I
SHE was never lonely, she told herself. The solitude of her little old white house, sitting retired from the village street among its lilac trees and syringas did not frighten or depress her. She could spend a whole day of rain there, seeing no one but the grocer's boy, the big gray cat, and occasional stooped hurrying figures out in the wet street and could come down into evening calmly, busied with her enforced or chosen duties and thoughts. A cloud seemed to wrap her round in many folds of seclusion till the common world of hurry and friction and loud or secret loves and hates was dim to her eyes and ears. Street sounds and whistles of trains at the cross-roads were muffled echoes; but the ticking of the tall clock, the throbbing of rain on a tin roof, the infrequent wind banging at a loose window, the cat's creepy tread on the stairs, grew rhythmic and insistent.
Yet she was not lonely. She never stopped to brood, listening long to perilous voices. She denied even to certain pieces of furniture, books, or ornaments, their passive right to conjure up the spectre of her solitude. If a room seemed too vibrant with unseen presences, she would enter it and drive out the quivering mystery with some brisk petty business of sweeping, of shifting a picture, or rearranging a book-shelf. Often she whistled softly about her work, although there were moments when as if by an instinct she would stop short and glance over her shoulder, to see nothing, and after that to be still.
So the day would shift from gray dawn to gray dusk; and she had not allowed herself to think that she might have cause for loneliness, there in the quiet house behind its dripping lilac trees.
Only in the evenings did the clock and the rain become too loud and real. Then, as she sat with a pleasant book or broidery in the yellow lamplit circle of her sitting-room, warm and quaint in its accumulation of color,—old gay reds, greens, blues, tumbled together by generations of fond house-holders, and now subdued into harmony by years and the low light,—she would find herself all at once rigid as an ice-image, yet alert as a coiled serpent; listening, listening,—for what? For a quick step on the flags before the door? For a long jangling peal at the bell? For a voice in the hall, or a sick querulous summons from the downstairs chamber, or the scraping of a chair from above? No, she knew that she had no cause to wait for these things. There was only the rain, the clock, sleek Diogenes purring on the white fox-skin, the lamp wick fretting a little to itself, and once in a while, out in the dark street, the splash and clatter of wheels, the faint wet whisper of feet that always passed her gate.
So, with a self-scorning smile and a drawing of her hand across her eyes, she would take up again the book or needle-work, and stop abruptly that rigid listening for sounds which never came. Long since, on her first solitary night in the old house, she had vowed to herself that she would not be sad, or strange, no matter what tricks her heart and mind might play her. She would not fear memory and anticipation, but would compel them to be her servants, to keep their distance. She had been young then, and had not quite believed in her solitude. Now that she knew it through and through, she was still aware that to look too far back or too far forward would equally undo her. On these rainy nights of withdrawal, her trial-times were still upon her. If she failed now, if one shudder or one tear escaped her, she was lost forever; and the white house would drive her out, into a world where she could no more choose her own way of being alone.
But she was not lonely, she repeated; and to prove it, her mind would indulge in a fantasia of loneliness. The book would slip from her hand, and she, gazing half-hypnotized into shadowy corners, visited all the solitary people over the wide world. It pleased her to imagine homesick officers in stifling Indian bungalows; young men and girls, fresh come to the City, wandering forlorn through the glare of streets, or idling under their meagre lodging-house gas-jets; light-keepers on desolate sand-dunes and rock-ledges, climbing at night twisted iron steps to tend the eternal lamp; night-watchmen pacing deserted yards and mill-corridors; sailors in the dead watch; poets and prophets trying passionately to capture the wild visions which leaped across their darkness; and most of all, many women sitting as she did in warm quaint rooms, near village streets, hearing the clock tick and the rain throb.
It pleased her, to travel so on light unhindered wing. Almost it seemed as if her soul left her body, and fared out to knock against every lonely window and to keep dumb company round every solitary lamp. And she felt that she was one of an endless army, marching straightforwardly and silently out upon their lives, stripped of the disguises that kindred and close friendship invent, and making, in return for the silence of their hearts and the smiling of their lips, only one demand of all that encountered them.
That demand she never shaped, of her own will. But when she had sat a long time, dreaming, and had at length roused herself to make fast doors and windows, had shut the cat in the kitchen, taken her hand-lamp and gone up the broad stairs to bed—then, in the gay chintz-hung security of her own chamber, her throat would fashion involuntarily those words that her heart and lips refused to let themselves speak.
'It is all right enough,' her throat would say for her, as she turned down the counterpane, untied her shoes, and wound her watch. 'I am quite all safe and right. But—no one must ask me—if I am lonely. No one must ever ask me that.'