Gerald, holding back a sound of distress, twisted on his chair, not daring to recall himself to Aurora’s notice either by speaking or touching her.
“I’m plain sorry for myself,” she explained her tears while trying to stop them. “You can’t be sorry, for their own sakes, for the little children who go back to God without knowing anything of this life’s troubles. It’s for myself I’m sorry. I never can bring up those times without the feeling of them coming over me again, and then, as I tell you, I’m sorry for that poor fool in her empty house, and then in the thundering freight-car, and then in the hospital. I see her outside of me just as plain as I would another person. Then, too”–she dried her eyes as if this time for good–“I feel a burning here”–she touched her breast–“like anger. Angry. I feel angry at being robbed, in a way I never seem to get over. To think I might have had him all my life, like millions of other women, and I never even saw him! And he was as real to me all those months before!... I don’t see how I could have loved him more than I did. I’m hungry for him 246 sometimes, just as I might be for food. And then I’m angry and rebellious. But I couldn’t tell you against who. It isn’t God, certainly. He’s our best friend, all we’ve got to rely on. And He’s been mighty good to me. There in Denver, when I hadn’t a friend or a penny, He raised up friends for me and gave me the most wonderful luck.
“I stayed right there in Denver till less than a year ago. I guess you’ve heard me speak of the Judge. The doctor in the hospital where they carried me was his son; that’s how it all came about–friends, good luck, money, everything. When I say I found friends, let me mention that I found enemies, too, the meanest, the bitterest! I–but there”–she interrupted herself as, on the very verge of further confidences, a change of mind was effected in her by sudden weariness or by a deterrent thought, or both–“I guess I’ve talked enough about myself for one evening. I didn’t have a soft time of it there in Denver,” she summed up the remainder of her story, “but I’d got back to being my old self. You’d never have known what I’d been through. I was just about as you’ve known me here. Funny, isn’t it,”–Aurora seemed almost ashamed, apologetic,–“how the disposition you’re born with hangs on?”
“Golden disposition,” Gerald commented soothingly. Timid about looking directly at her just yet, he looked instead at the portrait, whereon lay the shadow of the events just related.
After a little period of thought in silence Aurora said, with the shamefaced air she took when venturing to talk of high things:
“I heard a sermon once on the text, ‘Mary kept all these things in her heart.’ The minister said that it wasn’t only Mary who did this, but ordinary women, so often. And 247I know from myself how true it is. You see a woman all dressed up at a party, laughing with the others, dancing perhaps, and she’ll be saying inside of herself, ‘If baby had lived, he’d have been three years old.’ Or thirteen, or thirty. I’ve no doubt it goes on as long as she lives. And she can see him before her just as plain, as he would have been.... My baby would have been five last October.”
Gerald remembered how sweet he had always thought it of her to wish to stop and fondle little children, often wee beggars, stuffing little grimy fists with pennies, not avoiding to touch soiled little cheeks with her clean gloves. He had attributed this propensity to a simple womanly talent for motherliness.
“I’ve got this to be thankful for,” she came out again from silence, farther down along the line of her meditations, “that he did live for a few hours. I’ve got a son, just as much as if he’d grown to be a man.” She was dry-eyed, almost joyful in this.
“Yes, yes,” hurried Gerald, consolingly; “that’s what you must always think of–that and not the other things. You must lay hold of that thought and feel rich in it. But hear me, dear friend–me, trying to suggest ways to you of being brave and cheerful! You, who do from god-given temperament what I can only see as a right aim of aspiration, by light of a certain philosophy arrived at in my own way, through my own experiences. Philosophy is not the right word, either; the feeling I have is mainly esthetic. In order not to be too unhappy in this world, in order to have a little serenity, we must forgive everything, Aurora; that is what I have clearly seen. It’s the only way. We must forgive events just as we forgive persons. And we 248must love life. I who so much of the time hate life, yet know better. We must love it as we must love our enemies. The wherefore is a mystery, but peace of heart and beauty of life are involved with doing it. We mustn’t mind being wounded, crucified. We mustn’t mind anything, Aurora! We mustn’t be angry, the gestures of it are ugly. I, who am always being angry, who sometimes groan aloud my thoughts are so blasphemously bitter, I am telling you what I at bottom know. The game is so unfair, it calls for magnanimity on our part to stake handsomely and lose patiently. Patience, that’s it! We must be patient–patient as a cab-horse! Pride and dignity demand that we be patient, absolutely. For the sake of certain beautiful things and sweet people in the world, we must give it a good name. But hear me! Hear me giving counsels to you–you who without formulating these ideas act on them, whilst with me they are things which I see as fit to be done but can never hope to do.”
“You, too, Gerald, poor boy,” was Aurora’s simple reply–“you, too, have had lots to try you.”