The Brimming Cup

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

This was the memory of the time when she had played it, almost a year ago, and had thought how intimacy and familiarity with music but deepened and enriched and strengthened its hold on you. It was only the lower pleasures of which one grew tired,—had enough. The others grew with your growing capacity to hold them. She remembered how that day she had recalled the Wordsworth sonnet, "A beauteous evening, calm and free," and had thought that music took you in to worship quite simply and naturally at the Temple's inner shrine, that you adored none the less although you were at home there and not breathless with adoration like the nun: because it was a whole world given to you, not a mere pang of joy, because you could live and move and be blessedly and securely at home there.

She finished the last note of the Largo and sat silent. She was thinking that her marriage was like that, too.

Presently she got up, took out the old portfolio of photographs, and pinned upon the wall over the piano the view taken from Rocca di Papa.

VII
February 24.

Marise had been drilling the chorus in the Town Hall of Ashley after the men's working-hours, and now in the dimming light of the early evening was going home on snow-shoes, over the hill-path. She liked to use snow-shoes and occasionally said that she could walk more easily and more lightly on them than on bare ground. She trod over the tops of the deep drifts with an accentuation of her usual strong free step.

The snow fell thickly and steadily, a cold, finely-spun, straight-hung curtain, veiling all the muffled sleeping valley. There was an inconceivable silence about her as she drew her snow-shoes over the velvet-like masses of the snow. But within her were ringing echoes of the rhythms and cadences of the afternoon's struggle, imperfectly sung most of them, haltingly, or dully, or feebly, or with a loud misunderstanding of the phrase. At the recollection of these failures, she clenched her hands hard inside her fur gloves with an indomitable resolution to draw something better from her singers the next time.

But mingled with them was a moment of splendor. It was when the men had tried over the passage she had explained to them the week before. She had not known then, she did not know now, how clearly or definitely she had reached them with her summary of the situation of the drama: the desperate straits of the Israelites after the three-year drought, the trial by fire and water before the scorning aristocracy, Elijah stark and alone against all the priesthood of Baal, the extremity of despair of the people . . . and then the coming of the longed-for rain that loosened the terrible tension and released their hearts in the great groaning cry of thanksgiving. She had wondered how clearly or definitely she had reached their understanding, but she knew that she had reached their hearts, when suddenly she had heard all those men's voices pealing out, pure and strong and solemn and free, as she had dreamed that phrase could be sung.

The piercing sweetness of the pleasure this had brought to her came over her again in a wave. She halted on the crest of the hill, and for a moment in place of the purples and blues of the late snowy afternoon there hung before her eyes the powerful, roughly clad bodies of those vigorous men, their weather-beaten faces, their granite impassivity, under which her eye had caught the triumph of the moment, warming them as it did her, with the purest of joys this side of heaven, the consciousness of having made music worthily. The whole valley seemed to be filled to its brim with that shout of exultation. It had taken all of her patience, and will-power, and knowledge of her art and of these people to achieve that moment. But it had lifted her high, high above the smallness of life, up to a rich realm of security in joy.

The snow fell more and more thickly, covering her as she stood with a fine, soft mantle of white. She had heard the men that afternoon saying they had seen signs of the winter break-up, and she wondered at it now, looking about the frozen, buried, beautiful valley and up to the frozen towering mountains, breathing in the cold air, as pure as the ether itself. It seemed to her that spring was as remote and unreal and impossible an imagination of the heart as a child's fairy-tale.