From Harper's Magazine, December, 1908. By permission of Harper and
Brothers and Olivia Howard Dunbar.
It was intolerably unchanged, the dim, dark-toned room. In an agony of
recognition my glance ran from one to another of the comfortable,
familiar things that my earthly life had been passed among. Incredibly
distant from it all as I essentially was. I noted sharply that the very
gaps that I myself had left in my bookshelves still stood unfilled; that
the delicate fingers of the ferns that I had tended were still stretched
futilely toward the light; that the soft agreeable chuckle of my own
little clock, like some elderly woman with whom conversation has become
automatic, was undiminished.
Unchanged--or so it seemed at first. But there were certain trivial
differences that shortly smote me. The windows were closed too tightly;
for I had always kept the house very cool, although I had known that
Theresa preferred warm rooms. And my work-basket was in disorder; it was
preposterous that so small a thing should hurt me so. Then, for this was
my first experience of the shadow-folded transition, the odd alteration
of my emotions bewildered me. For at one moment the place seemed so
humanly familiar, so distinctly my own proper envelope, that for love of
it I could have laid my cheek against the wall; while in the next I was
miserably conscious of strange new shrillnesses. How could they be
endured--and had I ever endured them?--those harsh influences that I now
perceived at the window; light and color so blinding that they obscured
the form of the wind, tumult so discordant that one could scarcely hear
the roses open in the garden below?
But Theresa did not seem to mind any of these things. Disorder, it is
true, the dear child had never minded. She was sitting all this time at
my desk--at _my_ desk--occupied, I could only too easily surmise how. In
the light of my own habits of precision it was plain that that sombre
correspondence should have been attended to before; but I believe that I
did not really reproach Theresa, for I knew that her notes, when she did
write them, were perhaps less perfunctory than mine. She finished the
last one as I watched her, and added it to the heap of black-bordered
envelopes that lay on the desk. Poor girl! I saw now that they had cost
her tears. Yet, living beside her day after day, year after year, I had
never discovered what deep tenderness my sister possessed. Toward each
other it had been our habit to display only a temperate affection, and I
remember having always thought it distinctly fortunate for Theresa,
since she was denied my happiness, that she could live so easily and
pleasantly without emotions of the devastating sort.... And now, for the
first time, I was really to behold her.... Could it be Theresa, after
all, this tangle of subdued turbulences? Let no one suppose that it is
an easy thing to bear, the relentlessly lucid understanding that I then
first exercised; or that, in its first enfranchisement, the timid vision
does not yearn for its old screens and mists.
Suddenly, as Theresa sat there, her head, filled with its tender
thoughts of me, held in her gentle hands, I felt Allan's step on the
carpeted stair outside. Theresa felt it, too,--but how? for it was not
audible. She gave a start, swept the black envelopes out of sight, and
pretended to be writing in a little book. Then I forgot to watch her any
longer in my absorption in Allan's coming. It was he, of course, that I
was awaiting. It was for him that I had made this first lonely,
frightened effort to return, to recover.... It was not that I had
supposed he would allow himself to recognize my presence, for I had long
been sufficiently familiar with his hard and fast denials of the
invisible. He was so reasonable always, so sane--so blindfolded. But I
had hoped that because of his very rejection of the ether that now
contained me I could perhaps all the more safely, the more secretly,
watch him, linger near him. He was near now, very near,--but why did
Theresa, sitting there in the room that had never belonged to her,
appropriate for herself his coming? It was so manifestly I who had
drawn him, I whom he had come to seek.
The door was ajar. He knocked softly at it "Are you there, Theresa?" he
called. He expected to find her, then, there in my room? I shrank back,
fearing, almost, to stay.
"I shall have finished in a moment," Theresa told him, and he sat down
to wait for her.
No spirit still unreleased can understand the pang that I felt with
Allan sitting almost within my touch. Almost irresistibly the wish beset
me to let him for an instant feel my nearness. Then I checked myself,
remembering--oh, absurd, piteous human fears!--that my too unguarded
closeness might alarm him. It was not so remote a time that I myself had
known them, those blind, uncouth timidities. I came, therefore, somewhat
nearer--but I did not touch him. I merely leaned toward him and with
incredible softness whispered his name. That much I could not have
forborne; the spell of life was still too strong in me.
But it gave him no comfort, no delight. "Theresa!" he called, in a voice
dreadful with alarm--and in that instant the last veil fell, and
desperately, scarce believingly, I beheld how it stood between them,
those two.
She turned to him that gentle look of hers.
"Forgive me," came from him hoarsely. "But I had suddenly the
most--unaccountable sensation. Can there be too many windows open? There
is such a--chill--about."
"There are no windows open," Theresa assured him. "I took care to shut
out the chill. You are not well, Allan!"
"Perhaps not." He embraced the suggestion. "And yet I feel no illness
apart from this abominable sensation that persists--persists....
Theresa, you must tell me: do I fancy it, or do you, too,
feel--something--strange here?"
"Oh, there is something very strange here," she half sobbed. "There
always will be."
"Good heavens, child, I didn't mean that!" He rose and stood looking
about him. "I know, of course, that you have your beliefs, and I respect
them, but you know equally well that I have nothing of the sort!
So--don't let us conjure up anything inexplicable."
I stayed impalpably, imponderably near him. Wretched and bereft though I
was, I could not have left him while he stood denying me.
"What I mean," he went on, in his low, distinct voice, "is a special, an
almost ominous sense of cold. Upon my soul, Theresa,"--he paused--"if I
_were_ superstitious, if I _were_ a woman, I should probably imagine it
to seem--a presence!"
He spoke the last word very faintly, but Theresa shrank from it
nevertheless.
"_Don't_ say that, Allan!" she cried out. "Don't think it, I beg of you!
I've tried so hard myself not to think it--and you must help me. You
know it is only perturbed, uneasy spirits that wander. With her it is
quite different. She has always been so happy--she must still be."
I listened, stunned, to Theresa's sweet dogmatism. From what blind
distances came her confident misapprehensions, how dense, both for her
and for Allan, was the separating vapor!
Allan frowned. "Don't take me literally, Theresa," he explained; and I,
who a moment before had almost touched him, now held myself aloof and
heard him with a strange untried pity, new born in me. "I'm not speaking
of what you call--spirits. It's something much more terrible." He
allowed his head to sink heavily on his chest. "If I did not positively
know that I had never done her any harm, I should suppose myself to be
suffering from guilt, from remorse.... Theresa, you know better than I,
perhaps. Was she content, always? Did she believe in me?"
"Believe in you?--when she knew you to be so good!--when you adored
her!"
"She thought that? She said it? Then what in Heaven's name ails
me?--unless it is all as you believe, Theresa, and she knows now what
she didn't know then, poor dear, and minds----"
"Minds what? What do you mean, Allan?"
I, who with my perhaps illegitimate advantage saw so clear, knew that he
had not meant to tell her: I did him that justice, even in my first
jealousy. If I had not tortured him so by clinging near him, he would
not have told her. But the moment came, and overflowed, and he did tell
her--passionate, tumultuous story that it was. During all our life
together, Allan's and mine, he had spared me, had kept me wrapped in the
white cloak of an unblemished loyalty. But it would have been kinder, I
now bitterly thought, if, like many husbands, he had years ago found for
the story he now poured forth some clandestine listener; I should not
have known. But he was faithful and good, and so he waited till I, mute
and chained, was there to hear him. So well did I know him, as I
thought, so thoroughly had he once been mine, that I saw it in his eyes,
heard it in his voice, before the words came. And yet, when it came, it
lashed me with the whips of an unbearable humiliation. For I, his wife,
had not known how greatly he could love.
And that Theresa, soft little traitor, should, in her still way, have
cared too! Where was the iron in her, I moaned within my stricken
spirit, where the steadfastness? From the moment he bade her, she turned
her soft little petals up to him--and my last delusion was spent. It was
intolerable; and none the less so that in another moment she had,
prompted by some belated thought of me, renounced him. Allan was hers,
yet she put him from her; and it was my part to watch them both.
Then in the anguish of it all I remembered, awkward, untutored spirit
that I was, that I now had the Great Recourse. Whatever human things
were unbearable, I had no need to bear. I ceased, therefore, to make
the effort that kept me with them. The pitiless poignancy was dulled,
the sounds and the light ceased, the lovers faded from me, and again I
was mercifully drawn into the dim, infinite spaces.
* * * * *
There followed a period whose length I cannot measure and during which I
was able to make no progress in the difficult, dizzying experience of
release. "Earth-bound" my jealousy relentlessly kept me. Though my two
dear ones had forsworn each other, I could not trust them, for theirs
seemed to me an affectation of a more than mortal magnanimity. Without a
ghostly sentinel to prick them with sharp fears and recollections, who
could believe that they would keep to it? Of the efficacy of my own
vigilance, so long as I might choose to exercise it, I could have no
doubt, for I had by this time come to have a dreadful exultation in the
new power that lived in me. Repeated delicate experiment had taught me
how a touch or a breath, a wish or a whisper, could control Allan's
acts, could keep him from Theresa. I could manifest myself as palely, as
transiently, as a thought. I could produce the merest necessary flicker,
like the shadow of a just-opened leaf, on his trembling, tortured
consciousness. And these unrealized perceptions of me he interpreted, as
I had known that he would, as his soul's inevitable penance. He had come
to believe that he had done evil in silently loving Theresa all these
years, and it was my vengeance to allow him to believe this, to prod
him ever to believe it afresh.
I am conscious that this frame of mind was not continuous in me. For I
remember, too, that when Allan and Theresa were safely apart and
sufficiently miserable I loved them as dearly as I ever had, more dearly
perhaps. For it was impossible that I should not perceive, in my new
emancipation, that they were, each of them, something more and greater
than the two beings I had once ignorantly pictured them. For years they
had practiced a selflessness of which I could once scarcely have
conceived, and which even now I could only admire without entering into
its mystery. While I had lived solely for myself, these two divine
creatures had lived exquisitely for me. They had granted me everything,
themselves nothing. For my undeserving sake their lives had been a
constant torment of renunciation--a torment they had not sought to
alleviate by the exchange of a single glance of understanding. There
were even marvelous moments when, from the depths of my newly informed
heart, I pitied them--poor creatures, who, withheld from the infinite
solaces that I had come to know, were still utterly within that
Shell of sense
So frail, so piteously contrived for pain.
Within it, yes; yet exercising qualities that so sublimely transcended
it. Yet the shy, hesitating compassion that thus had birth in me was
far from being able to defeat the earlier, earthlier emotion. The two, I
recognized, were in a sort of conflict; and I, regarding it, assumed
that the conflict would never end; that for years, as Allan and Theresa
reckoned time, I should be obliged to withhold myself from the great
spaces and linger suffering, grudging, shamed, where they lingered.
* * * * *
It can never have been explained, I suppose, what, to devitalized
perception such as mine, the contact of mortal beings with each other
appears to be. Once to have exercised this sense-freed perception is to
realize that the gift of prophecy, although the subject of such frequent
marvel, is no longer mysterious. The merest glance of our sensitive and
uncloyed vision can detect the strength of the relation between two
beings, and therefore instantly calculate its duration. If you see a
heavy weight suspended from a slender string, you can know, without any
wizardry, that in a few moments the string will snap; well, such, if you
admit the analogy, is prophecy, is foreknowledge. And it was thus that I
saw it with Theresa and Allan. For it was perfectly visible to me that
they would very little longer have the strength to preserve, near each
other, the denuded impersonal relation that they, and that I, behind
them, insisted on; and that they would have to separate. It was my
sister, perhaps the more sensitive, who first realized this. It had now
become possible for me to observe them almost constantly, the effort
necessary to visit them had so greatly diminished; so that I watched
her, poor, anguished girl, prepare to leave him. I saw each reluctant
movement that she made. I saw her eyes, worn from self-searching; I
heard her step grown timid from inexplicable fears; I entered her very
heart and heard its pitiful, wild beating. And still I did not
interfere.
For at this time I had a wonderful, almost demoniacal sense of disposing
of matters to suit my own selfish will. At any moment I could have
checked their miseries, could have restored happiness and peace. Yet it
gave me, and I could weep to admit it, a monstrous joy to know that
Theresa thought she was leaving Allan of her own free intention, when it
was I who was contriving, arranging, insisting.... And yet she
wretchedly felt my presence near her; I am certain of that.
A few days before the time of her intended departure my sister told
Allan that she must speak with him after dinner. Our beautiful old house
branched out from a circular hall with great arched doors at either end;
and it was through the rear doorway that always in summer, after dinner,
we passed out into the garden adjoining. As usual, therefore, when the
hour came, Theresa led the way. That dreadful daytime brilliance that in
my present state I found so hard to endure was now becoming softer. A
delicate, capricious twilight breeze danced inconsequently through
languidly whispering leaves. Lovely pale flowers blossomed like little
moons in the dusk, and over them the breath of mignonette hung heavily.
It was a perfect place--and it had so long been ours, Allan's and mine.
It made me restless and a little wicked that those two should be there
together now.
For a little they walked about together, speaking of common, daily
things. Then suddenly Theresa burst out:
"I am going away, Allan. I have stayed to do everything that needed to
be done. Now your mother will be here to care for you, and it is time
for me to go."
He stared at her and stood still. Theresa had been there so long, she so
definitely, to his mind, belonged there. And she was, as I also had
jealously known, so lovely there, the small, dark, dainty creature, in
the old hall, on the wide staircases, in the garden.... Life there
without Theresa, even the intentionally remote, the perpetually
renounced Theresa--he had not dreamed of it, he could not, so suddenly,
conceive of it.
"Sit here," he said, and drew her down beside him on a bench, "and tell
me what it means, why you are going. Is it because of something that I
have been--have done?"
She hesitated. I wondered if she would dare tell him. She looked out and
away from him, and he waited long for her to speak.
The pale stars were sliding into their places. The whispering of the
leaves was almost hushed. All about them it was still and shadowy and
sweet. It was that wonderful moment when, for lack of a visible horizon,
the not yet darkened world seems infinitely greater--a moment when
anything can happen, anything be believed in. To me, watching,
listening, hovering, there came a dreadful purpose and a dreadful
courage. Suppose for one moment, Theresa should not only feel, but _see_
me--would she dare to tell him then?
There came a brief space of terrible effort, all my fluttering,
uncertain forces strained to the utmost. The instant of my struggle was
endlessly long and the transition seemed to take place outside me--as
one sitting in a train, motionless, sees the leagues of earth float by.
And then, in a bright, terrible flash I knew I had achieved it--I had
_attained visibility_. Shuddering, insubstantial, but luminously
apparent, I stood there before them. And for the instant that I
maintained the visible state I looked straight into Theresa's soul.
She gave a cry. And then, thing of silly, cruel impulses that I was, I
saw what I had done. The very thing that I wished to avert I had
precipitated. For Allan, in his sudden terror and pity, had bent and
caught her in his arms. For the first time they were together; and it
was I who had brought them.
Then, to his whispered urging to tell the reason of her cry, Theresa
said:
"Frances was here. You did not see her, standing there, under the
lilacs, with no smile on her face?"
"My dear, my dear!" was all that Allan said. I had so long now lived
invisibly with them, he knew that she was right.
"I suppose you know what it means?" she asked him, calmly.
"Dear Theresa," Allan said, slowly, "if you and I should go away
somewhere, could we not evade all this ghostliness? And will you come
with me?"
"Distance would not banish her," my sister confidently asserted. And
then she said, softly: "Have you thought what a lonely, awesome thing it
must be to be so newly dead? Pity her, Allan. We who are warm and alive
should pity her. She loves you still,--that is the meaning of it all,
you know--and she wants us to understand that for that reason we must
keep apart. Oh, it was so plain in her white face as she stood there.
And you did not see her?"
"It was your face that I saw," Allan solemnly told her--oh, how
different he had grown from the Allan that I had known!--"and yours is
the only face that I shall ever see." And again he drew her to him.
She sprang from him. "You are defying her, Allan!" she cried. "And you
must not. It is her right to keep us apart, if she wishes. It must be as
she insists. I shall go, as I told you. And, Allan, I beg of you, leave
me the courage to do as she demands!"
They stood facing each other in the deep dusk, and the wounds that I had
dealt them gaped red and accusing. "We must pity her," Theresa had said.
And as I remembered that extraordinary speech, and saw the agony in her
face, and the greater agony in Allan's, there came the great irreparable
cleavage between mortality and me. In a swift, merciful flame the last
of my mortal emotions--gross and tenacious they must have been--was
consumed. My cold grasp of Allan loosened and a new unearthly love of
him bloomed in my heart.
I was now, however, in a difficulty with which my experience in the
newer state was scarcely sufficient to deal. How could I make it plain
to Allan and Theresa that I wished to bring them together, to heal the
wounds that I had made?
Pityingly, remorsefully, I lingered near them all that night and the
next day. And by that time had brought myself to the point of a great
determination. In the little time that was left, before Theresa should
be gone and Allan bereft and desolate, I saw the one way that lay open
to me to convince them of my acquiescence in their destiny.
In the deepest darkness and silence of the next night I made a greater
effort than it will ever be necessary for me to make again. When they
think of me, Allan and Theresa, I pray now that they will recall what I
did that night, and that my thousand frustrations and selfishnesses may
shrivel and be blown from their indulgent memories.
Yet the following morning, as she had planned, Theresa appeared at
breakfast dressed for her journey. Above in her room there were the
sounds of departure. They spoke little during the brief meal, but when
it was ended Allan said:
"Theresa, there is half an hour before you go. Will you come upstairs
with me? I had a dream that I must tell you of."
"Allan!" She looked at him, frightened, but went with him. "It was of
Frances you dreamed," she said, quietly, as they entered the library
together.
"Did I say it was a dream? But I was awake--thoroughly awake. I had not
been sleeping well, and I heard, twice, the striking of the clock. And
as I lay there, looking out at the stars, and thinking--thinking of you,
Theresa,--she came to me, stood there before me, in my room. It was no
sheeted specter, you understand; it was Frances, literally she. In some
inexplicable fashion I seemed to be aware that she wanted to make me
know something, and I waited, watching her face. After a few moments it
came. She did not speak, precisely. That is, I am sure I heard no sound.
Yet the words that came from her were definite enough. She said: 'Don't
let Theresa leave you. Take her and keep her.' Then she went away. Was
that a dream?"
"I had not meant to tell you," Theresa eagerly answered, "but now I
must. It is too wonderful. What time did your clock strike, Allan?"
"One, the last time."
"Yes; it was then that I awoke. And she had been with me. I had not seen
her, but her arm had been about me and her kiss was on my cheek. Oh. I
knew; it was unmistakable. And the sound of her voice was with me."
"Then she bade you, too----"
"Yes, to stay with you. I am glad we told each other." She smiled
tearfully and began to fasten her wrap.
"But you are not going--_now!_" Allan cried. "You know that you cannot,
now that she has asked you to stay."
"Then you believe, as I do, that it was she?" Theresa demanded.
"I can never understand, but I know," he answered her. "And now you will
not go?"
* * * * *
I am freed. There will be no further semblance of me in my old home, no
sound of my voice, no dimmest echo of my earthly self. They have no
further need of me, the two that I have brought together. Theirs is the
fullest joy that the dwellers in the shell of sense can know. Mine is
the transcendent joy of the unseen spaces.