The Fullness Of Life

by Edith Wharton

　　IFor hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweetlassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when theheat seems to have silenced the very birds and insects, and, lying sunkin the tasselled meadow-grasses, one looks up through a level roofing ofmaple-leaves at the vast shadowless, and unsuggestive blue. Now andthen, at ever-lengthening intervals, a flash of pain darted through her,like the ripple of sheet-lightning across such a midsummer sky; but itwas too transitory to shake her stupor, that calm, delicious, bottomlessstupor into which she felt herself sinking more and more deeply, withouta disturbing impulse of resistance, an effort of reattachment to thevanishing edges of consciousness.The resistance, the effort, had known their hour of violence; butnow they were at an end. Through her mind, long harried by grotesquevisions, fragmentary images of the life that she was leaving, tormentinglines of verse, obstinate presentments of pictures once beheld,indistinct impressions of rivers, towers, and cupolas, gathered in thelength of journeys half forgotten-through her mind there now only moveda few primal sensations of colorless well-being; a vague satisfaction inthe thought that she had swallowed her noxious last draught of medicine. . . and that she should never again hear the creaking of her husband'sboots -- those horrible boots -- and that no one would come to botherher about the next day's dinner . . . or the butcher's book. . . .At last even these dim sensations spent themselves in thethickening obscurity which enveloped her; a dusk now filled with palegeometric roses, circling softly, interminably before her, now darkenedto a uniform blue-blackness, the hue of a summer night without stars.And into this darkness she felt herself sinking, sinking, with thegentle sense of security of one upheld from beneath. Like a tepid tideit rose around her, gliding ever higher and higher, folding in itsvelvety embrace her relaxed and tired body, now submerging her breastand shoulders, now creeping gradually, with soft inexorableness, overher throat to her chin, to her ears, to her mouth. . . . Ah, now it wasrising too high; the impulse to struggle was renewed;. . . her mouth wasfull;. . . she was choking. . . . Help!"It is all over," said the nurse, drawing down the eyelids withofficial composure.The clock struck three. They remembered it afterward. Someoneopened the window and let in a blast of that strange, neutral air whichwalks the earth between darkness and dawn; someone else led the husbandinto another room. He walked vaguely, like a blind man, on his creakingboots.IIShe stood, as it seemed, on a threshold, yet no tangible gateway was infront of her. Only a wide vista of light, mild yet penetrating as thegathered glimmer of innumerable stars, expanded gradually before hereyes, in blissful contrast to the cavernous darkness from which she hadof late emerged.She stepped forward, not frightened, but hesitating, and as hereyes began to grow more familiar with the melting depths of light abouther, she distinguished the outlines of a landscape, at first swimming inthe opaline uncertainty of Shelley's vaporous creations, then graduallyresolved into distincter shape -- the vast unrolling of a sunlit plain,aerial forms of mountains, and presently the silver crescent of a riverin the valley, and a blue stencilling of trees along its curve --something suggestive in its ineffable hue of an azure background ofLeonardo's, strange, enchanting, mysterious, leading on the eye and theimagination into regions of fabulous delight. As she gazed, her heartbeat with a soft and rapturous surprise; so exquisite a promise she readin the summons of that hyaline distance."And so death is not the end after all," in sheer gladness sheheard herself exclaiming aloud. "I always knew that it couldn't be. Ibelieved in Darwin, of course. I do still; but then Darwin himself saidthat he wasn't sure about the soul -- at least, I think he did -- andWallace was a spiritualist; and then there was St. George Mivart --"Her gaze lost itself in the ethereal remoteness of the mountains."How beautiful! How satisfying!" she murmured. "Perhaps now I shallreally know what it is to live."As she spoke she felt a sudden thickening of her heart-beats, andlooking up she was aware that before her stood the Spirit of Life."Have you never really known what it is to live?" the Spirit ofLife asked her."I have never known," she replied, "that fulness of life which weall feel ourselves capable of knowing; though my life has not beenwithout scattered hints of it, like the scent of earth which comes toone sometimes far out at sea.""And what do you call the fulness of life?" the Spirit asked again."Oh, I can't tell you, if you don't know," she said, almostreproachfully. "Many words are supposed to define it -- love andsympathy are those in commonest use, but I am not even sure that theyare the right ones, and so few people really know what they mean.""You were married," said the Spirit, "yet you did not find thefulness of life in your marriage?""Oh, dear, no," she replied, with an indulgent scorn, "my marriagewas a very incomplete affair.""And yet you were fond of your husband?""You have hit upon the exact word; I was fond of him, yes, just asI was fond of my grandmother, and the house that I was born in, and myold nurse. Oh, I was fond of him, and we were counted a very happycouple. But I have sometimes thought that a woman's nature is like agreat house full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyonepasses in going in and out; the drawingroom, where one receives formalvisits; the sitting-room, where the members of the family come and go asthey list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles ofwhose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, noone knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy ofholies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes.""And your husband," asked the Spirit, after a pause, "never gotbeyond the family sitting-room?""Never," she returned, impatiently; "and the worst of it was thathe was quite content to remain there. He thought it perfectly beautiful,and sometimes, when he was admiring its commonplace furniture,insignificant as the chairs and tables of a hotel parlor, I felt likecrying out to him: 'Fool, will you never guess that close at hand arerooms full of treasures and wonders, such as the eye of man hath notseen, rooms that no step has crossed, but that might be yours to livein, could you but find the handle of the door?'""Then," the Spirit continued, "those moments of which you latelyspoke, which seemed to come to you like scattered hints of the fulnessof life, were not shared with your husband?""Oh, no -- never. He was different. His boots creaked, and healways slammed the door when he went out, and he never read anything butrailway novels and the sporting advertisements in the papers -- and --and, in short, we never understood each other in the least.""To what influence, then, did you owe those exquisite sensations?""I can hardly tell. Sometimes to the perfume of a flower; sometimesto a verse of Dante or of Shakespeare; sometimes to a picture or asunset, or to one of those calm days at sea, when one seems to be lyingin the hollow of a blue pearl; sometimes, but rarely, to a word spokenby someone who chanced to give utterance, at the right moment, to what Ifelt but could not express.""Someone whom you loved?" asked the Spirit."I never loved anyone, in that way," she said, rather sadly, "norwas I thinking of any one person when I spoke, but of two or three who,by touching for an instant upon a certain chord of my being, had calledforth a single note of that strange melody which seemed sleeping in mysoul. It has seldom happened, however, that I have owed such feelings topeople; and no one ever gave me a moment of such happiness as it was mylot to feel one evening in the Church of Or San Michele, in Florence.""Tell me about it," said the Spirit."It was near sunset on a rainy spring afternoon in Easter week. Theclouds had vanished, dispersed by a sudden wind, and as we entered thechurch the fiery panes of the high windows shone out like lamps throughthe dusk. A priest was at the high altar, his white cope a livid spot inthe incense-laden obscurity, the light of the candles flickering up anddown like fireflies about his head; a few people knelt near by. We stolebehind them and sat down on a bench close to the tabernacle of Orcagna."Strange to say, though Florence was not new to me, I had neverbeen in the church before; and in that magical light I saw for the firsttime the inlaid steps, the fluted columns, the sculptured bas-reliefsand canopy of the marvellous shrine. The marble, worn and mellowed bythe subtle hand of time, took on an unspeakable rosy hue, suggestive insome remote way of the honeycolored columns of the Parthenon, but moremystic, more complex, a color not born of the sun's inveterate kiss, butmade up of cryptal twilight, and the flame of candles upon martyrs'tombs, and gleams of sunset through symbolic panes of chrysoprase andruby; such a light as illumines the missals in the library of Siena, orburns like a hidden fire through the Madonna of Gian Bellini in theChurch of the Redeemer, at Venice; the light of the Middle Ages, richer,more solemn, more significant than the limpid sunshine of Greece."The church was silent, but for the wail of the priest and theoccasional scraping of a chair against the floor, and as I sat there,bathed in that light, absorbed in rapt contemplation of the marblemiracle which rose before me, cunningly wrought as a casket of ivory andenriched with jewel-like incrustations and tarnished gleams of gold, Ifelt myself borne onward along a mighty current, whose source seemed tobe in the very beginning of things, and whose tremendous waters gatheredas they went all the mingled streams of human passion and endeavor. Lifein all its varied manifestations of beauty and strangeness seemedweaving a rhythmical dance around me as I moved, and wherever the spiritof man had passed I knew that my foot had once been familiar."As I gazed the mediaeval bosses of the tabernacle of Orcagnaseemed to melt and flow into their primal forms so that the folded lotusof the Nile and the Greek acanthus were braided with the runic knots andfish-tailed monsters of the North, and all the plastic terror and beautyborn of man's hand from the Ganges to the Baltic quivered and mingled inOrcagna's apotheosis of Mary. And so the river bore me on, past thealien face of antique civilizations and the familiar wonders of Greece,till I swam upon the fiercely rushing tide of the Middle Ages, with itsswirling eddies of passion, its heaven-reflecting pools of poetry andart; I heard the rhythmic blow of the craftsmen's hammers in thegoldsmiths' workshops and on the walls of churches, the party-cries ofarmed factions in the narrow streets, the organroll of Dante's verse,the crackle of the fagots around Arnold of Brescia, the twitter of theswallows to which St. Francis preached, the laughter of the ladieslistening on the hillside to the quips of the Decameron, whileplague-struck Florence howled beneath them -- all this and much more Iheard, joined in strange unison with voices earlier and more remote,fierce, passionate, or tender, yet subdued to such awful harmony that Ithought of the song that the morning stars sang together and felt asthough it were sounding in my ears. My heart beat to suffocation, thetears burned my lids, the joy, the mystery of it seemed too intolerableto be borne. I could not understand even then the words of the song; butI knew that if there had been someone at my side who could have heard itwith me, we might have found the key to it together."I turned to my husband, who was sitting beside me in an attitudeof patient dejection, gazing into the bottom of his hat; but at thatmoment he rose, and stretching his stiffened legs, said, mildly: 'Hadn'twe better be going? There doesn't seem to be much to see here, and youknow the table d'hote dinner is at half-past six o'clock."Her recital ended, there was an interval of silence; then the Spirit ofLife said: "There is a compensation in store for such needs as you haveexpressed.""Oh, then you do understand?" she exclaimed. "Tell me whatcompensation, I entreat you!""It is ordained," the Spirit answered, "that every soul which seeksin vain on earth for a kindred soul to whom it can lay bare its inmostbeing shall find that soul here and be united to it for eternity."A glad cry broke from her lips. "Ah, shall I find him at last?" shecried, exultant."He is here," said the Spirit of Life.She looked up and saw that a man stood near whose soul (for in thatunwonted light she seemed to see his soul more clearly than his face)drew her toward him with an invincible force."Are you really he?" she murmured."I am he," he answered.She laid her hand in his and drew him toward the parapet whichoverhung the valley."Shall we go down together," she asked him, "into that marvellouscountry; shall we see it together, as if with the self-same eyes, andtell each other in the same words all that we think and feel?""So," he replied, "have I hoped and dreamed.""What?" she asked, with rising joy. "Then you, too, have looked forme?""All my life.""How wonderful! And did you never, never find anyone in the otherworld who understood you?""Not wholly -- not as you and I understand each other.""Then you feel it, too? Oh, I am happy," she sighed.They stood, hand in hand, looking down over the parapet upon theshimmering landscape which stretched forth beneath them into sapphirinespace, and the Spirit of Life, who kept watch near the threshold, heardnow and then a floating fragment of their talk blown backward like thestray swallows which the wind sometimes separates from their migratorytribe."Did you never feel at sunset --""Ah, yes; but I never heard anyone else say so. Did you?""Do you remember that line in the third canto of the 'Inferno?'""Ah, that line -- my favorite always. Is it possible --""You know the stooping Victory in the frieze of the Nike Apteros?""You mean the one who is tying her sandal? Then you have noticed,too, that all Botticelli and Mantegna are dormant in those flying foldsof her drapery?""After a storm in autumn have you never seen --""Yes, it is curious how certain flowers suggest certainpainters-the perfume of the incarnation, Leonardo; that of the rose,Titian; the tuberose, Crivelli --""I never supposed that anyone else had noticed it.""Have you never thought --""Oh, yes, often and often; but I never dreamed that anyone else had.""But surely you must have felt --""Oh, yes, yes; and you, too --""How beautiful! How strange --"Their voices rose and fell, like the murmur of two fountainsanswering each other across a garden full of flowers. At length, with acertain tender impatience, he turned to her and said: "Love, why shouldwe linger here? All eternity lies before us. Let us go down into thatbeautiful country together and make a home for ourselves on some bluehill above the shining river."As he spoke, the hand she had forgotten in his was suddenlywithdrawn, and he felt that a cloud was passing over the radiance of hersoul."A home," she repeated, slowly, "a home for you and me to live infor all eternity?""Why not, love? Am I not the soul that yours has sought?""Y-yes -- yes, I know -- but, don't you see, home would not be likehome to me, unless --""Unless?" he wonderingly repeated.She did not answer, but she thought to herself, with an impulse ofwhimsical inconsistency, "Unless you slammed the door and wore creakingboots."But he had recovered his hold upon her hand, and by imperceptibledegrees was leading her toward the shining steps which descended to thevalley."Come, O my soul's soul," he passionately implored; "why delay amoment? Surely you feel, as I do, that eternity itself is too short tohold such bliss as ours. It seems to me that I can see our home already.Have I not always seem it in my dreams? It is white, love, is it not,with polished columns, and a sculptured cornice against the blue? Grovesof laurel and oleander and thickets of roses surround it; but from theterrace where we walk at sunset, the eye looks out over woodlands andcool meadows where, deep-bowered under ancient boughs, a stream goesdelicately toward the river. Indoors our favorite pictures hang upon thewalls and the rooms are lined with books. Think, dear, at last we shallhave time to read them all. With which shall we begin? Come, help me tochoose. Shall it be 'Faust' or the 'Vita Nuova,' the 'Tempest' or 'LesCaprices de Marianne,' or the thirty-first canto of the 'Paradise,' or'Epipsychidion' or "Lycidas'? Tell me, dear, which one?"As he spoke he saw the answer trembling joyously upon her lips; butit died in the ensuing silence, and she stood motionless, resisting thepersuasion of his hand."What is it?" he entreated."Wait a moment," she said, with a strange hesitation in her voice."Tell me first, are you quite sure of yourself? Is there no one on earthwhom you sometimes remember?""Not since I have seen you," he replied; for, being a man, he hadindeed forgotten.Still she stood motionless, and he saw that the shadow deepened onher soul."Surely, love," he rebuked her, "it was not that which troubledyou? For my part I have walked through Lethe. The past has melted like acloud before the moon. I never lived until I saw you."She made no answer to his pleadings, but at length, rousing herselfwith a visible effort, she turned away from him and moved toward theSpirit of Life, who still stood near the threshold."I want to ask you a question," she said, in a troubled voice."Ask," said the Spirit."A little while ago," she began, slowly, "you told me that everysoul which has not found a kindred soul on earth is destined to find onehere.""And have you not found one?" asked the Spirit."Yes; but will it be so with my husband's soul also?""No," answered the Spirit of Life, "for your husband imagined thathe had found his soul's mate on earth in you; and for such delusionseternity itself contains no cure."She gave a little cry. Was it of disappointment or triumph?"Then -- then what will happen to him when he comes here?""That I cannot tell you. Some field of activity and happiness hewill doubtless find, in due measure to his capacity for being active andhappy."She interrupted, almost angrily: "He will never be happy without me.""Do not be too sure of that," said the Spirit.She took no notice of this, and the Spirit continued: "He will notunderstand you here any better than he did on earth.""No matter," she said; "I shall be the only sufferer, for he alwaysthought that he understood me.""His boots will creak just as much as ever --""No matter.""And he will slam the door --""Very likely.""And continue to read railway novels --"She interposed, impatiently: "Many men do worse than that.""But you said just now," said the Spirit, "that you did not love him.""True," she answered, simply; "but don't you understand that Ishouldn't feel at home without him? It is all very well for a week ortwo -- but for eternity! After all, I never minded the creaking of hisboots, except when my head ached, and I don't suppose it will achehere; and he was always so sorry when he had slammed the door, only henever could remember not to. Besides, no one else would know how tolook after him, he is so helpless. His inkstand would never be filled,and he would always be out of stamps and visiting-cards. He would neverremember to have his umbrella re-covered, or to ask the price ofanything before he bought it. Why, he wouldn't even know what novels toread. I always had to choose the kind he liked, with a murder or aforgery and a successful detective."She turned abruptly to her kindred soul, who stood listening with amien of wonder and dismay."Don't you see," she said, "that I can't possibly go with you?""But what do you intend to do?" asked the Spirit of Life."What do I intend to do?" she returned, indignantly. "Why, I meanto wait for my husband, of course. If he had come here first he wouldhave waited for me for years and years; and it would break his heart notto find me here when he comes." She pointed with a contemptuous gestureto the magic vision of hill and vale sloping away to the translucentmountains. "He wouldn't give a fig for all that," she said, "if hedidn't find me here.""But consider," warned the Spirit, "that you are now choosing foreternity. It is a solemn moment.""Choosing!" she said, with a half-sad smile. "Do you still keep uphere that old fiction about choosing? I should have thought that youknew better than that. How can I help myself? He will expect to find mehere when he comes, and he would never believe you if you told him thatI had gone away with someone else-never, never.""So be it," said the Spirit. "Here, as on earth, each one mustdecide for himself."She turned to her kindred soul and looked at him gently, almostwistfully. "I am sorry," she said. "I should have liked to talk with youagain; but you will understand, I know, and I dare say you will findsomeone else a great deal cleverer --"And without pausing to hear his answer she waved him a swiftfarewell and turned back toward the threshold."Will my husband come soon?" she asked the Spirit of Life."That you are not destined to know," the Spirit replied."No matter," she said, cheerfully; "I have all eternity to wait in."And still seated alone on the threshold, she listens for thecreaking of his boots.