The Brimming Cup | Page 4

them, or she would not have mentioned it. She explained, "It's
not a famous line at all, nothing I ever heard anybody else admire. We
had to learn the poem by heart, when I was a little girl and went to
school in Bayonne. It starts out,
'Waterloo, Waterloo, morne plaine Comme une onde qui bout dans une
urne trop pleine,'
And that second line always stuck in my head for the picture it made. I
could see it, so vividly, an urn boiling over with the great gush of water
springing up in it. It gave me a feeling, inside, a real physical feeling, I
mean. I wanted, oh so awfully, sometime to be so filled with some
emotion, something great and fine, that I would be an urn too full,
gushing up in a great flooding rush. I could see the smooth, thick curl

of the water surging up and out!"
She stopped to look at him and exclaim, "Why, you're listening! You're
interested. Neale, I believe you are the only person in the world who
can really pay attention to what somebody else says. Everybody else
just goes on thinking his own thoughts."
He smiled at this fancy, and said, "Go on."
"Well, I don't know whether that feeling was already in me, waiting for
something to express it, or whether that phrase in the poem started it.
But it was, for ever so long, the most important thing in the world to
me. I was about fourteen years old then, and of course, being a good
deal with Catholics, I thought probably it was religious ecstasy that was
going to be the great flood that would brim my cup full. I used to go up
the hill in Bayonne to the Cathedral every day and stay there for hours,
trying to work up an ecstasy. I managed nearly to faint away once or
twice, which was something of course. But I couldn't feel that great tide
I'd dreamed of. And then, little by little . . . oh, lots of things came
between the idea and my thinking about it. Mother was . . . I've told
you how Mother was at that time. And what an unhappy time it was at
home. I was pretty busy at the house because she was away so much.
And Father and I hung together because there wasn't anybody else to
hang to: and all sorts of ugly things happened, and I didn't have the
time or the heart to think about being 'an urn too full.'"
She stopped, smiling happily, as though those had not been tragic
words which he had just spoken, thinking not of them but of something
else, which now came out, "And then, oh Neale, that day, on the piazza
in front of St. Peter's, when we stood together, and felt the spray of the
fountains blown on us, and you looked at me and spoke out. . . . Oh,
Neale, Neale, what a moment to have lived through! Well, when we
went on into the church, and I knelt there for a while, so struck down
with joy that I couldn't stand on my feet, all those wild bursts of
excitement, and incredulity and happiness, that kept surging up and
drenching me . . . I had a queer feeling, that awfully threadbare feeling
of having been there before, or felt that before; that it was familiar,
although it was so new. Then it came to me, 'Why, I have it, what I

used to pray for. Now at last I am the urn too full!' And it was true, I
could feel, just as I dreamed, the upsurging of the feeling, brimming
over, boiling up, brimming over. . . . And another phrase came into my
mind, an English one. I said to myself, 'The fullness of life.' Now I
know what it is."
She turned to him, and caught at his hand. "Oh, Neale, now I do know
what it is, how utterly hideous it would be to have to live without it, to
feel only the mean little trickle that seems mostly all that people have."
"Well, I'll never have to get along without it, as long as I have you," he
said confidently.
"And I refuse to live a minute, if it goes back on me!" she cried.
"I imagine that old folks would think we are talking very young,"
suggested the man casually.
"Don't speak of them!" She cast them away into non-existence with a
gesture.
They sank into a reverie, smiling to themselves.
"How the fountains shone in the sun, that day," she murmured; "the
spray they cast on us was all tiny opals and diamonds."
"You're sure you aren't going to be sorry to go back to