The Brimming Cup

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

How strange an experience for her altogether, to be able to stand firm against noise and urgent clamor and confusion, and to see, in spite of it, what she was looking at; to see, back of the powerful magnetic personality, the undeveloped and tyrannical soul, the cramped mind without experience or conception of breadth and freedom in the relations between human beings; to be able to hear Vincent cry out on her with that fierce, masterful certainty of himself, that she was acting from cowed and traditional-minded motives and not to believe a word of it, because it was not true; not even to feel the scared throb of alarm at the very idea that it might be true; to have it make no impression on her save pity that Vincent should be imprisoned in a feeling of which possession was so great a part that failure to possess turned all the rest to poison and sickness.

What had happened to her, in truth, that she had this new steadfastness? She had told Vincent he could not understand it. Did she understand it herself? She leaned her chin on her two hands looking deep into the green recesses of the forest. High above her head, a wind swayed the tops of the pines and sang loudly; but down between the great brown columns of their trunks, not a breath stirred. The thick-set, myriad-leaved young maples held all their complicated delicately-edged foliage motionless in perfect calm.

It was very still in the depths of Marise's complicated mind also, although the wind stirred the surface. Yes, she knew what had happened to her. She had seen it completely happen to three other human beings, miraculously, unbelievably, certainly; had seen the babies who could not tell light from dark, heat from cold, emerge by the mere process of healthful living into keenly sensitive beings accurately alive to every minutest variation of the visible world. It must be that like them she had simply learned to tell moral light from dark, heat from cold, by the mere process of healthful living. What happened to the child who at one time could not grasp the multiplication table, and a few years later, if only he were properly fed and cared for, had somehow so wholly changed, although still the same, that he found his way lightly among geometric conceptions, and only a few years after that was probing with expert fingers at some unsolved problem of astronomy? He had grown up, that was all. By calling the miracle a familiar name we veiled the marvel of it. Insensibly to him, with no visible change from one day to the next, he had acquired a totally different conception of the universe, a totally different valuation of everything in life.

That was what had happened to her. She had grown up . . . why should not a woman grow up to other valuations of things as well as her comrade in life?

And it had happened to her as it did to the child, because someone stronger than she had protected her while she was growing . . . not protected from effort, as though one should try to protect the child from learning his lessons. . . . Back there, such ages ago in Italy, in her ignorant . . . how ignorant! . . . and frightened girlhood, she had begged Neale, without knowing what she did, to help her grow up, to help her save what was worth saving in her, to help her untangle from the many-colored confusion of her nature what was best worth keeping. And Neale had done it, had clung steadily to his divination of what was strong in her, in spite of her clamor to him to let it go.

But Vincent had not grown up, was back there still in confusion, holding desperately with all that terrific strength of his to what could not be held, to what was impermanent and passing in its nature. Why should he do that? Neale knew better than that. Then she saw why: it was because Vincent conceived of nothing but emptiness if he let it go, and horribly feared that imaginary emptiness. Out of the incalculable richness of her kingdom she wondered again at his blindness. . . . And made a pitying guess at the reason for it . . . perhaps for him it was not imaginary. Perhaps one of the terms of the bargain he had made with life was that there should be nothing later but emptiness for him. Yes, she saw that. She would have made that bargain, too, if it had not been for Neale. She would have been holding terrified to what was not to be held; with nothing but that between her and the abyss. Who was she to blame Vincent for his blindness?

That, perhaps, had been the meaning of that singular last moment of their talk together, which had frightened her so, with its sudden plunge below the surface, into the real depths, when, changed wholly into someone else, he had run back to her, his hands outstretched, his eyes frightened, his lips trembling . . . perhaps he had felt the abyss there just before him. For an instant there, he had made her think of Paul, made her remember that Vincent himself had, so short a time ago, been a little boy too. She had been so shocked and racked by pity and remorse, that she would have been capable of any folly to comfort him. Perhaps she had seen there for an instant the man Vincent might have been, and had seen that she could have loved that man.

But how instantly it had passed! He had not suffered that instant of true feeling to have space to live, but had burned it up with the return of his pride, his resentment that anyone save himself should try to stand upright, with the return of the devouring desire-for-possession of the man who had always possessed everything he had coveted. There was something sad in being able to see the littleness of life which underlay the power and might of personality in a man like Vincent. He could have been something else.

She wondered why there should slide into her mood, just now, a faint tinge of regret. . . . Why should there be anything there but the bright gladness of thanksgiving for the liberation from the chains which her own nature might have forged about her? She had at last stepped outside the narrow circle of personal desire, and found all the world open to her. And yet there was room in her heart for a shade of wistful wonder if perhaps all this did not mean that she might be sliding from the ranks of those who feel and do, into the ranks of those who only understand.

But one glance at the life that lay before her scattered this hanging mist-cloud . . . good heavens! what feeling and doing lay there before her!