Part 39 (1/2)
”Well, I haven't worked it out exactly--it's just sort of pouring in over me.”
”What's pouring over you?” demanded Aunt Nettie.
”Why--the sea of Life,” replied Missy desperately.
”For Heaven's sake!” commented Aunt Nettie again.
”It sounds vague; very vague,” said father. Was he smiling or frowning?--he had such a queer look in his eyes. But, as he left the table, he paused behind her chair and laid a very gentle hand on her hair.
”Like to go out for a spin in the car?”
But mother declined for her swiftly. ”No, Missy must work on her thesis this evening.”
So, after supper, Missy took tablet and pencil once more to the summerhouse. It was unusually beautiful out there--just the kind of evening to harmonize with her uplifted mood. Day was ending in still and brilliant serenity. The western sky an immensity of benign light, and draped with clouds of faintly tinted gauze.
”Another day is dying,” Missy began to write; then stopped.
The sun sank lower and lower, a reddening ball of sacred fire and, as if to catch from it a spark, Missy sat gazing at it as she chewed her pencil; but no words came to be caught down in pencilled tangibility.
Oh, it hurt!--all this aching sweetness in her, surging through and through, and not able to bring out one word!
”Well?” enquired mother when, finally, she went back to the house.
Missy shook her head. Mother sighed; and Missy felt the sigh echoing in her own heart. Why were words, relatively so much less than inspiration, yet so important for inspiration's expression? And why were they so maddeningly elusive?
For a while, in her little white bed, she lay and stared hopelessly out at the street lamp down at the corner; the glow brought out a beautiful diffusive haze, a misty halo. ”Only a signal shewn”...
The winking street lamp seemed to gaze back at her... ”Sometimes a signal flashes from out the darkness”... ”Only a look”... ”But who can comprehend the unfathomable influence of a look?--It may come to a soul wounded and despairing--a soul caught in a wide-sweeping tempest--a soul sad and weary, longing to give up the struggle...”
Where did those words, ringing faintly in her consciousness, come from?
She didn't know, was now too sleepy to ponder deeply. But they had come; that was a promising token. To-morrow more would come; the Valedictory would flow on out of her soul--or into her soul, whichever way it was--in phrases serene, majestic, ineffable.
Missy's eyelids fluttered; the street lamp's halo grew more and more irradiant; gleamed out to illumine, resplendently, a slender girl in white standing on a lighted stage, gazing with luminous eyes out on a darkened auditorium, a house as hushed as when little Eva dies. All the people were listening to the girl up there speaking--the rhythmic lift and fall of her voice, the sentiments fine and n.o.ble and inspiring:
”s.h.i.+ps that pa.s.s in the night and speak each other in pa.s.sing... So, on the ocean of life, we pa.s.s and speak one another... Only a look and a voice... But who can comprehend the unfathomable influence of a look?... which may come to a soul sad and weary, longing to give up the struggle...”
When she awoke next morning raindrops were beating a reiterative plaint against the window, and the sound seemed very beautiful. She liked lying in bed, staring out at the upper reaches of sombre sky. She liked it to be rainy when she woke up--there was something about leaden colour everywhere and falling rain that made you fit for nothing but placid staring, yet, at the same time, pleasantly meditative. Then was the time that the strange big things which filter through your dreams linger evanescently in your mind to ponder over.
”Only a look and a voice--but who can comprehend the--the--the unfathomable influence of a look? It may come to a soul--may come to a soul--”
Bother! How did that go?
Missy shut her eyes and tried to resummon the vision, to rehear those rhythmic words so fraught with wisdom. But all she saw was a sort of heterogeneous ma.s.s of whirling colours, and her thoughts, too, seemed to be just a confused and meaningless jumble. Only her FEELING seemed to remain. She could hardly bear it; why is it that you can feel with that intolerably fecund kind of ache while THOUGHTS refuse to come?
She finally gave it up, and rose and dressed. It was one of those mornings when clothes seem possessed of some demon so that they refuse to go on right. At breakfast she was unwontedly cross, and ”talked back”
to Aunt Nettie so that mother made her apologize. At that moment she hated Aunt Nettie, and even almost disliked mother. Then she discovered that Nicky, her little brother, had mischievously hidden her strap of books and, all of a sudden, she did an unheard-of thing: she slapped him! Nicky was so astonished he didn't cry; he didn't even run and tell mother, but Missy, seeing that hurt, bewildered look on his face, felt greater remorse than any punishment could have evoked. She loved Nicky dearly; how could she have done such a thing? But she remembered having read that Poe and Byron and other geniuses often got irritable when in creative mood. Perhaps that was it. The reflection brought a certain consolation.
But, at school, things kept on going wrong. In the Geometry cla.s.s she was a.s.signed the very ”proposition” she'd been praying to elude; and, then, she was warned by the teacher--and not too privately--that if she wasn't careful she'd fail to pa.s.s; and that, of course, would mean she couldn't graduate. At the last minute to fail!--after Miss Simpson had started making her dress, and the invitations already sent to the relatives, and all!
And finally, just before she started home, Professor Sutton, the princ.i.p.al, had to call her into his office for a report on her thesis.