How he would go to them and say,
“Listen.
God must call me to Jefferson because my life died there, was shot from the saddle of a galloping horse in a Jefferson street one night twenty years before it was ever born.”
He thought that he could say that, at first.
He believed that they would comprehend.
He went there, chose that as his vocation, with that as his purpose.
But he believed in more than that.
He had believed in the church too, in all that it ramified and evoked.
He believed with a calm joy that if ever there was shelter, it would be the Church; that if ever truth could walk naked and without shame or fear, it would be in the seminary.
When he believed that he had heard the call it seemed to him that he could see his future, his life, intact and on all sides complete and inviolable, like a classic and serene vase, where the spirit could be born anew sheltered from the harsh gale of living and die so, peacefully, with only the far sound of the circumvented wind, with scarce even a handful of rotting dust to be disposed of.
That was what the word seminary meant: quiet and safe walls within which the hampered and garmentworried spirit could learn anew serenity to contemplate without horror or alarm its own nakedness.
‘But there are more things in heaven and earth too than truth,’ he thinks, paraphrases, quietly, not quizzical, not humorous; not unquizzical and not humorless too.
Sitting in the failing dusk, his head in its white bandage looming bigger and more ghostly than ever, he thinks,
‘More things indeed,’ thinking how ingenuity was apparently given man in order that he may supply himself in crises with shapes and sounds with which to guard himself from truth.
He had at least one thing to not repent: that he had not made the mistake of telling the elders what he had planned to say.
He had not needed to live in the seminary a year before he learned better than that.
And more, worse: that with the learning of it, instead of losing something he had gained, had escaped from something.
And that that gain had colored the very face and shape of love.
She was the daughter of one of the ministers, the teachers, in the college.
Like himself, she was an only child.
He believed at once that she was beautiful, because he had heard of her before he ever saw her and when he did see her he did not see her at all because of the face which he had already created in his mind.
He did not believe that she could have lived there all her life and not be beautiful.
He did not see the face itself for three years.
By that time there had already been for two years a hollow tree in which they left notes for one another.
If he believed about that at all, he believed that the idea had sprung spontaneously between them, regardless of whichever one thought of it, said it, first.
But in reality he had got the idea not from her or from himself, but from a book.
But he did not see her face at all.
Ha did not see a small oval narrowing too sharply to chin and passionate with discontent (she was a year or two or three older than he was, and he did not know it, was never to know it).
He did not see that for three years her eyes had watched him with almost desperate calculation, like those of a harassed gambler.
Then one night he saw her, looked at her.
She spoke suddenly and savagely of marriage.
It was without preamble or warning.
It had never been mentioned between them.
He had not even ever thought of it, thought the word.
He had accepted it because most of the faculty were married.
But to him it was not men and women in sanctified and living physical intimacy, but a dead state carried over into and existing still among the living like two shadows chained together with the shadow of a chain.
He was used to that; he had grown up with a ghost.
Then one evening she talked suddenly, savagely.
When he found out at last what she meant by escape from her present life, he felt no surprise.
He was too innocent.
“Escape?” he said. “Escape from what?”
“This!” she said.
He saw her face for the first time as a living face, as a mask before desire and hatred: wrung, blind, headlong with passion.
Not stupid: just blind, reckless, desperate. “All of it!
All!
All!”
He was not surprised.
He believed at once that she was right, and that he just had not known better.
He believed at once that his own belief about the seminary had been wrong all the while.
Not seriously wrong, but false, incorrect.