Where the Path Breaks

by C. N. Williamson; A. M. Williamson

Not that he had deliberately stood aside and left the girl unprotected. When in the German hospital he had drifted back to a knowledge of realities past and present, he had seen almost at once that, even if the news were unwelcome, he must not let his wife live in ignorance that she was still bound. It was only after hearing from Severne of Barbara’s marriage to d’Arcy, that he had said, “John Denin is dead and buried, and his ghost laid.” He had meant to make the supreme sacrifice for Barbara’s good, and there had been no shadow of doubt in his mind that he was right in making it. Now he asked himself if even then it might not have been best to let the truth come out. No one was to blame for the mistake in a dead man’s identity, nor for what had happened afterwards through that mistake. Barbara would have had a hard choice before her; yet she might, if she possessed strength and courage enough, have chosen from the two men who had come into her life, the one she loved. The whole world would have rung with the tragic story, but at the end Barbara might have lived down the tragedy. If he had been her choice, he would have helped her to live it down, by the gift of such love as no man had ever given to a woman.

As it was, he had dared to play the potter. He had taken the clay of Barbara’s destiny into his own awkward hands, to shape it as he thought best, and he had let the vase break in the furnace. He could never make it what, but for his meddling, it might have been; yet he must piece the delicate fragments together if he could, not caring for—not thinking of—his bleeding hands.

This, then, was the debt Denin owed to Barbara. And to pay it he saw that he must begin by remaking himself, before he could give her anything worth the having. He must become a thing of value, in order to be of value to her. Those faint whispers and snatches of music from the other side of the hidden river, which he had jumbled into “The War Wedding,” confusedly, hurriedly, fearing to lose their echoes, he must now carefully gather up again and sort out with method. He must dip into his brain where half-remembered thoughts seethed in solution. He must see the rainbow in every tear drop, and crystallize it into a jewel for Barbara. Thus developing himself, he might have some worthy offering for her at last.

He could not write that day, nor the next, for it seemed that the only things worth saying were the things which would not let themselves be said, things which swept through the background of his mind like a flight of chiming bells in the night, elusive as waiting souls for which no bodies have yet been made. But though he could not write, he called thoughts, which he had once seen and let go, to come again to him. He sent himself back along the road he had traveled beyond the milestones. He searched by the wayside for beautiful memories he had dropped there, and some of them he found grown up tall and white as lilies in moonlight. Whatever he found was for Barbara.

On the third night after the revelation, he had gathered something to give her, and strength enough to feel sure he would not put into his letter the question which must not be asked: “What was the reason you couldn’t tell your husband that you loved him?”

Denin wrote with a typewriter, as he had written before, on blank paper with no address, because it was better for Barbara to come in touch with him only through his publishers. In that way, she would be spared any sense of constraint she might have to feel in knowing that he lived among her neighbors of long ago. She had given him her name frankly, and she might fear some inadvertent mention of it to people she had met as a child. If he were to be of real use to her, he thought, he must be known only as a distant Voice, an Ear, a Sympathy, almost impersonal outside his letters.

Denin wrote to her that he was sure, entirely sure, the man she loved was “not too far away to know.”

“You will only have to send him a thought, and it must reach him behind that very thin wall we call death. The way I imagine it, such a message goes where it’s directed, just as when we call ‘Central’ through the telephone. They, whom we speak of as dead, have their own work to do and their own life to live, so perhaps they don’t think of us every moment. But surely we’ve only to call. They may not see us in the flesh, any more than we can see them in the spirit; but it came to me when I was very close to the other side, that our bodies don’t enclose us quite. We’re half-open jewel-boxes, that let out flashes of emerald, or sapphire, or diamond light, according to the strength of our vibrations—or aspirations, if you like (I begin to realize that these are much the same thing!). It is the flashes of light which are seen and recognized by the ones who have passed farther on. The lights are our images, as well as messages for them. But when I say ‘farther on,’ it’s only a figure of speech. They are not far off.

“We can see the rain. We can’t see the wind, even when it is so close we can lean on it like a wall. And so we can lean on their love, strong as a wall, stronger than anything visible to us, because love is the strongest thing there is. You see, life wouldn’t be worth living for any of us—it wouldn’t have been worth creating—if the dead really died. The glory of the deathless dead lights our way, with the bright deeds they have done, till we come where we can see for ourselves that there’s no dividing line. ‘The milestones end.’ That’s all. They’re not needed any more.

“I heard other people talking of these things when I went where the milestones end. Since then I’ve wondered why I didn’t know the things before. Listen to your hopes, and you can know without waiting; because hope is the voice of instinctive knowledge, and soul-instinct is what we were born knowing. Believe this, and you won’t have to stumble slowly up, as I did, with a hod full of old precepts on my back. You can plane down from the sky with your arms full of stars, and live with them, as I live with the flowers in my garden.