In sudden satisfaction over his secret triumph the old man was very nearly overcome by his own chuckling.
Old? Yes, he felt very old to-night. Perhaps he hadn’t many years before him. Maybe it was only a matter of months. Then he would die. What was it like to die? Just a passing out probably, into something vast and dark. Oblivion! That was it. Why wasn’t that the ideal end? Oblivion, where you were nothing and had no mind and no memory and no books, where you simply did not exist. Just nothingness and eternal peace. Aratu, that kingdom where reigned mere oblivion. He wasn’t looking forward to Heaven and harps. (Imagine Hattie strumming a harp!) He was filled with a sense of great completeness, of having done everything there was to do, of having known all of life that it was possible for one man to know. Sin? What was sin? He didn’t regret anything he had done. He had no remorse, no regrets. On the contrary he was glad of all the things he had done which people called sin. It gave him a satisfactory feeling of completeness. Now when he was so old, he needn’t wish he had done this or done that. He had. To be sure, he hadn’t murdered any one! He hadn’t been guilty of theft. It was very satisfactory ... that feeling of completeness.
Nothing remained. Death.... Deadness.... Why he was dead already. Death must be like this room, blank, dark, negative, neither one thing nor the other. He had been dead for weeks, for months, for years; and here he was walled up in a tomb of books. “La Pucelle” (a rare edition). What would become of it? Like as not Hattie would burn it, never knowing its value. Think how she would suffer if ever she discovered she had burned up a great pile of banknotes! Candide, The Critique of Pure Reason, Spinoza, Montaigne, Darwin, Huxley. (What a row they’d caused! How well he remembered the chatter.) Plato. And there was Verlaine and George Sand and all of Thackeray. Colonel Newcome and Rebecca Sharp with her pointed nose and green eyes. What an amusing creature she was! Amelia Sedley, that tiresome, uninteresting, virtuous bore! And Charles Honeyman. (Ah! He knew things they didn’t dream of in this town!) And there in the corner by the old desk, Emma Bovary tearing voluptuously at her bodice.
But they were not all ghosts of books. There were ghosts too of reality, ghosts born of memories, which came dimly out of the past, out of a youth that, dried now at its source, had been hot-blooded and romantic and restless; such ghosts as one called Celeste (in a poke bonnet with a camelia pinned just above the brim) who seemed forever peeping round the corner of a staircase as she had once peeped, in a glowing reality round the corner of a staircase in the Rue de Clichy. Nina who was more alive now than she had ever been.... And they thought him a failure!
Yes, they were amusing ghosts. He had lived with them so many years. Lonely? How was it possible to be lonely among such fascinating companions? He had lived with them too long. He knew them too well, inside and out. They kept him company in this tomb of books. He seldom left it. Once a week, perhaps, to walk around the block; and then the children ran from him as if they saw the Devil himself.
Grandpa Tolliver began to rock more gently now. Yes, he’d been wicked enough. He’d known everything there was to know and didn’t regret it. They shut him up in this room and didn’t address him for days at a time, but he had Emma Bovary and Becky Sharp to amuse him; and Celeste who belonged to him alone. Grandpa Barr didn’t even have them. His children had left him—all but his daughter Hattie—to go to Iowa, to Oregon, to Wyoming, always toward the open country. Your friends might die and your children might go away, but your memories couldn’t desert you, nor such friends as Emma and Becky.
Outside it began presently to rain, at first slowly with isolate, hesitating drops, and then more and more steadily until at last the whole parched earth drank up the autumn downpour.
2
IN the sound of rain falling through soft darkness there is a healing quality of peace. Its persistence—the very effortless unswerving rhythm of the downpour—have the power of engulfing the spirit in a kind of sensuous oblivion. Even upon one of so violent and unreflective a nature as Ellen Tolliver, one so young, so impatient and so moody, the sound of the autumn rain falling on the roof and in the parched garden had its effect. It created a music of its own, delicate yet primitive, abundant of the richness of earth and air, so that presently in a room a dozen feet from her grandfather, Ellen stopped sobbing and buried her face in the pillow of her great oak bed, soothed, peaceful; and presently in the darkness of her room she lay at last silent and still, her dark hair tossed and disheveled against the white of the pillowcase. She lay thus in a solitude of her own, separated only by the thinness of a single wall from the solitude in which her grandfather sat enveloped. If the sound of her sobbing had been audible, there was another wall that would have stopped it ... the wall of warm autumn rain that beat upon the earth and shut her away from all the world.
She knew no reason for this outburst of weeping. If there had been a reason she would not have locked herself in her room to weep until she had no more tears. She could not say, “I weep because some one has been unkind to me,” or “I weep because I have suffered a sudden disappointment.” She wept because she could not help herself; because she had been overcome by a mood that was at once melancholy and heroic, sad yet luxuriously sensuous. After a fashion, her weeping gave her pleasure. Now that the sound of the rain had quieted her, she lay bathing her soul in the darkness. Somehow it protected her. Here in a locked room where no splinter of light penetrated, she was for a little time completely herself. That was the great thing.... She was herself.... There was no one about her.... Sometimes this same triumphant aloofness came to her from music.... It too was able to set her apart where she was forced to share nothing of herself with any one. In the darkness people couldn’t pry their way into your soul. All this she understood but vaguely, with the understanding of a sensitive girl who has not learned to search her own soul. And this understanding she kept to herself. None knew of it. The face she showed to the world betrayed nothing of loneliness, of wild and turbulent moods, of fierce exasperation. To the world she was a girl very like other girls, rather more hasty and bad-tempered perhaps, but not vastly different—a girl driven alone by a wild vague impulse hidden far back in the harassed regions of her impatient soul. It is one of the tragedies of youth that it feels and suffers without understanding.