As I look back now, every word, every object, every outline is clear to me from the first instant of our meeting. It is as though with the sudden stirring of my deeper nature every little sense awoke. There are colors, the oranges in a straw basket, the blue of a porter on the dock, the gray whirl of her scarf against the blue Breton cape on the upper deck as we passed out of France, the red luxury of the sunset that swam over our heads that last day at sea,—all these tints and a dozen others are associated in the minutest visualization along with the scent of tarred ropes about us at Bordeaux, the clean brine of the sea which held us ten unforgettable days, the sound of the forecastle bell tolling off the hours, and the light, slipping step which I would know to-day from a thousand others.
It was in the wet dawn of late November that I first saw her, and the memory starts up before my eyes, even to the most irrelevant details. I can see again the moist dock, the gray flanks of the ocean liner shutting out the sky, the masts dissolving in the morning mist and the white splotches of faces flowering against the rails. The salt, tarred smell of the sea is still in my nostrils and I am back in the crowd of leave-takers, saying the last broken farewells; an old couple clinging to their son, a sailor with his sweetheart. Boatswains are piping, cabmen swearing, loiterers gazing; a smirched face looms as a little wharf rat bumps against me, and—I look up and see her again—as I saw her for the first time.
She stood heavily veiled, her arm about an old servant in a Breton cap, who was weeping her heart out,—a very old woman, wrinkled and stooped, whose lips trembled, whose eyes never ceased their staring intentness. It was not simply grief at parting, often hysterical in servants, but something inexpressibly deeper; not so much a protest as a final resignation to a weight of sorrow beyond old age’s power to bear.
At this moment, her young mistress lifted her veil and, as she bent forward to kiss each shriveled cheek, I saw her face out of the mist and the blurred crowd—as I see it now—and no second glance could ever add to that instant conviction. The whistle blew above us. The old woman cried something hysterically and caught the young hand to her lips. I heard her murmur a blessing, I saw her try to disengage her hand, and then as, helplessly, she sought for assistance, her look met mine. I know that my eyes were dim. She saw and trusted them. I stepped forward, bare-headed.
“Permettez—Madame?”
“Merci, Monsieur—vous êtes bien bon.”
The veil dropped again. I put my hand under the old woman’s arm and drew her slowly away. When I returned, her young mistress was already on the boat.
I do not know that I can describe her, for when I see her face I see only the eyes, dark, round and big, without guile or artifice, eyes that were open and luminous, and yet eyes that were stricken with a suffering too deep to be cast off in tears. It was not what I saw but what I felt,—the inner quality, the sweet dignity, the gentleness and the high aristocracy. Women, before, had been to me types. In her, instantly, I discerned a being set apart, whose choice of action could never proceed from feminine acceptance of the hour’s fashion in dress, thought and standards. She was what she was, and would go forward always along her clear path, undisturbed by the troubling blast of the popular wind. I knew that for the first time I had looked into eyes which no ugliness, no meanness, no unworthy thought could ever trouble, and that I was of the privileged of the world to have seen her. One look, a look that might pass a thousand times—one look in the mists of the dawn, in the scrambling, shoddy crowd—and yet, for that one instant’s fugitive understanding, all that I had been and was became as nothing, and my destiny—for better or worse, for ill and pain and sorrow, emptiness and loneliness—was irrevocably determined. Yes, mystery of the good and evil that is in us! From the pain of evil, we struggle back to sanity and clean air and memory covers over the scar, but from the emptiness and the ache that, in the mystery of good, love may lay upon our lives, what escape or what answer is there?
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