"It really isn't time yet. Mother gets nervous, sitting all day. And
she doesn't care to read any more. Stay a little longer."
These snatches of Jean's confidence were delicious to her.
"Oh, I've got to go."
Jean suddenly put both arms around Margaret's waist and clasped her in
a swift embrace.
"I wish," she said, "some awfully nice old widower or bachelor would
come along and marry you!"
As Jean crossed the street with the lowering sun making a nimbus in her
chestnut-golden hair, she began to sing. The words sprang joyous and
clear as a bobolink's note--
"What's this dull town to me?
Robin's not here!"
But a sudden waft of consciousness smote them to a vague humming that
passed swiftly into--
"My Mary's asleep by thy murmuring stream;
Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream."
In the scented dark of the spring evening, Margaret came to the porch
again. A little curved moon sailed the sky--less a light-giver than a
shining ornament on the breast of night. A while before children's
laughter and skurrying footfalls had echoed down the sidewalks. Boys
had played ball in the middle of the street, with running and violent
contortions, and shouts and calls rejoicing in the release of their
animal energies. But these sounds had ceded to silence as the soft
darkness fell. Then young strollers, two and two, had passed; but these
also were gone. A gentle wind rustled very softly in the dead
vine-stalks. The world was alone with the fragrant wind and the
dreaming dusk and the little silver scimitar of moon.
The house opposite was all dark, except for a line of lamplight beside
the drawn blind of a side window. Earlier, Jean had turned on the porch
lights and sat under them in the most graceful of the wicker chairs,
reading, or affecting to read, and Frank, coming down the street, had
seen her in all that glow. Then they had turned off the lights and gone
away together, and the house had sunk into shadowy repose. Vague lines
of wanness betrayed the place of the cement walks. The fruit-trees were
dim, withdrawn, half-hinted shapes of whiteness, but their perfume,
grown bolder in darkness, wandered the winds with poignant, sweet
desire.
Margaret leaned against the weather-worn corner-post of the porch; her
hand passed over its cracked, paint-blistered surface with, a soft,
absent touch. She felt to her finger-tips the wooing lure of the night.
In the spring of her pulses she was aware of Frank and Jean somewhere
together in the dusky, fragrant, crescent-clasped folds of it. She
seemed to draw in with her breath and gather subtly through the pores
of her flesh all the shy, sweet, youthful yearning of the world--and,
behind that, wordlessly she knew the driven sap, the life-call, the
procreant urge. She sighed and stirred restlessly. The strand of pain
that runs in the pleasure of such moods began to ache gently like an
old wound touched with foreknowledge of evil weather. She shared the
pang that lies at the heart of spring.
Words of poetry pressed into her mind, voices of the great
interpreters. She was not a cultivated woman, hardly to be called
educated; her horizon, even of books, was chance-formed and narrow; but
what circumstance had given her she remembered well. The groping, vain
longing that stirred in her fell on speech, and moved among the haunted
echoes of the world.
"Bloomy the world, yet a blank all the same--
Framework that waits for a picture to frame."
And then, sudden as a cry:
"Never the time and the place,
And the loved one all together!"
She drew a long, shivering sigh, and deliberately thrust the lines out
of her mind. Best not to remember them--on such a night! Their edges
cut like young grass drawn through careless fingers.
The little new moon was rising higher in the deep, soft blue-darkness
of the sky. Margaret looked up at its gleaming curve, and other words
of poetry came to her, words she had read once in an old
magazine--translated from the Persian:
"Quaffing Hadji-Kivam's wine-cup, there I saw by grace of him,
On the green sea of the night, the new moon's silver shallop
swim!"
They swung on, like a familiar, wistful, passionate tune:
"Oh, my heart is like a tulip, closing up in time of cold!
When, at length, shy Bird of Fortune, shall my snare thy
wings enfold?"
Footsteps sounded along the walk, the linked steps of two, lingering,
yet with the springing fall of youth; then a murmur of voices, girl's
and boy's interchanging, lingering, too, and low, weighted, like the
footsteps, with the burden of their hour. Margaret drew back a little
behind the sapless vine-stems. She knew that she could not be seen in
the shadow of the porch, even by a passer far less absorbed than the
two who drifted by. She had recognized Frank and Jean at once, and
thrilled intimately at the quality of their voices. Both were changed
from the careless tones of every day, Frank's husky and strained,
Jean's vibrant and tremulous. What they said was quite inaudible--only
that betraying _timbre_, conscious and unconscious, hung on the
scented air. A single word in the girl's thrilled voice--a sharpened,
quivering note of life at high tension--pierced the shadows of the
porch:
"---- you ----"
"'You!'" Margaret leaned forward among her shadows, thrusting her
clenched hands downward, then pressed them tight upon her heart. "You!"
That little key unlocked the flood-gates. The barriers went down, and
the tide of passionate loneliness swept her soul.
"You!" she whispered to the fragrant, shimmering, vitalizing night; and
the word mocked her, and returned unto her void. She leaned her bosom
against the angled surface of the porch-post; she pressed her face
among the dry, unbudded vines. The cry went out from her into the empty
spaces of the world--a voiceless, hopeless call: "You! you! you! Oh,
you who never came to me!"
Her soul was ravaged by that mocking bitterness of loss which comes
only to those who have not possessed. She, crying for a lover in the
night, she who had never been sought! If ever her shy and homely
girlhood might have attracted a youth, poor Margaret's love of poetry
would have frightened him away. If the burdened poverty of her maturity
might have admitted a suitor, her acquaintance numbered no man who
would not have shunned an earnest-minded old maid. And she knew this
utterly. A thousand old aches were in the sudden rush of anguish, and
shame fought among them. She was shocked and startled at the drip of
salt tears down her cheeks, at the heaving of her shaken breast.
She struggled to rebuild her old barriers against the woe--pride, and
dignity, and the decent acceptance of one's lot. But those were for the
eyes of men and women; and here were no eyes, only night, and the risen
sap and the wild heart in her breast. Duty? She had never swerved in
doing it, but she thrust the thought by with passionate rebellion at
the waste of her in dull service to the outworn lives which neither
asked nor could take from her anything but the daily drudgery. She
groped for the old humble consolations, tender appreciations, generous
friendships, the joy in others' joy. But there the wall had broken
through. "I am nothing to them!" thought Margaret bitterly. "Jean will
not care to talk to me after to-night. And I can't always kiss other
people's babies! I want one of my own!"
The gauzy veil of dream that wrapped her often had fallen from before
her eyes. Rent by the piercing beauty of the night, and soaked in her
tears, that fragile fabric of vision served no more. Imagined blisses
had betrayed her, naked and tender, to the unpitying lash of truth. The
remote, the universal, mocked her sore longing for something near and
real, of earth and flesh--oh, as welcome in sorrow as in joy!--to be
imperiously her own! The river of life dashed by and would not fill her
empty cup. The love she loved so had passed her by.
She faced the hollowest desolation known to humanity. She had committed
no sin; she had been true and tender and faithful; she had not failed
in the least and humblest dues of love: yet, now she stood wrapped in
torment, and saw, across a great gulf fixed, the joys of love's elect.
She stood utterly frustrate and alone--a shared frustration were
happiness! Her mental life had been so intensely uncompanioned that she
was tortured with doubts of her own reality. What warrant of Being had
that soul which could not touch in all the blank, black spaces of the
void another soul to give it assurance of itself? What if the aching
throat and riven breast were but the phantom anguish of a dream Thing,
unpurposed, unjustified, a Thing of ashes and emptiness!
There remained God--perhaps! Was God a dream too? Was there any _You_
in all the empty worlds?
She stood quite still, questing the universe for God. She thought of
her father's God--the savage Hebrew deity he thought he worshiped, the
harsh Puritan formalist who ruled his creed, the hysterical, illogical
sentimentalist who swayed his heart. She dropped them all out of her
mind. God was not, for her, in the ancient earthquake or fire or
whirlwind. But--perhaps--somewhere!
She sank to her knees in the darkness, and, laying her head upon her
arms on the railing, sought in her soul for God.
"You are Love," she said. "They say it, but they do not believe it;
but _I_ believe it. You are Love that creates, and makes glad--and
wounds. You are Love that rises in all creatures in spring, and would
make all things beautiful and kind. You are Love that gives--and gives
itself. You made me to love love and love's uses, and nothing else in
the world! You made my life loveless. Why?"
She waited a moment, then, with a sobbing breath of remembrance, "Oh,
one spring they nailed you on a cross because you loved too much!"
After that she was very still, her head bent upon her arms, her heart
quiet, waiting for the still, small voice, the answer of God.
It came presently, and she knew it was the answer. She accepted it with
comfort, and sad pride, and submission, and a slow, strange, white
happiness of consecration. The answer came without any words. If there
had been words, they might have been, perhaps, like these:
"Bear the pain patiently, my daughter, for life is wrought in pain, and
there is no child born without sharp pangs. I have not shut thee out
from my festival of spring. Thy part is thy pang. I have given thee a
coronal of pain and made thee rich with loss and desire. I have made
thee one of my vestals who guard perpetually the hearth-fire which
shall not be lit for them. I have denied thee love that love shall be
manifest in thee. Wherever love fails in my world, there shalt thou
re-create it in beauty and kindness. The vision thou hast, and the
passion, are of me, and I charge thee find some fair and sweet way that
they perish not in thee. All ways are mine. Be thou in peace."
Margaret rose at length. The moon was gone from the sky, but out of its
deep, tender darkness shone the far, dim light of stars. A cool wind
touched her cheek, bearing a faint, ethereal odor of blossoms as from a
great distance. And upon her face, if one might have seen for the
darkness, shone a fine, ethereal beauty far-brought from that great
distance which is nearer than hands and feet.
Against the shadowy front of the house opposite, two figures were
vaguely discernible, the taller a little darker than the encompassing
space, the other a little lighter. As Margaret looked, they melted
together, and were no longer two but one.
She smiled in the darkness, very sweetly, and, holding her head high,
turned and went quietly into the dark little house.