Part 27 (1/2)

A stupor and a sort of shame overwhelmed me as I heard that man trying to extract the utmost entertainment possible from the dark happenings that had been torturing me for a month.

I thought of that great voice, now silenced, which had said so clearly and forcefully that the writers of to-day imitate the caricaturists.

I, who had penetrated into the heart of humanity and returned again, found nothing human in this jiggling caricature! It was so superficial that it was a lie.

He said in front of me--of me the awful witness:

”It is man stripped of all outward appearances that I want people to see. Others are fiction, I am the truth.”

”It has a philosophical bearing, too.”

”Perhaps. But that wasn't my object. Thank G.o.d, I am a writer, and not a thinker.”

And he continued to travesty the truth, and I was impotent--the truth, that profound thing whose voice was in my ears, whose shadow was in my eyes, and whose taste was in my mouth.

Was I so utterly forsaken? Would no one speak the word I was in search of?

The Room was flooded with moonlight. In that magnificent setting there was an obscure white couple, two silent human beings with marble faces.

The fire was out. The clock had finished its work and had stopped, and was listening with its heart.

The man's face dominated. The woman was at his feet. They did nothing. An air of tenderness hovered over them. They looked like monuments gazing at the moon.

He spoke. I recognised his voice. It lit up his face for me, which had been shrouded from my sight before. It was /he,/ the nameless lover and poet whom I had seen twice before.

He was telling Amy that on his way that evening he had met a poor woman, with her baby in her arms.

She walked, jostled and borne along by the crowd returning home from work, and finally was tossed aside up against a post under a porch, and stopped as though nailed there.

”I went up to her,” he said, ”and saw she was smiling.

”What was she smiling at? At life, on account of her child. Under the refuge where she was cowering, facing the setting sun, she was thinking of the growth of her child in the days to come. However terrible they might be, they would be around him, for him, in him. They would be the same thing as her breath, her walk, her look.

”So profound was the smile of this creator who bore her burden and who raised her head and gazed into the sun, without even looking down at the child or listening to its babbling.

”I worked this woman and child up into a poem.”

He remained motionless for a moment, then said gently without pausing, in that voice from the Beyond which we a.s.sume when we recite, obeying what we say and no longer mastering it:

”The woman from the depths of her rags, a waif, a martyr--smiled. She must have a divine heart to be so tired and yet smile. She loved the sky, the light, which the unformed little being would love some day.

She loved the chilly dawn, the sultry noontime, the dreamy evening.

The child would grow up, a saviour, to give life to everything again.

Starting at the dark bottom he would ascend the ladder and begin life over again, life, the only paradise there is, the bouquet of nature.