How am I to know?
How am I to understand?” she cried at last.
There was a stir.
I believe she was wringing her hands. “There is something he can never forget.”
‘“So much the better for you,” I said gloomily.
‘“What is it?
What is it?” She put an extraordinary force of appeal into her supplicating tone. “He says he had been afraid.
How can I believe this?
Am I a mad woman to believe this?
You all remember something!
You all go back to it.
What is it?
You tell me!
What is this thing?
Is it alive?—is it dead?
I hate it.
It is cruel.
Has it got a face and a voice—this calamity?
Will he see it—will he hear it?
In his sleep perhaps when he cannot see me—and then arise and go. Ah! I shall never forgive him.
My mother had forgiven—but I, never!
Will it be a sign—a call?”
‘It was a wonderful experience.
She mistrusted his very slumbers—and she seemed to think I could tell her why!
Thus a poor mortal seduced by the charm of an apparition might have tried to wring from another ghost the tremendous secret of the claim the other world holds over a disembodied soul astray amongst the passions of this earth.
The very ground on which I stood seemed to melt under my feet.
And it was so simple too; but if the spirits evoked by our fears and our unrest have ever to vouch for each other’s constancy before the forlorn magicians that we are, then I—I alone of us dwellers in the flesh—have shuddered in the hopeless chill of such a task.
A sign, a call!
How telling in its expression was her ignorance.
A few words!
How she came to know them, how she came to pronounce them, I can’t imagine.
Women find their inspiration in the stress of moments that for us are merely awful, absurd, or futile.
To discover that she had a voice at all was enough to strike awe into the heart.
Had a spurned stone cried out in pain it could not have appeared a greater and more pitiful miracle.
These few sounds wandering in the dark had made their two benighted lives tragic to my mind.
It was impossible to make her understand.
I chafed silently at my impotence.
And Jim, too—poor devil!
Who would need him?
Who would remember him?
He had what he wanted.
His very existence probably had been forgotten by this time.
They had mastered their fates.
They were tragic.
‘Her immobility before me was clearly expectant, and my part was to speak for my brother from the realm of forgetful shade.
I was deeply moved at my responsibility and at her distress.
I would have given anything for the power to soothe her frail soul, tormenting itself in its invincible ignorance like a small bird beating about the cruel wires of a cage.
Nothing easier than to say, Have no fear!
Nothing more difficult.
How does one kill fear, I wonder?