“For the agony of the world’s struggle is the very life of God. Were
He mere spectator, perhaps He too would call life cruel. But in the
unity of our lives with His, our joy is His joy; our pain is His.”
I do not know what incoherent words I was saying. Janet stopped me.
“No, don’t,” she said. “I do not feel like that. You need not be sorry
for me.”
Her voice was very quiet, and her face was firm with the exalted,
unnatural self-control of extreme grief.
“Do you know?” she said, “the sorrow almost rests me. I have had so much
of the bitter and meaningless pain. Perhaps my quarrel with life is
over.”
“But this is so inexplicable,” I cried, taking the girl’s hands in mine
and forgetting that I was there to comfort her.
“It doesn’t need to be explained, because it hurts, and the hurt is
life, and life is good. Oh, I tell you,” she added proudly, drawing her
hands away and going over to seat herself by the window; “it is only
when you are standing outside, looking at life, talking about it and
thinking about it, that you can say it is cruel. When you are really
living, the very hurt is glorious.”
I sat and watched the tearless face. The girl had been carried beyond
me, out into the deeps of life where my words of help could not reach
her.
“I have always been trying to reason out the meaning of things,” she
said, turning quickly toward me, “and nobody even told me that it is
only what cannot be said that makes life worth while.”
“People have tried to, Janet,” I said softly, “but that is one of the
things that cannot be told.”
“There isn’t any kind of pain,” she said slowly, “that can equal the joy
of simple human love.”
I forgot my rebellion of the night before. I bowed my head in the
presence of this power for whose better apprehending we covet the very
agony and pain of life. We follow swiftly to let even its shadow fall
upon us, for if ‘in its face is light, in its shadow there is healing
too.’
The sunshine falling through the window turned Janet’s hair into a halo
of waving strands.
“Child,” I whispered, “it is true. It is good just to live. But remember
also that the old faith may be true. God may be, and may be love.”
“I don’t know,” said the girl, looking up. “I haven’t any opinions.”
Then a mist came over her eyes, for even her new comfort was swept away
by the waves of her sorrow; and she bowed her head upon her hands with
the cry that has ever been the one irrefutable witness to His presence:
“O my God!”