“When did you know?” she asked, and he answered mechanically, “This morning. I went down and saw the crowd under the window. I heard them talking. A newspaper reporter told me. Then I went to the bridge, but there was another crowd there, looking down at the water. So I came back.”
They sat down in one of the seats. Camilla felt both excited and constrained. She was afraid to go on. During the dumb hour she had spent in the store-room, she had felt that life was plainly a ruinous affair, and that she was somehow touched by a horrible wickedness and stained forever. She imagined, shrinking, some disclosure and disgrace. She pictured Henry Champney's amazement and grief. And then it all had been swept from her mind by the thought of Aidee, suffering somewhere alone. But now that she had found him, she found him reserved and quiet, and she seemed to stop on the edge of a gulf or crater, to peer over, to expect some red, rending explosion, but it was all still and dim there; and it stared up at her coldly and quietly.
“I came, because I thought I could help,” she said. “I thought it would help us both.”
“Are you troubled? You'd better let it go. It's the end of that story. I've fought it out now. I'm free of it.”
“What do you mean?”
They stared closely in the dusk into each other's eyes. Then she dropped her head, and wept with her face in her hands.
“It's not your story,” said Aidee.
“Yes, it is! It's mine!”
Then she raised her head, and he saw her wet eyes glisten in the dimness, and she said: “Teach me what it means.” And a dull shock went through him threaded by a sharp pain, a sensation so penetrating as to resemble pain, and desirable enough to be called happiness, and yet not like any pain or happiness in the remembered stretch of his concentrated and brooding life. That life, as he looked back on it, he saw starting from the old farmhouse on the plain, with its fallen fences and dry fields, the tired face of his mother in the house door, the small impish face of “Lolly” by his side. Next followed the big brick schoolhouse in the village, the schoolroom that he disliked, the books that he loved, the smoky chimney of his lamp, the pine table and the room where he studied; from which he would have to go presently down into the street and drag Lolly out of some raging battle with other boys, struggling and cursing, up to their room, where Lolly would turn on him in a moment with queer, twisted, affectionate smile, and clinging arms—“I ain't mad now, Al.” Then he saw the press-room in St. Louis, he saw Lolly imprisoned and then suddenly gone. He saw the mines and the crumbling mountain slopes in Nevada, the sheds, the dump cart, the spot where he had poured out first his long pent-up dreams to a rugged, astonished audience, and where that new passion of speech had come to him, that had seemed to fill the craving void in his heart; the spot where he had met the circuit-riding bishop and T. M. Secor. Then came his early success in Port Argent and the organisation of the Assembly; then the attack on Wood, and the growing sense of futility, in that while many listened and praised, little happened and little came of their listening or approval. “They take me for an actor, and the Assembly for a comedy,” he had thought bitterly, and he had written “The Inner Republic,” and the book that had brought to him Camilla Champney, eager and pureeyed, and asking, “What does it mean? It is my story too!”
What did it mean? Lolly lay dead in the ooze of the Muscadine and Port Argent was come to be a horror. He seemed so plainly to have failed, so drearily was Lolly dead, and all the fire in his own soul dead too, gone out in cinders, and his theory of life cracked like a hollow nutshell. He would go back to the mines, or to the slums and shops, and live again with the sweating hordes, among whom the grim secret of life lay, if anywhere; and when next he preached, he would preach the bitterest fact loudest. No, rather, if life is hopeless let us dig in the earth and say nothing. But Camilla! What of Camilla? And what did she mean? Her story too! He began to speak slowly, but presently grew rapid and eager.