CHAPTER XIX
INTO THE DARK
She was with him as he went then into the dark. She did not fail him in anything: the hand in his, the little strokes of genius in holding his mind, and when they went into the deeps where words were not fitted for utterance she did not fail him in those other things. He knew that as she clung to him with loving arms, so her spirit reached out to him in the demand that it be permitted to sustain.
Through the day and through the night she was with him now. There was no time when he could not reach out to find her, no bad dream from which he could not awaken to put his hand upon her and know that she was there. And when, time after time, bitterness rose up to submerge his soul, he could always finally shake it off by thanking God for Ernestine.
For a time the pain in his eyes served as a kindly antidote. The light was going out with so intense a suffering as to mitigate the suffering in the consciousness of its going. It was the pain in his temples helped him hold off the pain of giving up his work. It was not a thing conquered; he knew that the deeper pain was waiting for him out there in the darkness when the pain of transition should have ceased, leaving only a blank, a darkness, no other thing to engage for him any part of his mind. There was blessedness in the temporary alleviation brought by the pain that was physical. There were many things for him to meet out there. They were willing to wait. Now his fighting powers were so well engaged as to take something from the reality of a future battlefield.
In many ways it was not as he would have imagined it had he known of such a thing. He would have thought of it as one long mood of despair, inflamed at times by the passion of rebellion. There were, in truth, many moods. In hours when he was quiet they spoke of the things they had seen and loved, of Italy and the Alps they spoke often, struggling for the words to paint a picture. Sometimes she read a little to him—there would be much of that now. Through it all, they seized upon anything which would sustain each other. Once when he saw her faltering he told her that he thought after awhile he would write a book. He did not call it a text-book; did not speak of it as the kind of work to which a man sometimes turns when his creative work is done. He had always thought that when he was sixty or seventy he might write a few books. He would write them now at forty.
And when there came times of its being utterly unbearable, they were either silent or trivial.
Bitter questionings filled Ernestine's heart in those days. How was she going to watch him suffer and not hate a universe permitting his sufferings? How care for a world of beauty he could not see? How watch his heart break for the work taken from him and keep her belief in an order of things under which that was enacted? How love a world that had turned upon him like that? That was what he asked her to do. It seemed to her, now, impossible.
With him, as the bearing of the physical pain grew mechanical and the other things grew nearer, the worst of it was wondering what he should do with the days that were ahead. His spirit would not go with his sight. His desire to do was not to be crushed with his ability for doing. What then of the empty days to come? How smother the passion for his work? And if he did smother it, what remained? While he lived, how deafen himself to the call of life? Through what channel could he hope to work out the things that were in him? And how remain himself if constantly denying to himself the things which were his? It was that tormented him more than the relinquishing of the specific thing he had believed would crown the work of his life. His fight now would be a fight for clinging to that in him which was fundamental. But with what weapon should he fight?
Many times he failed to bear it in conformity with his ideal of bearing it. There were hours of not bearing it at all; hours of cursing his fate and damning the world. Then it was her touch upon his hand, her tear upon his cheek, her broken word which could bring him again into the sphere of what he desired to be. His desire to help her in bearing it, his thankfulness in having her,—those the factors in his control.