Thorley Masterman pondered on the words Lois had written him as he
tramped along the bluffs above the Mississippi, with the towers and
spires of Minneapolis looming like battlements through the haze of an
afternoon at the end of June. He had left the conference on new methods
of treating the thyroid gland which was being held in St. Paul in order
to think his position out. Having motored over from his hotel in
Minneapolis, he preferred to "tramp it" back. The glorious wooded way on
the St. Paul side of the river was in itself an invitation to his
strong, striding limbs, while the wine of Western air and the stimulus
of Western energy quickened the savage outdoor impulse so ready to leap
in his blood. The song of mating birds quickened it, too, and the
romance of the river gliding through the gorge below, and the beauty of
the cities eying each other like embattled queens from headland across
to headland and through the splendor of the promise of a gold-and-purple
sunset.
It was a great setting for great thoughts, inspiring ideas so large that
when he reached his hotel he found them too big to reduce easily to
paper.
"You ask me what love is, and say you don't know. I'm more daring than
you in that I think I do know. I know two or three things about it, even
if I don't know all.
"For one thing, I know that no one can do more than say what love is for
himself. You can't say what it is for me, or isn't, or must be, or ought
to be. That's my secret. I can't always share it, or at any rate share
it all, even with the person I love. But neither can I say what it is,
or isn't, or should be, or must be, for you. You have your secret. No
two people love in the same way, or get precisely the same kind of joy
or sorrow from loving. Since love is the flower of personality, it has
the same infinite variety that personalities possess. We give one thing
and we get back another. Do not some of our irritations--I'm not
speaking of you and me in particular--arise from the fact that, giving
one thing, we expect to get the same thing back, when all the while no
one else has that special quality to offer? The flower is different
according to the plant that produces it. When the pine-tree loved the
palm there was more than the distance to make the one a mystery to the
other.
"Of the two things essential to love, the first, so it seems to me, is
that what one gives should be one's best--the very blossom of one's
soul. It may have the hot luxuriance of the hibiscus, or the flame of
the wild azalea in the woods, or no more than the mildly scented,
flowerless bloom of the elm or the linden that falls like manna in the
roadway. Each has its beauties and its limitations; but it is worth
noticing that each serves its purpose in life's infinite profusion as
nothing else could serve it to that particular end. The elm lends
something to the hibiscus--the hibiscus to the elm. Neither can expect
back what it gives to the other. Perfection is accomplished when each
offers what it can.
"Which brings me to the remaining thing I know about love--that it
exists in offering. Love is the desire to go outward, to pour forth, to
express, to do, to contribute. It has no system of calculation and no
yard-stick for the little more or the little less. It is spontaneous and
irrepressible and overflowing, and loses the extraordinary essence that
makes it truly love when it weighs and measures and inspects too closely
the quality of its return. It is in the fact that love is its own
sufficiency, its own joy, its own compensation for all its pain, that I
find it divine. The one point on which I can fully accept your Christian
theology is that your God is love. Given a God who is Love and a Love
that is God, I can see Him as worthy to be worshiped. Call Him, then, by
any name you please--Jehovah, Allah, Krishna, Christ--you still have the
Essence, the _Thing_. Love to be love must feel itself infinite, or as
nearly infinite as anything human can be. When I can't pour it out in
that way--when I pause to reflect how far I can go, or reach a point
beyond which I see that I cannot go any further--I do not truly love."
Having written this much, he laid down his pen and considered. He had
said nothing personal, unless it was by implication. It was only after
long meditation that he decided to leave the matter there. The prime
question was no longer as to whether or not he loved her, but as to
whether or not she loved him. That was for her to decide. It was for her
to decide without his urging or tormenting. He began to feel not only
too sensitive on the subject, but too proud to make appeals to which she
would probably listen out of generosity. Since he had been in the wrong,
it was for her to make the advances; and so he ended his letter and
posted it.
The discussion continued throughout the correspondence that ensued while
he migrated from Minneapolis to Milwaukee, from Milwaukee to Denver, and
from Denver to Colorado Springs. It was partly from curiosity of travel
that he zigzagged in this way across the country, and partly to make it
plain to Lois without saying it that he awaited her permission to come
home. That he should be obliged to return one day, without her
permission if not with it, was a matter of course, but it would make the
meeting easier if she summoned him. As a hint that she could do so and
have no fear, he asked her in a postscript to one of his letters to tell
him, when she next wrote, what was happening to Rosie Fay.
To this she replied as simply and straightforwardly as he had put the
question, imparting all that Jim Breen had told her and whatever she had
gleaned for herself, adding as a seeming afterthought in the letter she
wrote next day:
"If Rosie _could_ bring herself to marry Jim it would be the happiest of
all solutions, and make things easier for Claude. I think she will. If
so, it won't be so much because her heart will have been caught in the
rebound as that the poor little thing is mentally and emotionally
exhausted, and glad to creep into the arms of any strong, good man who
will love her and take care of her. Just to be able to do that much will
be enough for Jim. I see a good deal of him; so I know. Every time he
brings an order of new plants we have a little talk--always about Rosie.
His love is of the kind you wrote about the other day; it has no
yard-stick for the little more or the little less in the return. Perhaps
men can love like that more easily than women do. Uncle Sim seemed to
hint one evening that there is generally a selfish strain in a woman's
love, in that what it gets is more precious to it than what it gives. I
wonder."
Thor received these two letters together on returning to Colorado
Springs from a day's visit to that high wilderness in which John Hay
sought freedom from interruption in writing his _Life of Lincoln_. He
understood fully that Lois was deliberately being cruel in order to be
kind. The very spacing out of her information over two separate days was
meant to impress him and at the same time to spare. Things would be
easier for Claude, she said, when she meant that they would be easier
for him.
But for him it was a matter of indifference. That is, it was the same
kind of matter of indifference that pain becomes in a limb that has
grown benumbed. For reasons he could hardly explain, that part of his
being to which Rosie Fay had made her pathetic appeal couldn't feel any
more. It was like something atrophied from over-strain. There was the
impulse to suffer, but no suffering. Moreover, he was sure that though
these nerves might one day vibrate again, they could never do so
otherwise than reminiscently. To the episode he felt as a mother might
feel to the dead child she has never been able to acknowledge as her
own. It was something buried, and yet sacred--sacred in spite of the
fact that it never should have been. As an incident in his life it had
brought keen joy and keener pain, but he had already outlived both. He
had outlived them as apparently Rosie had outlived them herself--not by
the passage of time, but by an intensity of experience which seemed to
have covered years.
He came to this conclusion not instinctively, nor all at once, but by
dint of reflection, as he sat on the broad terrace of the hotel,
watching the transformation scene that takes place in the Rockies during
the half-hour before sunset. His pipe was in his mouth; Lois's letters
lay open on the little table he had drawn up beside his chair. Other
tourists bore him company, scattered singly or in groups, smoking and
drinking tea. A mild suggestion of Europe, a suggestion of Cap Martin or
of Cannes, was blocked by the domes of the great range and by a shifting
interplay of magic lights where his eye was impelled to look for the
broad, still levels of Mediterranean blue.
There was a wonder in the moment which the yearning in his spirit was
tempted to take as symbolic, and perhaps prophetic, of his future. Where
all day long he had seen nothing but hard ridges packed against one
another, without water, without snow, without perspective, without a
shred of mist, without a hint of mystery, without anything to set the
mind to wondering what was above them or beyond them, the dissolving
views of late afternoon began to throw up a succession of lovely ranges,
pierced by valleys, glens, and gorges. Where the eye had ached with the
harsh red of the rocks spread with the harsh green of the scant
vegetation, soft vapors rose insensibly--purple, pink, and
orange--changing into nameless hues as they climbed into the great
clefts and veiled the rolling domes and swathed the pinnacles and
furrowed the deep passes and put the horizon infinitely far away. The
transmutation from conditions in which Nature herself seemed for once to
be barbaric, alien, hostile to civilized man, painted with Cheyenne
war-paint and girdled with a belt of scalps, to this breaking up of
glory into glory, of color into color, and of form into form, rising,
mingling, melting, fading, rising and mingling again, melting again,
fading again, passing swiftly in a last brief recrudescence from gold
into green and from green into black, with the hurried eclipse and the
sudden tranquillity of night--the transmutation which produced all this
was to Thor hopeful and in its way inspiriting. In the last rays of
light he drew out his fountain-pen and the scribbling-book he kept for
notes by the way, writing quickly without preamble or formality.
"Thanks for telling me about Rosie. It is as it should be--as will be
best. Jim saved her. Nothing so good could ever happen to her as to
marry him.
"As for me, there are two things, Lois, that I can truthfully affirm. I
can declare them the more emphatically because I have had time to think
them over--to think you over, and myself. If I ever had a doubt about
them I haven't now, because leisure and solitude have enabled me to see
them clearly. The first is that I have given you my best; and the
second, that I have given it without any restriction of which I have
been aware. If there was anything I withheld from you, and which you
think you should have had, I can only say that it was not of the nature
of my best. What it was I make no attempt to say, nor would it do any
good to try. Whatever it was, I wish neither to depreciate it nor to
deny it. It was something that swept me--like the tornado of which one
of your letters speaks--but it passed. It passed, leaving me tired and
older--oh, very much older!--and with an intense desire to creep home.
As a physicist I know nothing of a carnal man and a spiritual man, so
that I cannot enter into your analysis; but I do know that there are
higher and lower promptings in the human heart, and that in my case the
higher turn to you. As compared with you I'm only as the ship compared
to the haven in which it would take refuge. The ship is good for
something, but it needs a port."
Again he decided to leave his appeal suspended here, and on the next
morning began his preparations for gradually turning homeward.