Part 15

When eye can look into eye, when the stretched-out hand meets a responsive touch,--timid and uncertain, or confident with the knowledge of passionate love passionately returned,--the words that are spoken may be feeble, but the influence of a loved presence will carry conviction, and one voice awaken in one heart the music of the spheres. Then the dullest day is bright, the lovers’ feet tread on air, day is a joy and night a gladness, or at least a dream of delight. Then life is divided between anticipation and reality. No wonder the hours fly on wings; no wonder the thoughts suggested by brief absences are forgotten in the wonder and delight of briefer meetings, till the dread moment of separation comes, and aching hearts too late realise the appalling suddenness of the actual parting and the ceaseless regret for opportunities lost. You understand that my thoughts are not of the devout lover who is going through a short apprenticeship before signing a bond of perpetual servitude or partnership, as the case may be. That is a phase which, if it occasionally deserves sympathy, seldom receives it; indeed, it hardly awakens interest, except in those who wish to see the preliminaries concluded, that their interest in the principals may either cease, and give themselves more freedom, or begin, and bring them some profit. I appeal to you to tell me how to keep alive the divine flame when oceans and continents divide two loving hearts; how to tell of longing and bitter regret, of faith and love and worship, when such words may not be written; how to make personal influence felt across five seas and through many weary months; how to kill doubt and keep strong and faithful a priceless love, against which the stars in their courses may seem ready to fight; how, above all, to help one who needs help, and warm sympathy, and wise advice, so that, if it be possible, she may escape some of life’s misery and win some of life’s joy.

Journeying through this weary old world, who has not met the poor struggling mortal, man or woman, old or young, for whom the weal or woe of life hangs in the balance, to turn one way or the other, when the slightest weight is cast into either scale? Who has not been asked for sympathy or advice, or simply to lend an ear to the voice of a hopeless complaint? Some feel the iron in their souls far more keenly than others. While the strong fight, the weak succumb, and the shallow do not greatly mind, after they have gone through a short torture of what seems to them profound emotion. But in their case sympathy is rather wasted, for, however violent their grief, their tears are soon dried, and it must have been written for them that “joy cometh with the morning.”

You know what it is when the heart seems to struggle for more freedom, because it is choking with a love it may not, or will not, express; when, in the absence of one face, all other companionship is irksome, all conversation stale and unprofitable; when daylight wearies and night is cruelly welcome, because the struggle to play a part, and pretend an interest one does not feel, is over, and one stretches out one’s arms to the darkness, and whispers, “Come to me,” to ears that cannot hear. What strange unnatural creatures we are, for we stifle the voices of our souls, and seem to delight in torturing ourselves for the sake of some idea born of a tradition, the value of which we dare not even submit to the test of argument. If in response to your heart’s cry there came the one whose presence you desire, you would instantly torture yourself rather than confess your message. Whatever it cost you, you would not only pretend that the sudden appearance of the greatly beloved was the last thing you wished for, but you might even send him away with the impression that he had deeply offended you. And yet--Ah well! this artificial fortress we take such pains to build, and to keep in repair, is not proof against every assault. There are crises of life--an imminent danger, the presence or appearance of death, a sudden and irresistible wave of passionate feeling, or a separation that has no promise of reunion--before these the carefully constructed rampart of convention and outward seeming goes down like a house of cards.

“When a beloved hand is laid in ours, When, jaded by the rush and glare Of the interminable hours, Our eyes within another’s eyes see clear; When one world-deafened ear Is by the tones of a loved voice caressed, A bolt is shot back somewhere in the heart, And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again; The eye sinks inward and the heart lies plain, And what we mean we say, And what we would we know.”

There was a day which, to me, will ever be my day of days--halcyon hours of joy and gladness, coloured by a setting of wondrous beauty, and burdened by the fateful shadow of an inevitable parting that would, in all human probability, be the point where two lives, which had grown strangely and sweetly close, must divide, without any hope of re-uniting. You remember how in that early dawn we drove through the dewy grass, covered with the fairies’ dainty white gossamer kerchiefs, lace cobwebs spread out to dry in the morning sun; and, as we left the town and made for the distant mountains, the dark red road wound up and down hills, through orchards and grass-land and forest, till we gained a little village, where the road forked, and a clear, rain-swollen stream slipped swiftly past the picturesque brown cottages. Whilst the horses were being changed, we strolled a little way down the road, and watched a group of laughing urchins, playing in that lilied stream like water-babies. How they screamed with delight as their small glistening bodies emerged from the shining water to struggle up a crazy ladder that led from the back of a hut down into the winding stream; and how the sun shone! lighting the snow-white plumage of a brood of solemn-looking ducks, sailing majestically round the sedge-girt edges of a tiny pool beneath the bridge. In that pool was mirrored a patch of clear blue sky, and across it fell the shadows cast by a great forest tree. That was “a day in spring, a day with thee and pleasure!” Then, as we drove on, there were heavenly glimpses of sapphire hills, seen down long vistas through the forest. For the last few miles, the road followed the bank of a deep and rapid river, whose clear waters reflected the graceful overhanging trees, while the banks were buried in a thick maze of ferns and grasses, and great shining patches of buttercups and marigolds.

Were you sorry when the drive was over, and our sweet converse perforce ended? I wonder would you have enjoyed it better had that exquisite spot, in the depths of the forest, been ours alone for that one day? One day is so little in a lifetime, and yet what was ours was good! Do you remember how, in that far-off place, we met on the road one whom you recognised, but whose face and manner gave no clue to the romantic story of his life, a story that would have brought him great renown in the days when valour was accounted of the highest worth? You have not forgotten that, nor yet the return drive, when, as we crested the last hill, and began the steep and tortuous descent into the plain, the lurid rays of the setting sun threw crimson stains across dark pools of lotus-bearing water, half-hidden by overhanging grasses and the dank leaves of white-blossomed lilies. Beneath us lay a wide stretch of swamp-land, the very picture of abandonment, desolation, and solitude; heaps of up-turned earth, green with rank vegetation, and pools of dead water, whose dark shadows reflected the lambent fires of the western horizon. A broken line of black trees stood clear against the rapidly-darkening sky, but, as we reached the foot of the hill, heaven and earth were wrapped in the shadows of night. And then my day was done. Doubt was buried, and the “big word” bound our hearts in the joy of that priceless sympathy which carries human aspirations beyond the storm and stress of human life to a knowledge of the Divine. We said little; when hearts are at one, few words are needed, for either knows the other’s thoughts. But you were slow to unbend, making a brave fight against fate, and keeping true to your creed, though seven days would bring the end. To me, the light of that one brilliant day had been intensified by the rapidly approaching shadow of the inevitable parting. I wonder--now that the bitterness of separation has come, now that I vaguely ask myself what has happened to Time since I lost you--whether, if we could have that day again, you would again be so merciless in your determination to hold love in leash, and give no sign of either the passion or the pain that was tearing your heart. I think it was a hard fight, for, though you concealed your thoughts, you could not hide the physical effects of the struggle. Did you know how your weariness distressed me, and what I would have given to have the right to try to comfort you?

I have a confused memory of those other days. Brief meetings and partings; insane desires to make any excuse to write to you, or hear from you, though I had but just left your presence; a hopeless and helpless feeling that I had a thousand things to say to you, and yet that I never could say one of them, because the time was so short that every idea was swallowed up in the ever-present dread of your departure, and the ceaseless repetition of your cry, “I cannot bear it, I cannot bear it.” From out that vague background shine two stars, two brilliant memories to light the darkness of the weary months until I see your face again--a blissful memory and a sign. All the rest seems swallowed up in the bitterness of that parting, which comes back like some horrible nightmare.

Only black water under a heavy overcast sky; only the knowledge that the end had come; that what should be said must be said then, with the instant realisation that the pain of the moment, the feeling of impotent rebellion against fate, destroyed all power of reflection, and the impulse to recklessness was only choked back by the cold words of a publicly spoken farewell. Then rapid motion, and in one minute the envious darkness had taken everything but the horrible sense of loss and inconsolable regret. Whatever my suffering, it was worse for you; I at least was alone, alone with a voice which ever murmured in my ears that despairing cry, “I cannot bear it, I cannot bear it.”

When two who have been brought together, so close together that they have said the “big word” without faltering, are suddenly swept asunder by the receding wave of adverse circumstances, there must ever arise in their hearts that evil question, “How is it now? Is it the same? Or have time, and distance, and a thousand other enemies, so filled the space between us that the memory of either is growing dim, and the influence of the other waning, waning till the absence of all binding tie begins to feel like a very bond. Will the vision simply fade gradually out of sight?” For us there is no promise, no tie, no protestations of fealty; only knowledge, and that forced upon us rather than sought. You give or you don’t give, that is all; if you also take away, you are within your right. There may be reasons and reasons, I understand them all; and I have only one desire, that whatever prevails may secure you happiness. What you can give seems to me so unlike what others ever have to give, so infinitely beyond price, that, where I might gain, it is not right that I should speak. Therefore I cannot urge, I dare not even plead, a cause that has less to recommend it than the forlornest hope.

XXXV

OF OBSESSION

If that is irrevocable--why, then, no more. You can only decide, and while I would not have you consider me, I do ask you to think of yourself. I have no title to be considered, not the remotest; if I had, it might be different. Possibly, even, I had better not write now, and yet I must, though you say “Don’t.” It cannot matter for this once, and after--well, there may be no after. We are curiously inconsistent and very hard to understand; even when we think we know each other well, we speak to conceal our thoughts; and, when we write (and it is often easier to write what we mean than to say it) I wonder whether it occurs to us how marvellously contradictory we can be, and what difficult riddles we can frame, in two or three pages of a letter that comes straight from the heart and cries to be understood. Verily we are the slaves of circumstance; but whilst we accept that position, whilst we make sacrifices that can be absolutely heroic, and dumbly suffer the crucifixion of a lifetime, we want one other heart to know and understand. There are few things harder to bear than to stifle every strongest inclination, every dearest hope, to shut the gate of life, to lock it and throw away the key, with a determination to accept existence and make the best of it. God knows how bitter is that renunciation, but, if it be for another, and that other misunderstands, then the cruelty of it all seems almost beyond endurance.

If I may write no more to you, you may never understand. If I saw you, later, under other circumstances, I could not speak; so there can be no explanation for me. I do not plead, I may not. Not once, but often you have heard my profession of faith--a gift is good, because it is given freely. The greatest good, the most priceless gift, is love. It is valuable because it is free. You cannot buy it or compel it; even when given, you cannot lock it up, or chain it down, and say, “It is mine for ever.” It comes, and it is the joy of life; it goes, and it is pity, misery, despair. It is as useless to rave against the loss, as to shake one’s fist at Zeus and his thunderbolts. If I ever had, then I was thrice-blessed. If I have no longer, the fault is probably mine, and I have still the knowledge of what was. Not God Himself can deprive me of that. I would have liked that you should know all I yearn to say, but because you are not here to tell me, “Say it, say it all,” therefore I must keep silence. Perhaps I do not read aright all you mean; but some at least I know, and that is what you would have me understand without any shadow of doubt. That I realise, down to the very lowest depths of the suffering which is dumb for sheer pain; and I can say nothing, absolutely nothing, because I have no right; nay, more, you tell me to be silent. Surely you know, you know, what I would say? You remember how one evening we rode out by the rocks, and we talked of a story of faith and high resolve, and you said you did not think I was capable of a like devotion. That was a fairy tale; but what I said then, I repeat, with greater confidence, now; with hope, yes, I could stand and wait--with none, perhaps not.

That is all of me. What your letters have been you know, or at least you can guess, for I have answered them, and in those answers you could read all I might not say. “There must be an end, and it is not because of the trouble, but it is because of the pleasure.” You could not tell me that and think, because you bid me, I would not answer? Nor does one forget--fortunately--though if to forget be fortunate, I suppose to remember must be unfortunate, only it does not seem so to me. “Silence is a great barrier”--yes, death is silence, and the greatest barrier of all, and the silence of the living is, in a way, harder to bear, for it seems so needlessly unkind. Silence, determined, unbroken silence, will, I think, kill all feeling. I will not accept that as your last word, not yet; but if, when you receive this, you make that the beginning of silence, then I shall know, and I will not break it. Only I beg of you not to do so hard a thing as this, for I will gladly accept any less cruel sentence if you will not make yourself as dead to me. I have not done anything that need drive you to issue such an edict. Will not some less hopeless judgment, something short of eternal silence, serve until I bring on myself this ghastly doom? You are thinking that it was I who said, “All or nothing,” I who said friendship was too hard a road to tread. That was before--before I had tried; before I knew all I know now. You hid your heart far out of sight, and I never dared to guess--I do not now. But you went, and I, remembering how you went, catch at straws; for, as the Eastern says, I am drowning in the deepest sea. Do not think that is extravagant; it is because I have learned to count the unattainable at its true value that I also realise the immensity of the loss. We stood on either side of a wall, and because the wall was near to me I looked over it and almost forgot its existence. You, standing farther off, saw always the wall, and it shut me out. Then I, thinking it could be nothing to you, tried to get across the intervening space, and so fell, hurting myself, as those who fall must do. It was not a caprice, not an impulse that took me, it was the victory of the uncontrollable. So, doubting me, and to do right for both, you said, “I will build a wall too, stronger and higher, and then we can sometimes look over and talk to each other, and everything will be well.” But it is not well. Only you have vowed yourself to the work, and, if it seems hard, you say that all things are hard, and this must be good because it costs so much. To suffer is bad enough; to give suffering where you would strain every nerve to give only joy is so hard that, to help the other, seems worth any conceivable pain to oneself. What can it matter how it affects me, if I can do some little good for you; something that may save you a little pain, win you a little joy? Believe me, I have no wish but this. Whatever my selfishness would suggest is not really me, for “Thy law is my delight”; nay more, it is my delight to try to anticipate your wish. I have no fear except that you should misunderstand me, that I should misunderstand you. I am my own to offer, yours to accept--equally if, by effacement, I can save you the smallest regret, help you for a few yards over the stony path of life by keeping silence, you will neither see nor hear from me again. I would you did not doubt, perhaps you do not now; at least you cannot distrust, and in this I shall not fail. I shall not say farewell. I will never say that; but through the silence, if so it must be, sometimes, on a day in spring, perhaps, will come the echo of a past that you can recall with nothing more than regret. And that is what I do not quite understand. You say, “In all the years to come I shall not regret.” Not regret what has been, what might have been, or what will be then? Therein lies all the difference, and therein lies the riddle, there and in those words, “I am sometimes--” How am I to supply the rest? It might be any one of so many things. Could it ever be that you are sometimes driven to wonder whether everything I could offer is worth anything you would give? “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it; if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would be utterly contemned.” If that be true, and it has high authority, then in that one sentence is contained the conclusion of the whole matter. It tells you all that you can wish to know for yourself and myself and even for others. I have done; an accident drew from me an acknowledgment of my own hurt when it seemed unlikely that the fact should interest you. Now I am so unfortunate that, hurt myself, I have made you suffer as well. I have nothing to offer to help you, for all I had is yours already. And so the end: if so you deem it best. “_Si j’étais Dieu_,” I would use what power I had to spare you a moment’s pain and give you such happiness that you should forget the meaning of the word “suffering.” How utterly powerless we are, how impotent to save those we love, when no offer of the best we have, no devotion, no self-effacement, will secure the happiness of one other being, whose every pulse throbs in unison with ours, yet between whom and us there is fixed the great gulf of our own conventions. Is the end of all human hopes, all human sorrows, described in these two lines?--

“Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee There was, and then no more of Thee and Me.”

“Let me say it whilst I have the courage.” Suppose you had the greater courage to write, “I will never say it.” Let me rather cry with Saul, “Farewell to others, but never we part.” And yet I know that we have already parted to meet no more.

XXXVI

OF PARADISE LOST

By a dispensation of that Providence which, if seldom kind, is sometimes less than malignant, I received your two letters together--the poison and the antidote. I looked at the dates on the postmarks, and I took the poison first. It did not take long to read, and I am glad now that I can truly tell you that my impulse was to ignore your expressed wish, your command, and to at once tell you that I did not believe a single word of those lines, which, if meant to hurt, could not have been better conceived, for truly they were coldly cruel. Indeed, the note was hateful, and so absolutely unlike you, that it must have defeated its object, had that been really as you declared it. If you know me at all, you must have realised that, if I know the Kingdom of Heaven may not be taken by storm, I should never seek for the charity which is thrown to the importunate. But the other letter was there, and in it I found such measure of consolation as is vouchsafed to those who find that, if their path is difficult, they will not tread it alone, and it tends upward. It may not be all we desire--how should it be in a world which is full of

“Infinite passion And the pain of finite hearts that yearn”?

Still, it is much; and, at the worst, it is death without its sting.