The Torch Bearer

by Reina Melcher Marquis

She had always written with a singular ease, and it seemed strange to sit before her tempting pages and write not a word. But on the first morning, she felt no alarm. After all, it was but natural that she should have to spend some time in coaxing it out to the light—that talent of hers so long confined. It was but natural that it should not have courage to soar and sing at once. But on the second day her paper was as empty as before; it lay upon her table like a useless snare for some wild and lovely bird that no longer had vitality enough to flutter within reach of it.

And now, sitting at her writing-table in vain for several days, fear seized upon Sheila, fear that she would not name or analyze.

Well, as one grew older, one often wrote differently, with more difficulty. She had heard that, she reflected eagerly. She had heard that deliberate, intellectual effort had often to succeed the flushed, panting rush of youthful inspiration. This was probably the case with her now; of course it was, indeed. She must undertake the effort; she must accept and master a new method. Then all would be right with her.

And so she went about deliberately translating the gold of her idea into those dreamed-of words which were so fitly to interpret it. She went about it with an energy, a will to accomplish the feat, that should have been sufficient to achieve miracles. If there had been, hitherto, a strain of weakness in her, she was now all strength. And by that sheer strength—of purpose, of determination—she sought to realize her dream of perfection.

Now the white sheets on her table were no longer barren. Slow, painful writing covered them. She wrote and discarded, and wrote again. Day after day, she sat there at her table, engaged, as she came at last to perceive, in her final, her ultimate tragedy.

For when the thing that she had visioned as a little golden masterpiece was finished, she knew it for what it was. There was no felicity of phrase, no cunning art of construction, no conviction of truth, no throb of vitality within it. As surely as a still-born child had it been brought into the world dead. And it was incredibly ugly and deformed. There was not a gleam of gold upon it!

She recognized all this with unsparing clearness. Not one illusion was left to her, not one merciful deception; with a single glance at her completed story, illusions and self-deceptions were swept from her—and hope was swept from her with them.

Her gift was dead—or, at the least, it was forever ineffectual. There would be no more mad, glad flights; no more songs high in the sunlit heavens. The flights and songs and ecstasies were over for all time. Not for an instant did she cheat herself with sophistries of an eventual recovery. She knew that if it lived at all—this gift of hers which had once been more alive than she herself—it would but live within her as the pain of a thing balked and futile, restless still perhaps, but not restless with any power. Always—always now—the too exquisite note of a violin, the sight of blossoming trees at dawn, of silver, inscrutable stars at night would waken in her the hunger, the grief, of the unsatisfied. There would never be a time when she could look on poignant beauty with the peace of one who is herself a part of all beauty—having created something beautiful. For the ultimate calamity had befallen her; her gift had been killed, or hopelessly maimed.

Under the tremendous impact of this blow she was curiously unresentful. She wondered a little how it had happened. She wondered if she had suffered too much, suffered to the point of numbness—a thing fatal to one whose work had been fine largely through her capacity for emotion; or if the habit, the superstition, of her vow, persisting within her after the vow itself had been cast aside, had thus finally broken the wings of her talent. She wondered if her marriage alone, or her motherhood, or her shamed and hopeless love for Peter had been most disastrous to her. She had been conscious of them all as she had sat there trying to write. Eric's face and Peter's had drifted between her and her pages. Ted's cold declaration that talent was a bad thing for a married woman, and her own impassioned promise to God to renounce her work for Eric's life had both drowned for her the voice of her gift. It was as if all these factors in her destiny had had too much of her; it was as if they had claimed her too entirely and tenaciously ever to release her. Even in silence and solitude and a belated sense of liberty and rights, she could not be free of them. She could not decide whether one or all of them had been responsible for this final frustration. She wondered—and then she ceased to wonder at all. She knew that the frustration had been accomplished—and that she was suddenly too weary even to cry out.

It was at the moment when she realized all this fully, when she sat staring at the deformed and lifeless thing which she had brought forth, that a letter from Charlotte was handed to her. It came from New York—where was Peter. Sheila opened it with shaking fingers—and found what she desired: