Where the Atlantic meets the land

by H. Caldwell Lipsett

To-night he was not quite in his usual mood. Perhaps the quarrel had been a little more real than usual, and had jarred upon his nerves. The subtle seduction of the moonlight moved him. He felt a void in his life, a vague craving for sympathy, for something which he had never known. After a time he identified the feeling as one which had occurred periodically to him before. It was a yearning for one sip of the wine of life before it was too late, a sense of weariness, of discouragement at the thought that he had never known that joy which is every man's birthright once in his lifetime, the joy of knowing the full meaning of a woman's love.

Now he remembered the incident that had started the train of thought. He had been making a move, and his eyes fell upon his hand, and he had recognized with a strange outwardness for the first time that it was the hand of an old man, the fingers bent and gnarled, the nails dull, the muscles corrugated, and the veins dried up and withered. If he was ever to know more about women than he knew now, it behoved him to act quickly ere his manhood had quite died within him.

Once or twice before he had awakened to the same fact, but never with such urgency as now. Even still he was the wreck of a fine man, and there had been a time when he might easily have found favor with women, but he had let his chances slip. A bookworm and a dreamer, he had let his youth slide by before he knew that it was gone. His manhood he had spent beneath the rule of his elder brother. Once he had asserted his right to an individual soul, and fallen in love with a woman, and she was ready to reciprocate his love. But when he went and t told his brother, the elder replied: 'You can marry if you like, but as sure as you do, out you go out of my house. There's not enough on the farm to keep more than the three of us. I've never married, and I don't see why you should.'

For the moment his manhood rose in arms, and he determined to go out into the world and make a place for himself; but he put it off and put it off, and his brother was twenty years older than himself, and it seemed a pity to lose his chance of the farm, so the time never came, and he grew old waiting for his brother's death, and the woman that he loved grew old too.

At last his brother died, and he went to her and asked her to marry him, but she said: 'I loved you well once, and would have stood by your side if you had had the heart to make a fight for me. I've waited for you all these years, but now it's too late. I'm too old to change,' and she died also, and they were never married.

After her death he was numbed for a time, for he had so little that the loss of even the placid affection of their later years made a great gap in his life. Then the farm began to go wrong; he had not the practical head to manage it as his brother had managed it; and though he worked as hard as ever, what had formerly sufficed to keep the three in comfort could now barely support the remaining two. In truth, weakness of character had been his bane all his life, and would be to the end. He had not the strength to carry any purpose to its appointed goal. He was strong neither for good nor for evil. He was cursed with the curse of Reuben, 'Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel.' But he knew that he was weak, and it was very pitiful.

To-night, after shutting up the house, he went to his bed; and as he lay awake there through the watches of the night, his desolation came home to him and ate into his heart, and he pitied himself exceedingly.

About three o'clock, the darkest part of the night, he rose and wandered restlessly out into the garden, and sat alone there with the 'night of the large few stars, the mad naked summer night,' till its fascination entered into his marrow and stirred his placid soul with a strange disturbance.

As he sat there in the darkness, suddenly there was a movement in the hedgerows and all the trees around him, and a twittering burst forth on every side; it was the birds rousing themselves from their night's slumber. For five minutes the matin song lasted, and then as suddenly ceased, and a great stillness reigned over the world, waiting for the birth of another day. Five minutes later the first ray of dawn tinged the eastern horizon, and the birds burst into song a second time to hail the new-born day.

Often before he had noticed that sudden outburst and sudden hush before the dawn, and vaguely wondered what it meant. But the sound of cocks crowing and the wakened life of a farmyard came to his ears, and reminded him of the thread of his daily duties that had to be taken up.