Really it seems absurd, but those idiotic jig-saw puzzles were our
salvation. They actually took our minds off everything else. At first
I dreaded finishing one. No sooner was the last piece in place than I
felt a sudden revulsion, a booming of blood in my ears, and the sense
of loss and misery rushed over me like a wave of scalding water. And I
knew it was worse for Helen.
But after some days each seemed not merely a respite from pain, but
a sedative as well. After a two hours’ struggle with a fascinating
tangle of shapes and colors, we seemed numb to our bereavement and the
bitterness of the smart seemed blunted.
We grew fastidious as to manufacture and finish; learned to avoid crude
and clumsy products as bores; developed a pronounced taste for pictures
neither too soft nor too plain in color-masses; and became connoisseurs
as to cutting, utterly above the obvious and entirely disenchanted
with the painfully difficult. We evolved into adepts, quick to recoil
from fragments barren of any clue of shape or markings and equally
prompt to reject those whose meaning was too definite and insistent.
We trod delicately the middle way among segments not one of which was
without some clue of outline or tint, and not one of which imparted its
message without interrogation, inference and reflection.
Helen used to time herself and try the same puzzle over and over on
successive days until she could do it in less than half an hour. She
declared that a really good puzzle was interesting the fourth or fifth
time and that an especially fine puzzle was diverting if turned face
down and put together from the shapes merely, after it had been well
learned the other way. I did not enter into the craze to that extent,
but sometimes tried her methods for variety.
We really slept, and Helen, though worn and thin, was not abject, not
agonized. Her nights passed, if not wholly without tears, yet with only
those soft and silent tears, which are more a relief than suffering.
With me she was nearly her old self and very brave and patient. She
greeted me naturally and we seemed able to go on living.
Then one day she was not at the door to welcome me. I had hardly shut
it before I heard her sobbing. I found her again at the library table
and over a puzzle. But this time she had just finished it and was bowed
over it on the table, shaken all over by her grief.
She lifted her head from her crossed arms, pointed and buried her face
in her hands. I understood. The picture I remembered from a magazine of
the year before: a Christmas tree with a bevy of children about it and
one (we had remarked it at the time) a perfect likeness of our Amy.
As she rocked back and forth, her hands over her eyes, I swept the
pieces into their box and put on the lid.
Presently Helen dried her eyes and looked at the table.
“Oh! why did you touch it,” she wailed. “It was such a comfort to me.”
“You did not seem comforted,” I retorted. “I thought the contrast:...”
I stopped.
“You mean the contrast between the Christmas we expected and the
Christmas we are going to have?” she queried. “You mean you thought
that was too much for me?”