Part 5 (2/2)

When you see me standing helpless on a plank above a whirlpool, Do I drown, or do I hear you when you say it? Make believe?

How much more am I to say or do for you before I tell you That I met him! What's to follow now may be for you to choose.

Do you hear me? Won't you listen? It's an easy thing to listen. . . .”

”And it's easy to be crazy when there's everything to lose.”

”If at last you have a notion that I mean what I am saying, Do I seem to tell you nothing when I tell you I shall try?

If you save me, and I lose him -- I don't know -- it won't much matter.

I dare say that I've lied enough, but now I do not lie.”

”Do you fancy me the one man who has waited and said nothing While a wife has dragged an old infatuation from a tomb?

Give the thing a little air and it will vanish into ashes.

There you are -- piff! presto!”

”When I came into this room, It seemed as if I saw the place, and you there at your table, As you are now at this moment, for the last time in my life; And I told myself before I came to find you, 'I shall tell him, If I can, what I have learned of him since I became his wife.'

And if you say, as I've no doubt you will before I finish, That you have tried unceasingly, with all your might and main, To teach me, knowing more than I of what it was I needed, Don't think, with all you may have thought, that you have tried in vain; For you have taught me more than hides in all the shelves of knowledge Of how little you found that's in me and was in me all along.

I believed, if I intruded nothing on you that I cared for, I'd be half as much as horses, -- and it seems that I was wrong; I believed there was enough of earth in me, with all my nonsense Over things that made you sleepy, to keep something still awake; But you taught me soon to read my book, and G.o.d knows I have read it -- Ages longer than an angel would have read it for your sake.

I have said that you must open other doors than I have entered, But I wondered while I said it if I might not be obscure.

Is there anything in all your pedigrees and inventories With a value more elusive than a dollar's? Are you sure That if I starve another year for you I shall be stronger To endure another like it -- and another -- till I'm dead?”

”Has your tame cat sold a picture? -- or more likely had a windfall?

Or for G.o.d's sake, what's broke loose? Have you a bee-hive in your head?

A little more of this from you will not be easy hearing.

Do you know that? Understand it, if you do; for if you won't. . . .

What the devil are you saying! Make believe you never said it, And I'll say I never heard it. . . . Oh, you. . . . If you. . . .”

”If I don't?”

”There are men who say there's reason hidden somewhere in a woman, But I doubt if G.o.d himself remembers where the key was hung.”

”He may not; for they say that even G.o.d himself is growing.

I wonder if he makes believe that he is growing young; I wonder if he makes believe that women who are giving All they have in holy loathing to a stranger all their lives Are the wise ones who build houses in the Bible. . . .”

”Stop -- you devil!”

”. . . Or that souls are any whiter when their bodies are called wives.

If a dollar's worth of gold will hoop the walls of h.e.l.l together, Why need heaven be such a ruin of a place that never was?

And if at last I lied my starving soul away to nothing, Are you sure you might not miss it? Have you come to such a pa.s.s That you would have me longer in your arms if you discovered That I made you into someone else. . . . Oh! . . . Well, there are worse ways.

But why aim it at my feet -- unless you fear you may be sorry. . . .

There are many days ahead of you.”

”I do not see those days.”

”I can see them. Granted even I am wrong, there are the children.

And are they to praise their father for his insight if we die?

Do you hear them? Do you hear them overhead -- the children -- singing?

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