“Tell me—”
He drew a deep breath, he closed his eyes, he began, her hand still clasped in both his hands upon his breast.
“I want to tell you how I love you. I want to tell you now, while I am still fully alive, while my brain is clear, while my heart beats, while I have words upon my tongue. I love you. I have always loved you. I loved you before I ever knew you, before we ever met. I loved you because I knew the sort of woman I would always love, must always love, and when I saw you, I knew you were she. Of course I love your body because it is yours and because it pleases me. But I love your body because your spirit dwells there, because your incomparable brain is housed in your beautiful skull, because your soul is enshrined in your heart. I cannot imagine your body apart from the essential you, But I cannot imagine the essential you otherwise housed. You are entire in your whole being. I love the least part of you — your long free hair, your hands and feet, your adorable breasts, your waist, your thighs, the way you walk and carry your head. I love your voice, the look in your eyes — have you an idea how your soul speaks through your eyes? No, don't answer! I have more to say. If you had not let me love you — did you observe that I never ask you to love me? — I would have been afraid to descend solitary to the grave. As it is, my love for you sustains me. I fear nothing. I march to the unknown with steady step, for I bear in my heart my love for you. Love is the torch that lights my way. ‘O Death, where is thy sting? O Grave, where is thy victory?’”
His voice rang out into the night. He put her hand to his lips and held it there. But she drew it gently away, she lifted herself and took his head between her palms and kissed his lips.
“I am honored,” she said. “As long as I live, I am honored. I shall never forget — never, never!”
…She was at home again. They had parted, she and Edwin, with a new ease. Whatever they had was somehow eternal. All impatience was gone. A profound unity existed between them, maintained by the flow of his letters.
“I shall write to you whenever I like,” he had said at the last moment, “but don’t feel you must reply. It does me good to put down my thoughts, crystallize them, actually, in my letters to you. I feel they are permanent, once I give them to you. If anything happens to me, if some morning I don’t waken, you have the essential man with you always. You may do as you like with me.”
With these words, he began a series of letters, which arrived almost daily. Without attempting to reply to these letters she received them, absorbed them, and when she felt the need of communication, she wrote at any hour, day or night, of what at the moment engaged her thoughts, relevant to his or not. He wrote:
“I am astonished that the more I contemplate death the more I am upheld by a new confidence in the persistence of life beyond. This may simply be wishfulness, and yet I think not. Or it may be that, infused by love as I am — thanks to you, my darling — I believe final death is irrational, therefore morally wrong, therefore impossible. I assert the impossibility by a new faith in immortality. It is not for myself that I make the assertion. It is because of you, whom I love as perfection, that I insist it is morally wrong that the creation of perfection end in mere dust. Somehow the entire being cannot be thus dependent on a temporary manifestation, namely, the human frame, composite of water and a handful of chemicals. The ability to love must surely have a significance, must surely contain a promise. Without love, it is easy to believe that death is final, but with it — impossible! The very will to believe suggests persistence.”
To this she replied:
“Spring is here. The old maple trees, which seemed to me as a child already as old as eternity, are clothed in tender green. My house is rich with early roses. The gardener specializes in a certain few flowers, and roses are one of the few. In the midst of all this color and glory, your letter is like music, or perhaps, better, a voice, putting into words the promise of immortal spring. Though winter intervenes, life begins again in spring. As for me, I am idle, simply enjoying, not thinking very much, too lazy even to visit friends. They visit me. I tolerate them affectionately but without enthusiasm. I am happy in myself.”
This was not entirely true, she realized, even as she sealed the letter and sent it off. In the midst of the ordered daily life, she was aware of a secret restlessness, a query she did not pursue. The air was still cool. No wind, no storm, disturbed the golden air. Never had the house seemed so comfortable, the grounds so encompassing, the smooth lawns clipped of early growth, the shrubbery controlled, the trees in bud and leaf. Yet in the midst of all this to which she was accustomed she was waiting for something more and, moreover, was aware of waiting.
She had received one short note from Jared Barnow, thanking her for letting him stay in her Vermont house. She had not answered it. Why should she, indeed? A casual hospitality, a casual note of thanks, an invitation casually given, a half promise of acceptance — all in all, but there was no more here than gossamer. She must understand herself. Loneliness was inevitable and not to be assuaged by one who merely passed by. She must busy herself, first with the house. It was now hers alone. It could be changed, improved, made new. After all, a house should change with changing generations, become the setting for a new personality.
A new personality? Herself — no other! She could be a different person now, someone she had not known, less shy, less retiring, more concerned with her looks, with her mind — in short, with growth. Arnold in his own way had been a retreat. In the shelter of his superior age, his success as a famous lawyer, she had felt no stimulus except to be what he wished her to be, his wife, the mother of intelligent and reasonably obedient children, a charming hostess, a figure conventionally correct in the conventional and correct society of an old conservative city. She had felt no great desire to be any other than this, for Arnold had not restrained her. She had not been aware of ambition unfulfilled and on the whole she had enjoyed her state of being. She knew that Arnold in his own fashion had loved her more than she loved him, but she had loved him, nevertheless, without regret, and she supposed their relationship was one common to persons in their life circumstances.
Now, however, it occurred to her that she might be quite a different person and a creeping curiosity beset her. Suppose, indeed, that she became someone entirely new? Suppose she began by doing what she wanted to do, saying what she wanted to say, going where she wanted to go? She could not define as yet such yearnings, but then she was accustomed to being as she was. Suppose, she told herself, suppose she studied her own desires as they might appear, once they were allowed? It occurred to her that she was in fact repressed, although unaware of repression. The house, for example. If she could not think of what she wanted, she could begin by rejecting what she did not want.
Walking thoughtfully about the vast rooms, looking at one object and another, it slowly came to her that she did not want any of it. It was not at all her idea of a house for herself. Grandparents and parents had built it, had filled it with the furniture of their own age, valuable, heavy, immovable. She would sell it — no, she would give it away, fill it with orphans or old men and women, homeless people whom it could shelter as it had sheltered her.