V. THE ROOM OF THE SILENCES

The Christmas candles looked at her flickeringly; the little white candles of purity, the little red candles of love. The holly in the room concealed its bold gay berries behind its thorns, and the cedar from the faithful tree beside the house wall had need now of its bitter rosary.

Her first act was to pay what is the first debt of a fine spirit--the debt of courtesy and grat.i.tude.

"It is a wonderful story, Frederick," she said in a manner which showed him that she referred to the beginning of his story and not to the end.

"As usual you have gone your own way about it, opening your own path into the unknown, seeing what no one else has seen, and bringing back what no one else ever brought. It is a great revelation of things that I never dreamed of and could never have imagined. I appreciate your having done this for me; it has taken time and work, but it is too much for me to-night. It is too new and too vast. I must hereafter try to understand it. And there will be leisure enough. Nor can it lose by waiting. But now there is something that cannot wait, and I wish to speak to you about that; Frederick, I am going to ask you some questions about the last part of the story. I have been wanting to ask you a long time: the story gives me the chance and--the right."

He advanced a step toward her, disengaging himself from the evergreen.

"I will answer them," he said. "If they can be answered."

And thus she sat and thus he stood as the questions and answers pa.s.sed to and fro. They were solemn questions and solemn replies, drawn out of the deeps of life and sinking back into them.

"Frederick," she said, "for many years we have been happy together, so happy! Every tragedy of nature has stood at a distance from us except the loss of our children. We have lived on a sunny pinnacle of our years, lifted above life's storms. But of course I have realized that sooner or later our lot must become the common one: if we did not go down to Sorrow, Sorrow would climb to us; and I knew that on the heights it dwells best. That is why I wish to say to you to-night what I shall: I think fate's hour has struck for me; I am ready to hear it. Its arrow has already left the bow and is on its way; I open my heart to receive it. This is as I have always wished; I have said that if life had any greatest tragedy, for me, I hoped it would come when I was happiest; thus I should confront it all. I have never drunk half of my cup of happiness, as you know, and let the other half waste; I must go equally to the depth of any suffering. Worse than the suffering, I think, would be the feeling that I had shirked some of it, had stepped aside, or shut my eyes, or in any manner shown myself a cowardly soul."

After a pause she went over this subject as though she were not satisfied that she had made it clear.

"I have always said that the real pathos of things is the grief that comes to us in life when life is at its best--when no one is to blame--when no one has committed a fault--when suffering is meted out to us as the reward of our perfect obedience to the laws of nature. In earlier years when we used to read Keats together, who most of all of the world's poets felt the things that pa.s.s, even then I was wondering at the way in which he brings this out: that to understand Sorrow it must be separated from sorrows: they would be like shadows darkening the bright disk of life's clear tragedy, thus rendering it less bravely seen.

"And so he is always telling us not to summon sad pictures nor play with mournful emblems; not to feign ourselves as standing on the banks of Lethe, gloomiest of rivers; nor to gather wolf's bane and twist the poison out of its tight roots; nor set before us the cup of hemlock; nor bind about our temples the ruby grape of nightshade; nor count over the berries of the yew tree which guards sad places; nor think of the beetle ticking in the bed post, nor watch the wings of the death moth, nor listen to the elegy of the owl--the voice of ruins. Not these! they are the emblems of our sorrows. But the emblems of Sorrow are beautiful things at their perfect moment; a red peony just opening, a rainbow seen for an instant on the white foam, youth not yet faded but already fading, joy with its finger on his lips, bidding adieu.

"And so with all my happiness about me, I wish to know life's tragedy. And to know it, Frederick, not to infer it: _I want to be told_."

"If you can be told, you shall be told," he said.

She changed her position as though seeking physical relief and composure. Then she began:

"Years ago when you were a student in Germany, you had a college friend. You went home with him two or three years at Christmas and celebrated the German Christmas. It was in this way that we came to have the Christmas Tree in our house--through memory of him and of those years. You have often described to me how you and he in summer went Alpine climbing, and far up in some green valley girdled with glaciers lay of afternoons under some fir tree, reading and drowsing in the crystalline air. You told me of your nights of wandering down the Rhine together when the heart turns so intimately to the heart beside it. He was German youth and song and dream and happiness to you. Tell me this: before you lost him that last summer over the creva.s.se, had you begun to tire of him? Was there anything in you that began to draw back from anything in him? As you now look back at the friendship of your youth, have the years lessened your regret for him?"

He answered out of the ideals of his youth:

"The longer I knew him, the more I loved him. I never tired of being with him. Nothing in me ever drew back from anything in him. When he was lost, the whole world lost some of its strength and n.o.bility. After all the years, if he could come back, he would find me unchanged--that friend of my youth!"

With a peculiar change of voice she asked next:

"The doctor, Herbert and Elsie's father, our nearest neighbor, your closest friend now in middle life. You see a great deal of the doctor; he is often here, and you and he often sit up late at night, talking with one another about many things: do you ever tire of the doctor and wish him away? Have you any feeling toward him that you try to keep secret from me? Can you be a perfectly frank man with this friend of your middle life?"

"The longer I know him the more I like him, honor him, trust him. I never tire of his companionship or his conversation; I have no disguises with him and need none."

"The children! As the children grow older do you care less for them?

Do they begin to wear on you? Are they a clog, an interference? Have Harold and Elizabeth ceased forming new growths of affection in you?

Do you ever unconsciously seek pretexts for avoiding them?"

"The older they grow, the more I love them. The more they interest me and tempt away from work and duties. I am more drawn to be with them and I live more and more in the thought of what they are becoming."

"Your work! Does your work attract you less than formerly? Does it develop in you the purpose to be something more or stifle in you the regret to be something less? Is it a snare to idleness or a goad to toil?"

"As the mariner steers for the lighthouse, as the hound runs down the stag, as the soldier wakes to the bugle, as the miner digs for fortune, as the drunkard drains the cup, as the saint watches the cross, I follow my work, I follow my work."

"Life, life itself, does it increase in value or lessen? Is the world still morning to you with your work ahead or afternoon when you begin to tire and to think of rest?"

"The world to me is as early morning to a man going forth to his work. Where the human race is from and whither it is hurrying and why it exists at all; why a human being loves what it loves and hates what it hates; why it is faithful when it could be unfaithful and faithless when it should be true; how civilized man can fight single handed against the ages that were his lower past--how he can develop self-renunciation out of selfishness and his own wisdom out of surrounding folly,--all these are questions that mean more and more. My work is but beginning and the world is morning."

"This house! Are you tired of it now that it is older? Would you rather move into a new one?"

"I love this house more and more. No other dwelling could take its place. Any other could be but a shelter; this is home. And I care more for it now that the signs of age begin to settle on it. If it were a ruin, I should love it best!"

She leaned over and looked down at the two setters lying at her feet.

"Do you care less for the dogs of the house as they grow older?"

"I think more of them and take better care of them now that their hunting days are over."

"The friend of your youth--the friend of your middle age--the children--your profession--the world of human life--this house--the dogs of the house--you care more for them all as time pa.s.ses?"

"I care more for them all as time pa.s.ses."

Then there came a great stillness in the room--the stillness of all listening years.

"Am I the only thing that you care less for as time pa.s.ses?"

There was no reply.

"Am I in the way?"

There was no reply.

"Would you like to go over it all again with another?"

There was no reply.

She had hidden her face in her hands and pressed her head against the end of the sofa. Her whole figure shrank lower, as though to escape being touched by him--to escape the blow of his words. No words came. There was no touch.

A moment later she felt that he must be standing over her, looking down at her. She would respond to his hand on the back of her neck.

He must be kneeling beside her; his arms would infold her. Then with a kind of incredible terror she realized that he was not there. At first she could so little believe it, that with her face still buried in one hand she searched the air for him with the other, expecting to touch him.

Then she cried out to him:

"Isn't there anything you can say to me?"

Silence lasted.

"_Oh, Fred! Fred! Fred! Fred_!"

In the stillness she began to hear something--the sound of his footsteps moving on the carpet. She sat up.