ONE DAY OUT OF ALL THE YEARS
It was not enough!
If you would safely renounce a joy, you had best enjoy something of it
first. Renunciation must have something to live on. You can "take up the
whole of love and utter it," and _then_ "say adieu for ever," but
not before.
I have asked mercy for Jenny, though it was perhaps hardly necessary,
for the world always pities Jenny. Now I would ask it for Isabel and
Theophil, who are thus quietly to sacrifice the greatest thing in their
lives, the one reality for which they have come into existence, for
Jenny's sake. Great is their love for each other, but even greater and
stranger must be their involuntary love for an invisible goodness, an
ideal of ineffable pity. They are going to die that Jenny may live.
Strange, this gentle heroism of human creatures one for the other. Would
it be unfair to ask that each should support the anguish of his own
destiny, and that when Jenny's turn has come she should take her
lightning? Hers, had she known it, was the cup of anguish here; for
Theophil and Isabel had been decreed the cup of joy. But will they drink
it? No, they will change the cups; perhaps the bitter cup will grow
sweet near the dregs, being drunk together.
Yet this love of theirs, this perilous chance for Jenny, was none of
their making. Their joy had been given to them by unseen hands. It is
fairly theirs. Next time, perhaps, it will be their turn to suffer. It
is Jenny's now...
But no! the good heart of humanity will defeat the cruel ruling of the
gods. Let the lightning come upon them--not little Jenny.
Yet for this, Jenny, you will not grudge them their piteous reward.
Yours are all the years, Jenny. You will spare them one day out of all
the years. Think, Jenny, of the hours and hours and hours you and
Theophil have spent in careless happiness, and they--one almost laughs
to think of it--have just so far been granted four minutes. For four
minutes out of infinite time life has privileged them to be
alone together.
It will be far safer too. Otherwise you know not with what fearful flame
love will fill the chasms under ground, circling and seething in the
fiery darkness. Theophil loves you, but some day your home will suddenly
be rent from cope to base, unless his poor heart may speak, yea, babble
itself, just once in Isabel's ears.
A temptation had come to Theophil. At first he put it aside. Then
passion, wiser for once than reason, told him that it was a necessity,
and he knew that passion was right. A week of the fortnight had gone,
and Theophil remembered that Isabel would now be in the neighbourhood of
certain famous woods where in his boyhood he had often wandered, and he
remembered that she was to have the Monday quite free. That Monday they
should spend together in those enchanted woods. His secular business
often took him to towns thirty or forty miles away, and it was not
startling for him not to return till late at night. Thus Isabel and he
should steal their one day out of all the years.
So there went a note without one word of love in it to tell Isabel that
love was coming by the morning train; and so on that morning Isabel
stood waiting for love at that little wayside station, and presently,
with a mighty rushing sound of iron and brass, love came and stood very
quietly by her side, and looked into her eyes.
They took each other's hands quietly, and left the station without a
word; nor did they speak for a long while, walking blissfully side by
side through a village street which was to take them to the green and
lonely woods. Soon the houses were passed, and they still walked on
silent, listening to the song of their nearness.
Now, as they drank each other's presence through every feasting nerve,
they knew how starved they had been. As the lane narrowed and gloomed
green, dipping through caverns of bright leaves, they drew closer, and
smiled gently on each other; but they were not going to speak for a long
while yet. Had they not come away into this loneliness that they might
be silent together, that they might sit, hour after hour, and just watch
each other, lost in an ecstasy of contemplation, a trance of
recognition, a fascination that was almost fearful, that was so kind and
yet so cruel in its very power?
The woods are very still, but there is nothing in the world so still as
these two lovers, as they lie down on the green earth and gaze on each
other, hour after hour. When they find a word as great as their
silence, they will speak it--but they will find none except it be
"Isabel," except it be "Theophil."
And great passion has as little use for caresses as for words, and
kisses, which gay sensual love gathers greedily like little golden
flowers, and pays for nimbly with little, pretty words, will be almost
as rare as words.
Kisses! it is not to eat bonbons that these two have come out into the
woods.
Kisses! what kiss of the blind lips could match the kiss of those rapt
tragic eyes!
Kisses are but the diminutives of the great word "love;" they are but
the small change of passion, meteorites, star-dust of the great and
terrible planet.
Their souls are swung high above time and space in one never-ending
kiss,--the kiss of that predestined irrefragable union, of which
meetings and partings and kisses and caresses and words, and every other
fragmentary mode of expression, are but trivial accidents, to which
distance is still nearness, and nearness is still distance.
Their love is a property of eternal elements. It is fated as the union
of magnetic powers, it obeys chemic laws of irresistible combination.
They are Isabel and Theophil,--that is their love; they are in the world
together,--that is their marriage.
But passion will not be all day a tragedian. He has many moods. He is a
great wit,--how bright, how bright, he makes the brain!--a merry
comrade, a little, tender, silly child; and these two sad ones laughed
together, too, in the still woods,--for was not the most exquisite
humourist in the world their companion, love, who is all things by
turns, and all things wise?
And they feasted together, wine and great grapes, spread out on the
earth's green table; and they called each other silly, beautiful names,
and they feigned sad little glad stories--and called the wood their
home: this was their breakfast-oak, and that glade should be their great
hall, and high, high up in yonder beech, where the squirrel was sitting,
should be their secret little bed-chamber, hung in blue and green, with
a ceiling of stars. They should climb it each night on a ladder of
moonlight, and slide down from it each morning on the first strong rays
of the sun. And sometimes if it frightened them with being too near
heaven, they would seek out a dell of fine moss and creep close together
into the arms of the kind earth-mother, and then sleep while the stars
kept watch.
O, yes, it would be a wonderful life together.
Then suddenly the child's play would cease, as the birds stop singing
with the coming of the stars, and silence would sweep over them again,
and a great kiss would leap out of the silence, like a flame that lights
up heaven from north to south, and they would hang together, lost in an
anguish of desire.
The setting sun was turning the wood into halls of strange light, and
spreading golden couches here and there in its deep recesses.
"Theophil..." sighed Isabel.
"Wife..." sighed Theophil--(ah! Jenny!) and then a voice that seemed to
be neither's, and yet seemed to be the voice of both,--a voice like a
dove smothered in sweetness between their breasts,--said, "Let us go
deeper into the wood."
Later, when the stars had come, two white faces came glimmering from the
innermost chancel of the wood's green darkness. They passed close
together, still as phantoms among the trees, and when they came out on
to the lane they stood still.
"Theophil," said one voice, "if I should be dying, and I should send for
you, will you promise me to come?"
"Isabel," said another voice, "if I should be dying, and I should send
for you, will you promise _me_ to come?"
And each voice vowed to the other, and said, "I would come, and I would
go with you."
And all these words had once been Jenny's, but they had been Isabel's
first.