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Page 4
"It is the same thing with us too. The same spirit-substance underlies
both worlds and there is no separation in space, only in view-point.
Life goes on--it's just transfigured. It's as if a bandage should be
lifted from our eyes and we should suddenly see things in whose presence
we had been always."
The rushing, eager voice stopped. He bent and laid his hand on the older
man's and stared at his face, half hidden now in the shadows of the
lowering fire. There was no response. The heavy head did not lift and
the attitude was unstirred, hopeless. As if struck by a blow he sprang
erect and his fingers shut hard. He spoke as if to himself, brokenly.
"He does not believe--a single word--I say. I can't help him--I
_can't_ help him."
Suddenly the clinched fists flung out as if of a power not their own,
and his voice rang across the room.
"God!" The word shot from him as if a thunderbolt fell with it. "God!
Lift the bandage!"
A log fell with a crash into the fire; great battling shadows blurred
all the air; he was gone.
The man, startled, drew up his bent shoulders, and pushed back a lock of
gray hair and stared about, shaking, bewildered. The ringing voice, the
word that had flashed as if out of a larger atmosphere--the place was
yet full of these, and the shock of it added a keenness to his misery.
His figure swung sideways; he fell on the cushions of the sofa and his
arms stretched across them, his gray head lying heedless; sobs that tore
roots came painfully; it was the last depth. Out of it, without his
volition, he spoke aloud.
"God, God, God!" his voice said, not prayerfully, but repeating the
sound that had shocked his torture. The word wailed, mocked, reproached,
defied--and yet it was a prayer. Out of a soul in mortal stress that
word comes sometimes driven by a force of the spirit like the force of
the lungs fighting for breath--and it is a prayer.
"God, God, God!" the broken voice repeated, and sobs cut the words. And
again. Over and over, and again the sobbing broke it.
As suddenly as if a knife had stopped the life inside the body, all
sound stopped. A movement shook the man as he lay face down, arms
stretched. Then for a minute, two minutes, he was quiet, with a quiet
that meant muscles stretched, nerves alert. Slowly, slowly the tightened
muscles of the arms pushed the shoulders backward and upward; the head
lifted; the face turned outward, and if an observer had been there he
might have seen by the glow of the firelight that the features wet,
distorted, wore, more than all at this moment, a look of amazement.
Slowly, slowly, moving as if afraid to disturb something--a dream--a
presence--the man sat erect as he had been sitting before, only that the
rigidity was in some way gone. He sat alert, his eyes wide, filled with
astonishment, gazing before him eagerly--a look different from the dull
stare of an hour ago by the difference between hope and despair. His
hands caught at the stuff of the divan on either side and clutched it.
All the time the look of his face changed; all the time, not at once,
but by fast, startling degrees, the gray misery which had bound eyes and
mouth and brow in iron dropped as if a cover were being torn off and a
light set free. Amazement, doubting, incredulous came first, and with
that eagerness, trembling and afraid. And then hope--and then the fear
to hope. And hunger. He bent forward, his eyes peered into the quiet
emptiness, his fingers gripped the cloth as if to anchor him to a
wonder, to an unbelievable something; his body leaned--to something--and
his face now was the face of a starved man, of a man dying from thirst,
who sees food, water, salvation.
And his face changed; a quality incredible was coming into it--joy. He
was transformed. Lines softened by magic; color came, and light in the
eyes; the first unbelief, the amazement, shifted surely, swiftly, and in
a flash the whole man shone, shook with rapture. He threw out before him
his arms, reaching, clasping, and from his radiant look the arms might
have held all happiness.
A minute he stayed so with his hands stretched out, with face glowing,
then slowly, his eyes straining as if perhaps they followed a vision
which faded from them--slowly his arms fell and the expectancy went from
his look. Yet not the light, not the joy. His body quivered; his breath
came unevenly, as of one just gone through a crisis; every sense seemed
still alive to catch a faintest note of something exquisite which
vanished; and with that the spell, rapidly as it had come, was gone.
And the man sat there quiet, as he had sat an hour before, and the face
which had been leaden was brilliant. He stirred and glanced about the
room as if trying to adjust himself, and his eyes smiled as they rested
on the familiar objects, as if for love of them, for pleasure in them.
One might have said that this man had been given back at a blow youth
and happiness. Movement seemed beyond him yet--he was yet dazed with the
newness of a marvel--but he turned his head and saw the fire and at that
put out his hand to it as if to a friend.
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