§ 6
In a daze Sophie left the heated banquet-hall. She walked blindly, struggling to get hold of herself, struggling in vain. Every reality, every human stay, seemed to slip from her. A stifled sense of emptiness weighed her down like a dead weight.
“What’s the matter with me?” she cried. “Why do the higher-ups crush me so with nothing? Why is their smiling politeness only a hidden hurt in my heart?”
The flattering voices, the puppet-like smiles, the congratulations that sounded like mockery, were now so distant, so unreal as was the girl with her nose in the air. What cared these people wrapped in furs that the winter wind pierced through her shabby sweater? What cared they if her heart died in her from loneliness?
An aching need for human fellowship pressed upon her, a need for someone who cared for her regardless of failure or success. In a sudden dimming of vision she saw the only real look of sympathy that had ever warmed her soul. Of them all, this man with the understanding eyes had known that what she wanted to say was worth saying before it got into print. If she could only see him—him himself!
If she could only pass the building where he was she would feel calm and serene again! All her bitterness and resentment would dissolve, all her doubts turn to faith. Who knows? Perhaps he had come back already. Her feet seemed winged as they flew without her will, almost without her consciousness, towards the place where she thought he might be.
As she ran up the steps she knew he was there without being told. Even as she sent her name in, the door opened, and he stood there, the living light of the late afternoon glow.
He wasn’t a bit startled by her sudden appearance. He merely greeted her, and led her in silence to his inner study. But there was a quality about the silence that made her feel at ease, as though he had been expecting her.
“I have things to say to you,” she faltered. “Do you have time?”
For answer he pushed closer to the blazing logs an easy chair, and motioned her into it.
There no longer seemed any need to say what she had planned. His mere presence filled her with a healing peace.
“And it was so black for my eyes only a while before!” She spoke aloud her thought and paused, embarrassed.
“Black for your eyes?” he repeated, leaning towards her with an inviting interest.
“You know I was first on the table by the hotel?”
His eyebrows lifted whimsically.
“Tell me about it,” he urged.
“All those higher-ups what didn’t care a pinch of salt for me myself making such a fuss over a little accident of good luck!”
“Accident! You have won your way inch by inch grappling with life.” His calm, compelling look seemed to flood her with strength. “You have what our colleges cannot give, the courage to face yourself, the power to think. And now all your past experiences are so much capital to be utilized. Do you see the turning-point I mean?”
“The turning-point in my life is to know I got a friend. I owe it to the world to do something, to be something, after this miracle of your kindness.” And at his deepening smile, “But you are not kind in a leaning-down sort of kindness. You got none of that what-can-I-do-for-you-my-poor-child-look in you.”
Her effusiveness embarrassed him.
“You make too much out of nothing.”
“Nothing?” Her eyes were misty with emotion. “I was something wild up in the air, and I couldn’t get hold of myself all alone, and you—you made me for a person.”
“I cannot tell you how it affects me that in some way I do not understand I have been the means of bringing release to you. Of course,” he added quickly, “I was only an instrument, not a cause. Just as a spade which digs the ground is not a cause of the fertility of the soil or of the lovely flowers which spring forth. I cannot get away from the poetic, the religious experience which has so unexpectedly overtaken me.”
She listened to him in silent wonder. How different he was from the college people she had met at luncheon that day!
“I can’t put it in words,” she fumbled, “but I owe it to you, this confession. I can’t help it. I used to hate so the educated! ‘Why should they know everything, and me nothing?’ it cried in me. ‘Here I’m dying to learn, to be something, and they holding tight all the learning like misers hiding gold.’”