The Thread of Flame

by Basil King

On the floors above there was the same well-chosen abundance of everything, sufficiently toned down by use and time to merit the word shabby. That was the note that struck me first, and surprised me. Vio had never been what is commonly known as a good housekeeper; but she had commanded and been obeyed. What the house betrayed now was a diminution of the power of command. Doubtless money didn't go as far as it used to; and there was a new spirit in the world as to taking orders. I thought again of the garden revisited in autumn. The old house might be said to have fulfilled its long mission, and to be ready to pass away with the age of which it was a type.

To go into my own room and find it empty and swept of every trace of my habitation would have been a stranger experience than it was if every experience that day had not been strange. I looked into the wardrobes; I pulled open the drawers. There was not a garment, not a scrap of paper to indicate that I had ever been alive. Not till I saw this did I realize the completeness with which Vio had buried me.

And not till I saw this did I realize that Vio herself was up against the first big struggle of her life. She had never hitherto faced what might be called a moral situation. Her history had been that of any other well-off girl in a city like Boston, where money and position entitled her to whatever was best in the small realm. American civilization, like that of the Italy of the Middle Ages, being civic and not national, the boundaries of Boston, with its suburbs and seaside resorts, had formed the limits of Vio's horizon. True, she had spent a good deal of time in Europe—but always as a Bostonian. She had made periodical visits to Newport, Bar Harbor, Palm Beach, and White Sulphur Springs—but always as a Bostonian. Once she had traveled as far on the American continent as California—but still as a Bostonian.

Boston sufficed for Vio, seeing that it was big enough to give her variety, and swell enough to permit her to shine with little competition. Competition irked her, for the reason that she despised taking trouble. With the exception of a toilet exact to the last detail of refinement, her life was always at loose ends. She rarely answered letters; she rarely returned calls; she never kept accounts; if she began a book she didn't finish it. Adoring little Bobby during the months of his brief life, she found the necessities of motherhood unbearable. That she was as a rule picturesquely unhappy was due to the fact of having nothing on which to whet her spiritual mettle. Like a motor working while the motor-car stands still, she churned herself into action that got nowhere as a result.

But now for the first time in her life she was face to face with a great, big personal problem. How big and great the problem was I didn't at the time understand. All I could see was that she was meeting her baptism of fire, and that I was the means of the ministration.

Pushing open the door between her room and mine I received again the impression of almost awesome privilege I had got on our return from our honeymoon. I had never been at my ease in this room; it was Vio's sanctuary, her fastness. It was a Soames and Torrance sanctuary and fastness, and to it I had only been admitted, not given its freedom as a right. Possibly the feeling that always came to me on crossing its threshold, that I stepped out of my own domain, betokened the missing strand in the tie that had bound Vio and me together.

It had been a trial to me that she should be so much better off than I. Not only did it leave the less for me to do for her, but it created in her a spirit of detachment against which I chafed in vain. Out of the common fund of our marriage she made large reserves of herself, as she might have made reserves—which she did not—of her income. Our beings were allied, but they were not fused. For fusion she had too much that she prized to give away. In such quantity as I could give she made return to me; but having so much more than I to give, her reserves became conspicuous. Of what she withheld this room was the symbol. It was never my room. My comings and goings there had been made with a kind of reverence, as if the place were a shrine.

The only abiding note of my personality had been my photograph at the head of Vio's bed. There was a photograph there now, but I saw that the frame was different. Mine had been in a silver frame; this was in red-brown leather. If it was still mine...

But it was not mine. It was that of a colonel in an American uniform, wearing British and French decorations. Big, portly, handsome, bluff, with an empty left sleeve, he revealed himself as a hero. He was a hero, while I ... It occurred to me that death was not the only means of giving Vio her freedom, and that I ought to tell her so.

To do that I was making my way down-stairs with the words framing themselves on my lips.