, low and rambling, with many chimneys, gleamed in the sunlight. It was a heavenly day.

From the hill he could see not only the house, but to the left the garage and beyond that the stable. It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, and it seemed queer to him that at that hour and at that season there should be no sign of life anywhere. Surely the gardener and his assistant ought to be at work. He turned a puzzled and indignant glance back upon the garden, and he observed a curious phenomenon.

A strip of soil in the upper left hand corner of the garden was being turned and broken by a spade. Near by a fork was taking manure from a wheelbarrow and spreading it over the roots of a handsome crab apple.

Both the spade and the fork appeared to be performing these meritorious acts without the aid of any human agency.

And Derrick knew at once that McIntyre, the gardener, and Chubb, his assistant, must, since his departure, have sinned in their own eyes, so that they could now no longer show themselves to him, or he to them.

He started anxiously toward the house, but a familiar sound arrested him.

The blue roadster, hitting on all its cylinders, came slowly out of the garage and descended the hill and crossed the bridge and honked its horn for the mill corner and sped off along the county road toward Stamford all by itself.

There was nobody in the roadster. He could swear to that.

And this meant, of course, that Britton, the chauffeur, had done something which he knew that he ought not to have done, and was for ever separated from those who had gone beyond.

When Derrick reached the house he was in an exceedingly anxious state of mind. He stepped into the entrance hall and listened. And heard no sound. He passed rapidly through the master’s rooms downstairs and upstairs. In the sewing room a thread and needle was mending the heel of a silk stocking, but there did not seem to be anybody in the room.

He looked from the window and saw two fishing poles and a tin pail moving eagerly toward the river. The boys, perhaps. Oh, what could they have done to separate themselves from him? The window was open and he called and shouted, but the fishing poles and the tin pail kept on going.

He went downstairs, through the dining room and into the pantry.

His heart stood still.

On tiptoe on the seat of a chair stood his little girl, Ethel. Her hair shone like spun gold. She looked like an angel. And his heart swelled with an exquisite bliss; but before he could speak to her and make himself known, she had reached down something from the next to the top shelf and put it in her mouth.

At that instant she vanished.

He lingered for a while about the house and gardens, but it was no use. He knew that. They had all sinned in some way or other, and therefore he was indeed dead to them, and they to him.

Back of the stables were woods. From these woods there came a sudden sound of barking. The sound was familiar to Derrick, and thrilled him.

“If I can hear Scoop,” he thought, “Scoop can hear me.” He whistled long and shrill.

Not long after a little black dog came running, his stomach to the ground, his floppy silk ears flying. With a sob, Derrick knelt and took the little dog in his arms.

“Oh, Mumsey!” called Ethel. “Do come and look at Scoopie. He’s doing all his tricks by himself, just as if somebody was telling him to do them.”

The two looked from a window, and saw the little dog sit up and play dead and roll over—all very joyously—and jump as if through circled arms. Then they saw his tail droop and his head droop and his left hind leg begin to scratch furiously at his ribs. He always had to do that when anyone scratched his back in a particular place.

When Derrick returned to the Place of the wonderful lights and shadows he was very unhappy and he knew that he must always be unhappy.

“Instead of coming to this Place,” he said to himself, “knowing what I know now, I might just as well have gone to Hell.”

A voice, sardonic and on the verge of laughter, answered him.

“That’s just what you did.”