Anne Douglas Sedgwick

“ She looked up at him, and now, in the dear, deep eyes, he saw all the old Eppie, the Eppie of life and battle.
“Can you think it, Jim? It’s because I see so clearly what he sees that I hate it and repudiate it and fight it with every atom of my being. It’s that hatred, that repudiation, that fight, that is life. I believe in it, I’m for it, as I never believed before, as I never was before.”
He was answering her look, seeing her as life’s wounded champion, standing, shot through, on the ramparts of her beleaguered city. She would shake her banner high in the air as she fell. ”

“ His quiet was like the slow dropping of tears.
“No, Jim. There is the joy of loving. You know that.”
“You are more piteous than I, Eppie. You, you, to sue to such a man. He is the negation of everything you mean. To live with him would be like fighting for breath. If you marry him,—if you bring him to it,—he’ll suffocate you.”
“No, Jim,” she repeated,—and now, looking up, he saw in those beloved eyes the deep wells of solemn joy,—“I am the stronger.”
“In fighting, yes, perhaps. Not in every-day, passive life. He’ll kill you.” ”

“ She seemed in this parting to have effaced all memory of glamour, but Gavan knew that the deeper one was with him.
It was with him, even while, in the long journey South, he was able to unwrap film after film of the mirage from its central core of reality, to see Eppie, in all her loveliness, in all her noblest aspects, as a sort of incarnation of the world, the flesh, and the devil. He could laugh over the grotesque analogy; it proved to him how far from life he was when its symbol could show in such unflattering terms, and yet it hurt him that he could find it in himself so to symbolize her. ”

“ At this Gavan pushed aside his hat almost to laugh at her. “What a funny little girl you are, Eppie! What a dear little girl! Yes, of course, I have you. But when I go away? And even while I’m here,—what if we were both lonely together? Can’t you imagine that? The feeling of being lost in a great forest at night. You have such quaint ideas about God.”
“I’ve never had any ideas at all. I’ve only thought of Some One who was there,—Some One I didn’t need yet. I’ve always thought of God as being more for grown-up people. Lost in a forest together? I don’t think I would mind that so much, Gavan. ”

“ I want you to find peace.”
“Peace! What peace can I find?”
He looked at her now, wondering if she would understand and willing to put it before her as he himself saw it: “The peace of seeing it all, and letting it all go.”
“Gavan, I swear to you that I will never see him again. Oh, Gavan, what do you mean? If you would forgive me—really forgive me—and take me now, I would follow you anywhere. I am not afraid any longer. I have found out that the only thing to be afraid of is oneself. If I have you, nothing else matters.” ”

“ See oneself as discord, as part of the whole, every thought, every act, every feeling determined by it, and one entered, as it were, into the unwilling redemption. Desire, striving, hope, and fear fell from one. One found the secret of the Eternal Now, holding in its timelessness the vast vision of a world of change. But to Gavan, in these moments, the sorrow, the striving, the agony of life was sweet and desirable; for, to the finite life that strove, and hoped, and suffered the vision became the sightless gaze of death, and nothingness was the guerdon of such attainment. ”

“ The strange tone of his voice—it was indeed like the far note of a falling bell, dying in an abyss—roused Eppie from her experiments. She shook his shoulder. “Open your eyes, Gavan; please, at once. You make me feel horridly. I would rather have you look at the sky than fall inside like that.”
He raised himself on an arm now, with a gaze, for a moment, vague, deadened, blank, then sprang to his feet. “Don’t let’s look. Don’t let’s fall. We must pray and have faith. Eppie, I have made you so pale. Dear Eppie, to care so much. ”

“ The trivial occasion lent itself to splendid analogies. The strange light from above bathed her from head to foot in soft, intermittent, heavenly color.
Suddenly, in darkness, Grainger seized her hand. She had hardly felt the pressure, short, sharp with all the exasperation of his worship, before it was gone.
She did not turn to look at him. More than the unjustifiableness of the action, its unexpectedness, she felt a pain, a perplexity, as for something mocking, incongruous. And as if in instinctive seeking she turned her eyes on Gavan and found that he was looking at her. ”

“ But Eppie was pushing, pushing against the closed doors and would not be lured away by lightness. “Above all, Gavan, do you see that he is merely an illogical Hindoo when he tries to bridge his abyss with ethics? On his own premises he is utterly fatalistic, so that the very turning from the evil illusion, the very breaking down of the barrier of self, is never, with him, the result of an effort of the will, never a conscious choice, but something deep and rudimentary, subconscious, an influx of revelation, a vision that sets one free, perhaps, but that can only leave one with emptiness.” ”

“ Gavan glanced out at the rushing darkness on either side. It was like the sliding of a curtain before the first act of a drama. His cigar was done and he did not light another. His eyes on that darkness that passed and passed, he gave himself up to the long vision of the nearer years. Through them went always the link with childhood, the haunting phrase that sounded in every scene—that fear of life, that deep dread of its evil and its pain that he had tried to hide from Eppie, but that, together, they had glanced at. ”

“ He thought of her, but now with no fear, no anguish. A vast indifference filled him. It was no longer a question of tearing himself from her, no longer a question of saving himself and her. There was no question, nor any one to save. He was gone away, from her, from everything.
When the dawn slowly stole into the garden, so that the ghosts of day began to take shape and color, Gavan rose among them. The earth was damp with dew; his hair and clothes were damp. Overhead the sky was white, and the hills upon it showed a flat, shadowless green. ”

“ To love, the eremite of Cheylesford Lodge wouldn’t yield—perhaps for very pity’s sake; but if he were made to see the other side of it?—Grainger found a grim amusement in the paradox—the lover, in spite of love, might yield to pity. Couldn’t his own manliness strike some spark of manliness from Gavan? Couldn’t he and Eppie between them, with their so different appeals,—she to what was soft, he to what was tough,—hoist his tragically absurd head above water, as it were, into the air of real life, that might, who knew? fill and sustain his aquatic lungs? ”

“ There wasn’t a ray of enchantment in it. It was like bleak canvas scenery waiting for the footlights and a decorated stage.
Gavan looked before him, down the garden path, shivering a little. He was cold, and the sensation brought him back to the old fact of life, that, after all, was there as long as one saw it. The coming of the light seemed to retwist once more his own palely tinted prism of personality, and with the cold, with the conscious looking back at the night and forward to the day, came a long, dull ache of sadness. It was more physical than mental ”

“ Her love, including but so far transcending all natural cravings, had its proud recoil from the abasement—oh, she saw it all!—that his limitation would bring to it. Yet, like the mother again, adapting truth to the child’s dim apprehension, leading it on by symbols, she brooded over her deep thoughts of redemption and looked clearly at all dangers and all hopes. Faith must face even his unspiritual seeing. Faith must endure his worse than pagan love. Bound to her by every natural tie, her strength must lift him, through them, to their spiritual aspect, to their reality. ”

“ She put aside his lightness. “Gavan, we are friends. May I talk as I like to you?”
“Of course you may. I’ve always shown you that.”
“No, you have tried to prevent me from talking. But now I will. I have been thinking. It seems to me that it is your life that has so twisted your mind; it has been so joyless.”
“Does that make it unusual?”
“You must love life before you can know it.”
“You must love it, and lose it, before you can know it. I have had joy, Eppie; I have loved life. My experience has not been peculiarly personal; it is merely the history of all thought, pushed far enough.” ”

“ He knew the rules of the game and with him Alice was safe from any open pillory. People would never do more than whisper.
A bitter daylight flooded for Gavan that sweet, false dawn, and once again the cruelty, the caprice at the heart of all things were revealed to him. He knew the flame of impotent remorse. He had tossed the miserable child to this fate, and though remorse, like all else, was meaningless, he loathed himself for his futile, empty magnanimity.
She had seen his eyes upon her as she rode. She sent for him, and, alone with him, the glitter, the hardness, broke to dreadful despair. ”

“ It seized him, though he knew it for illusion. He laughed at the specter of nothingness and gloried in the beauty of the rainbow moment. This human creature needed him and he her: that was, for them, the only reality; who cared for the blank background where their lives flashed and vanished? The flash was what mattered. He sprang from the dead self, as from a tomb, when he kissed her lips. Life might mean sorrow and defeat, but its tragedy was atoned for by a moment of such joy.
“Gavan, Gavan, do we love each other? Do we?” ”

“ New things come. Old things fade and fade,—all but the deepest things. They couldn’t fade. No,” he repeated, “they couldn’t. Only, even they might get dimmer.”
She saw that he spoke from an agony of doubt, and he seemed to wrench the knife she had stabbed him with from his heart as he added: “But Robbie is such a little thing. And little things people do forget, I am sure of it. It’s that that makes them so sad.”
“Well, then,”—Eppie, too, felt the relief of the lesser pain,—“they will remember again. When you see Robbie in heaven you will remember all about him. ”

“ Could a woman look so steadily, with such a clear, untroubled sympathy, upon such a love as his, were there no great emotion within her, controlling her, absorbing her, making her indifferent to all lesser appeals? Had this negative, this aimless, this ambiguous man, captured, without any fight for it, her strong, her reckless heart? So he questioned, while Eppie still answered his gaze with eyes that showed him nothing but their grave, deep friendship.
“So it’s a contest between life and death?” he said at last.
“Between me and Gavan you mean?” ”

“ Eppie was carrying her one day when she and Gavan had followed Aunt Barbara on some housewifely errand up to the highest attic rooms. Outside the low sills of the dormer-windows ran a narrow stone gallery looking down over the pine-tree and the garden. The children squeezed out through the window to hang in delighted contemplation over the birds’-eye view, and then Eppie crawled to a farther corner where one could see round to the moorland and find oneself on a level, almost, with the rooks’ nests in the lime-trees. She handed Elspeth to Gavan to hold for her while she went on this adventure. ”

“ Eppie protested. And now Gavan asked, while Miss Barbara looked gratefully at him, sure of his backing, though she might not quite be able to understand his methods, “Are they such different creeds?”
Still holding her aunt’s hand and still looking up into her face, Eppie answered: “One is despair of life, the other trust in life. One takes all meaning out of life and the other fills it with meaning. The secret of one is to lose life, and the secret of the other to gain it. There is all the difference in the world between them; all the difference between life and death.” ”

“ Eppie’s face was still turned from him so that he could not see how she bore the rifling, but in the same dulled and gentle voice she answered, “He doesn’t ask what you do.”
At that Grainger’s deepest resentment broke out.
“Doesn’t ask your love? No, I suppose not. The man’s a mollusk,—a wretched, diseased creature.”
He had struck at last a flash from her persistent gentleness. She faced him, and he saw that she tried to smile over deep anger.
“You say that because Gavan is not in love with me? It is a sick fancy that sees every man not in love with me as sick too.” ”

“ Pale sunlight flooded the square, white room where, in all its dignified complexity of appurtenance, the simple meal was laid out. From the windows one saw the clear sky, the moor, its summer purple turned to rich browns and golds, and, nearer, the griffins with their shields.
Eppie was a little late in coming, and Gavan, while he and the general finished their wandering consumption of porridge and sat down to bacon and eggs, had time to observe by daylight in Miss Barbara, behind her high silver urn, the changes that in her were even more emphatic than in her brother. ”

“ Gavan asked.
“No, by incompleteness: one loves what could complete oneself and what one could complete; or so it seems to me.”
“And as long as there are selves, will there be suffering, too?”
Her eyes met his thought fearlessly.
“That question, I am sure, is the basis for all the religions of cowardice, religions that deny life because of their craving for peace.”
“Isn’t the craving for peace as legitimate as the craving for life?”
“Nothing that denies life can be legitimate. Life is the one arbitrator. And restlessness need not mean suffering. ”

“ Eppie asked in her steady voice.
“What you call life is what I call death, perhaps, Eppie.”
“Your metaphysics may be very cheap; I know very little about them. But if all that were true, I should still say that the illusion is more real than that nothingness—for to us such a reality would be nothingness. And I should say, let us live our reality all the more intensely, since, for us, there is no other.”
“How you care for life,” said Gavan, as he had said it once before. He looked at her marching through the mist like a defiant Valkyrie. ”

“ And suddenly the thought of that heave of sod, that headstone, what it stood for in his life, the tragic memory, the love, the agony,—all sinking into mere dust, into the same dust as the father whom he had hated,—struck with such unendurable anguish upon him that, as if under heavy churchyard sod a long-dead heart strove up in a tormented resurrection, life rushed appallingly upon him and, involuntarily, as a drowning man’s hand seizes a spar and clings, his hand closed on the pistol under it. Leave it, leave it,—this dream where such resurrections were possible. ”

“ What is religion to me, what is anything—anything in the world to me—if I have lost you, Gavan? Why are you so cruel, so horrible? I can’t understand it! I can’t bear it! Oh, I can’t! Why are our lives wrecked like this? Why did you leave me? Why have I become wicked? I was never, never meant to be wicked.” Tears, not of abasement, not of appeal, but of pure anguish ran down her face.
He was nearer to that elemental sadness and could speak with a more human tone. “You are not wicked—no more—no less—than any one. I don’t despise you. Believe me, Alice. ”

“ The mystic experience had come overwhelmingly to him and his mind was never to lose the effect of that immediacy of consciousness, untransmissible, unspeakable, ineffaceable. And that with which he found himself one was far from any human thoughts or emotions; rather it was the negation of them, the infinite negation of finite restlessness.
He went back to the house, to the darkened, empty room. The memories that crowded there, of pity and love and terror, were now part of the picture he looked at, as near and yet as far, as the vision of the snowdrops, the bird, and the spring sky. ”

“ That restless bird, always hovering, circling near, its shadow passing, repassing over the limpid water—he saw and knew it as the water might reflect in its stillness the bird’s flight. Life; the will to live, the will to want, and to strive, and to suffer in striving. All the waters of Eppie’s soul were broken by the flight of this bird of life; its wings, cruel and beautiful, furrowed and cut; its plumage, darkly bright, was reflected in every wave.
He said nothing after her last words.
“You think all feelings delusions, Gavan?” ”

“ She began to confide; not with an open frankness, but vaguely, as though she groped toward the causes of her sadness. She shrank, and knew now why she shrank, when her loud-voiced, cheerful husband came tramping into the room. Then she began to see that she was horribly lonely. Unconsciously, in the confidences now, she plead for help, for reassurance. She probed him constantly as to religious hopes and the real significance of life. Her soft voice, with its endearing little stammer, grew to Gavan nearer and dearer than all the voices of the world. ”