Shadows of Flames Part 124

"It's very painful ... being born, Sue."

"'Being born'?" said Miss Pickett, stopping on her way to the trunk with an odd shoe in her hand.

"Yes, Sue.... It's hard. It hurts.... Drawing in the first breaths hurts.... When I've breathed really deep, it will be different...."

"Yes-- I understand, lamb," said Sue softly.

Sophy went on, her eyes still fixed on the white satin scroll.

"You know, Sue ... it's said that when one dies and wakes up in quite another state, one doesn't realise that one has died just at first. Well ... I feel something like that. I've come into a queer, new state of being. I can't seem to realise myself or anything just yet."

"Yes, dear," said her cousin, fitting the shoe into a corner of the trunk, and coming back to sit down near her. Sophy reached out one hand mechanically, and Sue took it in both her own, with quiet, matter-of-fact affection. Sophy still gazed before her, seeing nothing.

"It's a queer thing to say, Sue," she continued after a moment, "but I don't think I've lived at all yet ... not really."

This _did_ seem odd to Miss Pickett, but she thought it due to a certain inevitable old-maidishness on her part, and gave no sign.

"I'll try to explain what I mean," said Sophy. "I've loved love all my life. But love isn't given us just to love ... the love between two people--a man and a woman ... is only one tiny part of love. Yes...."

She knitted her straight brows trying to bring her thought to clearness for the other. "That kind of love--if it tries to be an end in itself _has_ to die ... to wither away. Or, if it does last, then the soul withers."

She smiled suddenly, turning her eyes on her cousin.

"I think the Serpent was really kinder to Adam and Eve, when he got them turned out of Eden, than Jehovah was when he shut them up in it," she said.

"How's that?" asked Miss Pickett, startled, for she was rather orthodox in her views on religious form, though her big heart made her more unconventional in practise.

"Why, just think of it for a moment," Sophy answered. "If the Serpent hadn't interrupted their _tete-a-tete_--there they would be to this day--wandering love-sick among fadeless flowers, with nothing, nothing, nothing before them but an eternity of love-making!" Her pale face alight with mingled whimsicality and sadness, she added, leaning closer: "Sue ... I'll whisper you something.... _The Serpent was Jehovah in disguise, Sue!_"

A second later she said:

"Don't be vexed, dear, will you?... It's such a comfort thinking aloud to you like this...."

"No, indeed. Go on. I won't be vexed," Miss Pickett a.s.sured her warmly.

"You always were an irreverent monkey--but then the Lord made monkeys.

He knows how to allow for their antics."

But Sophy was intent upon her own train of thought again and only smiled absently at this indirect reproof.

"Two lessons...." she then said slowly. "It took two bitter lessons to teach me the truth about love--the sort of love that I always dreamed of as supreme--the love that is 'like an Archangel beating his iridescent wings in the void'...."

Miss Pickett could not follow the subtleties of Sophy's musing, she could only feel the pain that underlay it. She said gently:

"You mustn't deny love, honey, just because it's failed you. I don't ever want to see my child grow bitter."

"It's only one kind of love that I'm denying, Sue--not Eros, but Anteros ... the false G.o.d.... He comes in a lovely glamour. He's the rainbow on the foam of breaking waves. When the sea is still he vanishes. My bitterness is only against myself--for having wors.h.i.+pped a false G.o.d."

"Well, child--maybe you have. But thank the Lord! no mistake is final at your age...."

"My mistakes have been very final for me, Sue. I've laid all my frankincense and myrrh on the altar of Anteros, I've nothing to offer the true G.o.d. But there's my son ... my defeat shall make his victory.

There shall be one man in the world who knows the true G.o.d from the false. Some woman shall be glad through my pain. Some day, when a woman loves my Bobby, she shall be able to say: 'This is my beloved and this is my _friend_!'"

Sue glanced quickly at her, but her expression was wholly unconscious.

She was not thinking of Amaldi in that moment. She was only thinking that love to be real, to be perfect, to be lasting must include friends.h.i.+p, comrades.h.i.+p, understanding, mutual endeavour. That to retain its fulness it must give out to others besides the one, give incessantly, untiringly, without stint, without grudging. That instead of raising magic walls of enclosure, it should level all barriers.

She took another tone suddenly.

Colour came into her face. She looked with darkened eyes at her cousin.

"Sue...." she said. "The fact is that all these years I've been nothing but a miserable happiness-hunter!"

"Nonsense!" said Miss Pickett.

"Just that ... a happiness-hunter," repeated Sophy.

"Well ... and what is everybody else doing but hunting happiness, I'd like to know?" retorted her cousin. "Even the martyrs were after it! If they hadn't found happiness in martyrdom they wouldn't have sought it, you may be sure. Don't be morbid, child, for goodness' sake!"

"I'm not morbid. And what you say is true in a way. But there is selfish happiness and unselfish happiness, and what I've wanted was the selfish kind. I wanted love _all to myself_. What do I know of life really?...

What do I know of what's going on in the real world?... Oh, 'it is good for me that I have been afflicted!' It is something, at least, that I can say that from my soul--with all my might. It is good ... it is _good_ for me.... I'm glad the Serpent has come into Eden.... I'm glad that I've eaten of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil!... Now I'm going out into the wilderness of life, and I'm going to learn how to live. I'm just born, but I'm going to 'put aside childish things' ...

that toy called happiness, with all the rest!"

Miss Pickett gazed at the ardent face, with affection. Then she smiled wisely.

"Perhaps, honey," she said, "you'll find happiness in doing without it.

At any rate--you seem right happy at the prospect of not being happy."

Sophy rose and, kneeling down beside her, leaned her head on that kind breast.

"Do you know, Sue," she said dreamily, "after all, it's rather wonderful to feel that one has done with love, and yet finds life worth while."

"Is it, dear?" said Sue.

"Yes, it is. You know Socrates was glad when he had pa.s.sed the age of love. Now I understand why that was. I never did before."

Sue Pickett said nothing, only stroked the dark head upon her breast.

But a rather cryptic smile stirred her lips. She was thinking that from all she had read and heard, two beings could hardly differ more essentially than Sophy and the Sage of Athens.

XLVI

Sophy spent the rest of that summer and the following winter at Sweet-Waters. She did not wish to go among people so soon after her divorce, besides she felt the need of self-adjustment to her new relations with life.

That sense of being unreal in a world of unreality, which she had mentioned to Susan Pickett on the day of the divorce, lasted for some time. Then, in the early autumn--in her favourite month of October--began a recrudescence of the imperishable pa.s.sion for life as opposed to mere existence, that lent her always the elemental charm of fire. Many natures s.h.i.+ne in the great dim of circ.u.mstance, but with light differently derived. Some are, as one might put it, phosph.o.r.escent. In others one divines the pinch of star-dust in the clay--still luminous, still perfervid, as when the cosmic nebula first spun the white hot core of things. It was this mystic fire that glowed again in Sophy, burning clearer for the ash beneath it, even as the humbler, yet still sacred fire of hearths, burns clearer in like case.

It was as if in resigning her desire for one supremely personal love, Love itself had drawn nearer. Motherhood meant for her now, not only her feeling for her little son, but an aching towards all unmothered things.

It was not _welt-schmerz_, this feeling--_welt pa.s.sion_ rather.... She was like one who has lived for years in a lovely, doorless, painted house, lit by perfumed candles--then one day steps through a sudden break in its wall to face the tremendous sea. Yes--life lay like that before her--perilous but to be drowned in rather than left unessayed--unsailed. The cosmic romance was upon her. She no longer belittled romance to a love-tale--rather it was the adventure of a creative G.o.d--Zeus as Poet. And this new, impa.s.sioned desire to live fully, largely, universally, so confused her in the beginning, that she hardly knew where first to turn--so vast were her ignorances--so clamorous the wave-like voices that called from every side.