She was gone so long that I had time to do what I would with the
fragments of the story which she had so non-committally delivered to me.
Since analysis was my way, I should have full scope for it. I sat with
my head in my hands, my elbows on my knees. The sunset deepened and
glowed around me, but I paid no attention to it. The cloudy abstraction
which hovered before my inner vision, and let me grasp here a fringe,
there a fold, was all-absorbing to me.
Souls that want greatly, like Hesper, are doomed to failure or
disappointment. No earthly having can possibly satisfy them. For what
they really want is simply God, and earth represents Him very
imperfectly. Hesper had not been happy with the thing she had come
nearest having--her mother. Would she have been happy with her lover?
Would he have let her love him 'too well'? Books and education and
travel are all finite and fragmentary means to an end which never
arrives. Only adventurous spirits can escape the torment in them. And,
with all her eagerness, Hesper was not adventurous. She was too earnest
and humble, she was too direct. Fate had been good to her; and, in
giving her nothing, had really given her everything. Everything: that
was God. Well, her story had not once referred to Him, but it had been
as instinct with Him as a star with light. It was He who had beckoned
and lured her by lurking in her three definite interests, and then had
shattered them before her in order that she might find Him. She had Him
fast at last, and He had her. There was no mistaking the heavenly
surrender of her face. I was awed with the apprehension of the
passionate seeking and finding between a human soul and its Maker. Did
she recognize and acknowledge the situation? Or, here again, did she
prefer a blind certainty?
Blind! The word had dogged me for several weeks, but I had evaded it.
Now, when it suddenly confronted me, I was all but staggered by it. I
think I groaned slightly; I know I pressed my hand closely over my eyes.
Then my own action admonished me. Here was I, deliberately shutting
myself away from the sight of the outer world in order that I might hold
and marshal my thoughts in the presence of reality. The hills and sky
are distracting; the whole flying glory of creation is a perpetual
challenge and disturbance to the meditative spirit. How supremely
excellent it would be if one could only look long and hard and adoringly
enough at it to see through it once; and then never see it again, for
the rapt contemplation of That which lies behind!
I had come to this point in my revery when Hesper softly returned and
stood in the doorway behind me. I looked up at her. She returned my
smile, but I thought that her eyes did not quite fix me. Neither did she
glance at the sky when I commented on the beauty of the sunset--although
she assented to the comment convincingly. As she sat down beside me, her
hands and feet made a deft groping. I said nothing; and I have never
known whether she or any one else knew that she was blind.
The minister's wife waylaid me, as I passed her house that evening on my
way back to my room.
'You've been to see Hesper Sherwood again?' she remarked, with a
righteous, tolerant air of ignoring a slight. 'I'm so glad! Her life is
so empty that any little attention means riches to her.'
'Empty!'
The expostulation was a mistake, but I really could not help it.
'I have never known such a brimming life,' I added, still more
foolishly.
The minister's wife stared at me.
'Why, she has nothing at all,' she said.
'Precisely!' I commented, and went on my way.