AT THE END OF THE WORLD
“And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.”
She was sitting quietly in the sleeper, writing a letter to a friend. She had got as far as “I feel it my duty to tell you,” when the pencil flew out of her fingers. She had an instantaneous impression, grotesque in its horror, that all the natural laws were being unsettled with a terrible, grinding noise; for the pencil was falling toward the ceiling instead of the floor, and the man in front of her was following it, and even she herself. Then something struck her head and she lost consciousness.
When she came to herself she was lying on a cot in one corner of a large, unfamiliar room. As her gaze wandered slowly from object to object on the whitewashed walls, she concluded, from the combination of railway maps, time-cards, dusty windows filled with geraniums in pots, and a large, rusty Bible chained to a wall-pocket, that she was in a country railroad station; but when she turned her head she saw that it also resembled a hospital. She felt bruised and sore, but was not in much pain, and only an indefinable sensation of great weakness warned her not to move.
Presently some one noticed that her eyes were open and, drawing near, asked her some questions. She answered them with ease, and then in her turn asked a few. The man, obviously a physician, answered briefly but definitely. Then he drew a note-book from his pocket, took down some addresses that she gave him, and moved away softly in the direction of the telegraph window. She lay, looking after him incredulously. So this was death! She had at farthest two more hours on earth. It was part of her creed that one may permit one’s self to be surprised but never startled. She was not startled now, but, decidedly, she was sorry. Her best work was yet undone, and she had not meant to leave earth while there still remained so much to do.
The sounds and sights of the hastily improvised hospital were unpleasant to her, and she turned her head away from them. There was one cot between her and the corner. She recognized the profile of that bandaged head as belonging to the man who had sat across the aisle in the sleeper. She had jotted down a description of him in her note-book, thinking she might use it some day. It ran:
“Sallow skin, soft, brown hair, fine eyes, but an iron mouth with a devil-may-care expression. He has the get-up of a man who is too busy being prosperous to take time to be comfortable. His face, a singular combination of sensitiveness and stolidity, the latter leading. Neither hard enough for this world nor tender enough for the next. An Achilles with a dozen vulnerable spots, he sheds two drops of his own blood for every one he draws in his battles; so, whether he wins or not, they are always losing fields for him.”
She lay, looking at his profile, thinking that never, so long as she lived, could she see the other side of that anguished countenance, and the thought irritated her. This, she reflected, was an instance of the strength of the ruling passion. She had always been thirstily curious about life, even to its least details. Now the opportunities for quenching that thirst were at an end. There was no more for her in this world of that friction of spirit upon spirit which she loved. She was dying in a corner. Between herself and the immensity of eternity hung only that one white face.
Suddenly a thought came into her mind. Why should she not talk to him—while she was waiting?
“Are you badly hurt?” she asked, softly.
He groaned. “I am a dead man.”
“They tell me I am dying, too,” she said. “Why have they put us here in this corner, away from the others?”
“Because neither of us is in great pain, and we are both hopeless cases. They have no time to waste on us.”
“It is very strange to think that this is really the last of it. Are you prepared to die?”
“Prepared? What is prepared?” he answered. “One is never ready to stop living. And there were a great many things I wanted to do yet.”
“Were any of them important?”
An ironic smile twisted the corner of his lips. “Now that you mention it—no. I wanted to make a good deal more money. I was going to turn over two or three pieces of real estate next week that I expected a profit upon. I meant to build a finer house for my wife—a big, new one, with all the modern wrinkles of architecture and furnishing. Then, if I had known she was going to have charge of things so soon, I should have altered one or two investments”——
His pain grew sharper and he groaned. When he was still she spoke again.
“If I had met you yesterday I should have said that your interests in life were very much less fine and spiritual than my own. I wrote things that people praised. They said I was clever, ingenious, witty; but they never said I was an artist. I meant to make them say it. I was going to write a novel next winter that should show”—She stopped, but presently went on, musingly: “It is very odd, but somehow it doesn’t seem as important as it did this morning. Do you care that your house will never be built?”
“No.”
“And I don’t care about my novel. I called my interest in life art, and you called yours business; but neither of them seems to count any more. The question is, What does count?”
“Close your eyes and lie still for five minutes, and note what you find yourself unable to avoid thinking of. That will show you what counts.”
“You have been trying it?”
He made a motion of assent.
“Well,” he asked, after a silence on her part that seemed long, “does it work?”
“Yes,” she said, in a tense way; “it works too well. What did you see?”
Again the ironic smile twisted the visible corner of his mouth. “Shall we exchange confidences—last confessions, and all that? I’d just as soon. Reticence isn’t worth much now. Only—you begin.”
“I saw,” she said, slowly, “my husband’s eyes. I had forgotten how they looked when he found that I really meant to insist on a separation. He could not bear it, for he adored the ground I walked on. It was five years ago. I had no presentable reason for leaving him. He was so horribly good-natured that it used to irritate me. And I didn’t care for the domestic life. It interfered with my work, although he had promised that it should not. I wanted to be free again. He let me have the child. He was very good about the whole business—painfully good, in fact. But it did hurt him cruelly. I have been very much happier since, but I don’t suppose he has.”
“Did he have brown eyes—the big, faithful, dog-like kind?” asked the man.
“How did you know?”
“That good sort often do. The girl I jilted did. We had been engaged almost from our cradles. There was an accident with horses, and she got hurt. She limped a little afterward, and there were scars on her face and neck—not very bad scars, but still they were there. She had been a little beauty before that; but she never at any time thought much about her looks, and it hadn’t occurred to her that I minded. But I did mind. I fretted over it until I fancied that I didn’t love her, after all; but I did. One day I told her so. You know how she looked at me. She asked if the accident made any difference, and I hadn’t the skill to lie about it so that she believed me. She rose at once, as if to put an end to our interview. All she said was, ‘I thought you knew better what love was.’ I can hear how her voice sounded. She was badly cut up; lost her health and all that. And I never could pretend I wasn’t to blame. The girl I married later was faultlessly pretty, but there was nothing in the world to her.”
“We seem to be a nice sort, don’t we?” said the woman, reflectively.
“We are no worse than others. Unselfishness is out of fashion. Everybody takes what he wants nowadays.”
“My husband didn’t.”
“I respect your husband. But you did it. We did the same sort of thing, you and I; only I think you are the worse of the two. It is natural for a man to want a wife who isn’t disfigured.”
“It is natural for a clever woman to want to live unfettered.”
“Perhaps. But I erred through the worser part of my nature, and you through the better. My revolt against unselfishness was physical, and yours intellectual. Therefore you fell farther than I, by as much as the mind is better than the body; don’t you see?”
“That is speciously put, but I doubt its truth.”
Both were silent for a space.
“I have it!” she breathed suddenly, and her voice was stronger; for even in the clutches of death a new insight into the meaning of things had power to stimulate her whole being. “It is this way. Our error was the same. We both betrayed their trust in us. We grieved love. And the reason that we remember now is that love and God are one, and this is the judgment. That is why we see their eyes rebuking us. It comes to us, now that we die. That is all life is for—to learn not to grieve love. Why did I never know it before? Oh, if I had put that in my books!”
“If you had put it in your life it would have been better,” interrupted the man; but she went on, unheeding:
“That must be what they meant when they said my work lacked conviction. It is the heart that takes sides. One man said I was too clever to be interesting. I never understood what he meant before, but I see now. It was that I had mind enough but too little heart. I wanted to become as one of the gods by knowing, and the appointed path is by loving. To be human and to love is to be divine.”
“Oh, wise conclusion!” mocked the man. “What does it profit you to know it—now?”
She was silent, spent with the effort of her eager speech. The maps on the opposite wall whirled before her eyes. She felt herself slipping—slipping. Yet, though she found no words to tell him why, there came to her a sudden, sweet assurance that it profited her much, even at this last hour, to know the thing she had just spoken.
It was a long time before she found strength to ask: “Shall you be here after I am gone?”
“Why?”
“I gave them my husband’s name. I knew he would be glad to come. He lives a hundred miles from here, and it will only take him four hours at the longest. I shall not last that long. If you would tell him”—
“Tell him what?”
“Tell him,” said the woman, slowly, “that I saw; that I am sorry I grieved love and him; that I wish I had been wiser about what life meant; that love is always best.”
“The fact is,” said the man, reluctantly, “I did not mean to stay. I dabbled in medicine a little once, and I know that I can last this way a day or two. But I am in pain now, and it will grow worse. What is the use of staying? They tied an artery for me; it might easily get untied, you know.”
“Aren’t you going to wait until your wife comes?” she asked, wonderingly.
“Better not,” answered the man, briefly. “It would hurt her less this way, and me too. Scenes worry me, and her nerves are delicate.”
“What farces such marriages as yours are!”
“Better a farce than a tragedy. My wife has been happier than your husband. She has been very comfortable, and she will continue to be so, for my estate is reasonably large.”
“Then Arthur will never know that I am sorry, and I want him to. Oh, God! I want him to.”
The man lay, frowning sharply at the ceiling. The ineffectual anguish of her cry had touched him, but his pain was growing worse. At last he spoke.
“Look here. If I will stay and deliver that message for you, will you do something for me?”
“I? What can I do for any one?”
“You are a woman, though not, it seems, a very loving one. You can tell me if there is any forgiveness for the hurt I gave that girl, and if there is, absolve me in love’s name! I cannot bear her eyes.”
“Love forgives everything,” she answered, simply. “Wait until you see Arthur’s face when you tell him I was sorry. That will show you.”
“Say it!” murmured the man, peremptorily. “Let me hear the words, as she might say them.”
She turned upon her side to smile at him. Her voice had grown so faint that it seemed but a disembodied, yearning tenderness that spoke.
“In love’s name, then, and hers, absolvo te”—And the thread of sound dropped into a silence that was to remain unbroken.
The man lay still, clenching his hands and unclenching them. The thrusts of pain had grown very sharp, but he grimly set his teeth. He might ask for morphine; but if he took it “Arthur” might come and go while he lay in stupor, and the message remain forever undelivered. He looked at the clock on the opposite wall. Perhaps he had still three hours to wait. What should he do? That last dart was keenest of them all. What did people do in torture, people who had made promises that they must stay to keep? Surely there was something. Ah, that was it. Of course. They prayed. Then why not he, as well?
His lips moved feverishly.
“Christ, thou who suffered for love’s sake, give me—give me the pluck to hold out three hours more.”