The Shadow of Life

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

“No, no; it’s merely that I understand my own experience.”

But she had put his feet upon the road, and, turning his eyes from her as he looked, he contemplated its vista.

It was easy enough, after all, to gather into words that retrospect of the train; it was easy to be brief and lucid with such a comprehending listener,—to be very impersonal, too; simply to hold up before her eyes the picture that he saw.

His eyes met hers seldom while he told her all that was essential to her true seeing. It was wonderful, the sense of her secure, strong life that made it possible to tell her all.

The stages of his young, restless, tortured thought were swiftly sketched for an intelligence so quick, and the growing intuition of the capriciousness, the suffering of life. He only hesitated when it came to the reunion with his mother, the change that had crept between them; and her illness, her death; choosing his words with a reticence that bit them the more deeply into the listening mind.

But, in the days that followed the death,—days ghost-like, yet sharp,—he lingered, so that she paused with him in that pause of stillness in his life, that morning in the spring woods when everything had softly, gently shown an abiding strangeness. He told her all about that: about the look of the day, not knowing why he so wanted her to see it, too, but it seemed to explain more than anything else—the pale, high sky, the gray branches, the shining water and the little bird that hopped to drink. He himself looked ghost-like while he spoke—sunken, long, dark, impalpable, in the deep chair, his thin white fingers lightly interlocked, his face showing only the oddity of its strange yet beautiful oval and its shadowy eyes and lips. All whiteness and shadow, he might have been a projection from the thought of the woman, who, before him, leaned her head on her hand, warm, breathing, vivid with color, her steady eyes seeing phantoms unafraid.

After that there wasn’t much left to explain, it seemed—except Alice, that last convulsive effort of life to seize and keep him; and that didn’t take long—made, as it were, a little allegory, with nameless abstractions to symbolize the old drama of the soul entrameled and finally set free again. The experience of the spring woods had really been the decisive one. He came back to that again, at the end of his story. “It’s really, that experience, what in another kind of temperament is called conversion.”

Her eyes had looked away from him at last. “No,” she said, “conversion is something that gives life.”

“No,” he rejoined, “it’s something that lifts one above it.”

The fundamental contest spoke again, and after that they were both silent. He, too, had looked away from her when the story was over, and he knew, from her deep, slow breathing, that the story had meant a great deal to her. It was not a laboring breath, nor broken by pain to sighs; but it seemed, in its steady rhythm, to accept and then to conquer what he had put before her. That he should so hear it, not looking at her, filled the silence with more than words; and, as in the afternoon, he sought the relief of words.