The Garden of Survival | Page 8

as she sank
down into my arms and found relief in quiet sobbing on my breast.
And pity then returned. I felt unsure of myself again. This was the love
of the body only; my soul was silent. Yet--somehow, in some strange
hidden way, lay this ambushed meaning--that she had need of me, and
that she offered her devotion and herself in sacrifice.

II
THE brief marriage ran its course, depleting rather than enriching me,
and I know you realized before the hurried, dreadful end that my tie
with yourself was strengthened rather than endangered, and that I took
from you nothing that I might give it to her. That death should
intervene so swiftly, leaving her but an interval of a month between the
altar and the grave, you could foreknow as little as I or she; yet in that
brief space of time you learned that I had robbed you of nothing that
was your precious due, while she as surely realized that the amazing
love she poured so lavishly upon me woke no response--beyond a deep
and tender pity, strangely deep and singularly tender I admit, but
assuredly very different from love.
Now this, I think, you already know and in some measure understand;
but what you cannot know--since it is a portion of her secret, of that
ambushed meaning, as I termed it, given to me when she lay dying--is
the pathetic truth that her discovery wrought no touch of
disenchantment in her. I think she knew with shame that she had caught
me with her lowest weapon, yet still hoped that the highest in her might
complete and elevate her victory. She knew, at any rate, neither dismay
nor disappointment; of reproach there was no faintest hint. She did not
even once speak of it directly, though her fine, passionate face made
me aware of the position. Of the usual human reaction, that is, there
was no slightest trace; she neither chided nor implored; she did not
weep. The exact opposite of what I might have expected took place
before my very eyes.

For she turned and faced me, empty as I was. The soul in her, realizing
the truth, stood erect to meet the misery of lonely pain that inevitably
lay ahead--in some sense as though she welcomed it already; and,
strangest of all, she blossomed, physically as well as mentally, into a
fuller revelation of gracious loveliness than before, sweeter and more
exquisite, indeed, than anything life had yet shown to me. Moreover,
having captured me, she changed; the grossness I had discerned, that
which had led me to my own undoing, vanished completely as though
it were transmuted into desires and emotions of a loftier kind. Some
purpose, some intention, a hope immensely resolute shone out of her,
and of such spiritual loveliness, it seemed to me, that I watched it in a
kind of dumb amazement.
I watched it--unaware at first of my own shame, emptied of any
emotion whatsoever, I think, but that of a startled worship before the
grandeur of her generosity. It seemed she listened breathlessly for the
beating of my heart, and hearing none, resolved that she would pour her
own life into it, regardless of pain, of loss, of sacrifice, that she might
make it live. She undertook her mission, that is to say, and this mission,
in some mysterious way, and according to some code of conduct
undivined by me, yet passionately honoured, was to give--regardless of
herself or of response. I caught myself sometimes thinking of a child
who would instinctively undo some earlier grievous wrong. She loved
me marvellously.
I know not how to describe to you the lavish wealth of selfless devotion
she bathed me in during the brief torturing and unfulfilled period before
the end. It made me aware of new depths and heights in human nature.
It taught me a new beauty that even my finest dreams had left
unmentioned. Into the region that great souls inhabit a glimpse was
given me. My own dreadful weakness was laid bare. And an eternal
hunger woke in me--that I might love.
That hunger remained unsatisfied. I prayed, I yearned, I suffered; I
could have decreed myself a deservedly cruel death; it seemed I
stretched my little nature to unendurable limits in the fierce hope that
the Gift of the Gods might be bestowed upon me, and that her divine

emotion might waken a response within my leaden soul. But all in vain.
My attitude, in spite of every prayer, of every effort, remained no more
than a searching and unavailing pity, but a pity that held no seed of a
mere positive emotion, least of all, of love. The heart in me lay
unredeemed; it knew ashamed and very tender gratitude; but it