INTO THE DARK
She was with him as he went then into the dark. She did not fail him in
anything: the hand in his, the little strokes of genius in holding his
mind, and when they went into the deeps where words were not fitted for
utterance she did not fail him in those other things. He knew that as she
clung to him with loving arms, so her spirit reached out to him in the
demand that it be permitted to sustain.
Through the day and through the night she was with him now. There was no
time when he could not reach out to find her, no bad dream from which he
could not awaken to put his hand upon her and know that she was there.
And when, time after time, bitterness rose up to submerge his soul, he
could always finally shake it off by thanking God for Ernestine.
For a time the pain in his eyes served as a kindly antidote. The light
was going out with so intense a suffering as to mitigate the suffering in
the consciousness of its going. It was the pain in his temples helped him
hold off the pain of giving up his work. It was not a thing conquered; he
knew that the deeper pain was waiting for him out there in the darkness
when the pain of transition should have ceased, leaving only a blank, a
darkness, no other thing to engage for him any part of his mind. There
was blessedness in the temporary alleviation brought by the pain that was
physical. There were many things for him to meet out there. They were
willing to wait. Now his fighting powers were so well engaged as to take
something from the reality of a future battlefield.
In many ways it was not as he would have imagined it had he known of such
a thing. He would have thought of it as one long mood of despair,
inflamed at times by the passion of rebellion. There were, in truth, many
moods. In hours when he was quiet they spoke of the things they had seen
and loved, of Italy and the Alps they spoke often, struggling for the
words to paint a picture. Sometimes she read a little to him--there would
be much of that now. Through it all, they seized upon anything which
would sustain each other. Once when he saw her faltering he told her
that he thought after awhile he would write a book. He did not call it a
text-book; did not speak of it as the kind of work to which a man
sometimes turns when his creative work is done. He had always thought
that when he was sixty or seventy he might write a few books. He would
write them now at forty.
And when there came times of its being utterly unbearable, they were
either silent or trivial.
Bitter questionings filled Ernestine's heart in those days. How was she
going to watch him suffer and not hate a universe permitting his
sufferings? How care for a world of beauty he could not see? How watch
his heart break for the work taken from him and keep her belief in an
order of things under which that was enacted? How love a world that had
turned upon him like that? That was what he asked her to do. It seemed to
her, now, impossible.
With him, as the bearing of the physical pain grew mechanical and the
other things grew nearer, the worst of it was wondering what he should do
with the days that were ahead. His spirit would not go with his sight.
His desire to do was not to be crushed with his ability for doing. What
then of the empty days to come? How smother the passion for his work? And
if he did smother it, what remained? While he lived, how deafen himself
to the call of life? Through what channel could he hope to work out the
things that were in him? And how remain himself if constantly denying to
himself the things which were his? It was that tormented him more than
the relinquishing of the specific thing he had believed would crown the
work of his life. His fight now would be a fight for clinging to that in
him which was fundamental. But with what weapon should he fight?
Many times he failed to bear it in conformity with his ideal of bearing
it. There were hours of not bearing it at all; hours of cursing his fate
and damning the world. Then it was her touch upon his hand, her tear upon
his cheek, her broken word which could bring him again into the sphere of
what he desired to be. His desire to help her in bearing it, his
thankfulness in having her,--those the factors in his control.
There were two weeks of that: weeks in which two frightened, baffled
souls fought for strength to accept and power to readjust. Their
failures, the doubts, the rage, they sought to keep from each other;
their hard won victories, their fought for courage they gave to the
uttermost. A failure of one was a failure for one; but a victory of one
was a victory for two. It was through that method courage succeeded in
some measure in holding its own against bitter abandonment to despair.
His last looks were at her face. It was that he would take with him into
the darkness. As a man setting sail for a far country seeks to the last
the face upon the shore, so his last seeing gaze rested yearningly upon
the dear face that was to pass forever from his vision. And when the end
had come, when hungering eyes turned to the face they could not see, and
he knew with the certainty of encountered reality that he would never
again see the love lights in her eyes, that others would respond to the
smile that was gone from him forever, others read in her face the things
from which he was shut out, when he knew he would never again watch the
laughter creep into her eyes and the firelight play upon her hair, it
came upon him as immeasurably beyond all power to endure, and in that
hour he broke down and in the refuge of her arms gave way to the utter
anguish of his heart. And she, all of her soul roused in the passion to
comfort him, whispered hotly, the fierce tenderness of the defending
mother in her voice:
"You shall not suffer! You shall not! I will make it up to you! I will
make it right!"
PART TWO