A Puritan Bohemia/Chapter 23
CHAPTER XXIII
"Quelque terme où nous pensions nous attacher et nous affermir il branle et nous quitte; et, si nous le suivons, il échappe à nos prises, nous glisse, et fuit d'une fuite éternelle."—Pensèes, Pascal.
"Let's sit by the fire," suggested Anne, "and utter 'cosmic platitudes' for the last time."
"It is too bad," said Mrs. Kent mournfully. "The winter has been so interesting, and now you are going away. That is the trouble with Bohemia: nothing stays."
"That's the trouble with life, isn't it?" remarked Howard wearily. "Nothing stays, except an endless process by which we learn. We never really attain."
"Oh yes we do!" contradicted Anne. "The Lord usually gives you the thing you want after you have begun to stop caring for it."
"That's the first pessimistic remark I ever heard you make," said Howard.
"I usually make my pessimistic remarks when you aren't around," Anne replied.
A fresh wind was blowing into the studio. Through the skylight two stars were visible in the pale spring sky. A fire had been kindled on the hearth, "for sentiment," Anne said.
"How in the world," asked Howard, "do you derive that notion from success in the one thing you always wanted?"
"Oh, success tarnishes your hope," answered Anne with a laugh, "and makes it suffer the fatal change from the thing you want to the thing you have."
"Just what I said!" cried Howard triumphantly. "The only possession lies in not having."
"I told you that long ago," murmured Anne.
"That was different altogether. This is a general question."
"That was a childish notion about heaven," Anne continued, " 'They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more.' Think how insufferable eternity would be without the one thing that makes time endurable."
"One wouldn't mind the endless changing," interrupted Helen from her corner, "if one really learned anything. We just go round and round like squirrels in a cage."
"Somebody," Anne remarked, "said that all progress was simply a moving round from one part of the circle to another."
"That may be true," Howard answered; "only, when you get back to the starting-point, you find that it isn't the same point."
He rose to take Helen's cup, noticing, as he did so, that her cheeks looked thin in the firelight.
"It is for the last time," he said, as he held out his hand. The girl started, and Anne's pet Sèvres cup fell to the floor. Then, first, the young man caught the expression in Helen's eyes when they rested on him.
"That's symbolic," said Anne. "No; I don't mind in the least. Bohemia began with that cup, and all the illusions of Bohemia perish with it."
"Mend it," suggested Howard, holding up the fragments. "Life is nothing but a putting together of the broken pieces. I can imagine a process of learning through loss that would make one's failures satisfactory. By the way, when success comes, it doesn't usually take the shape that you expect. The Art Museum has offered to buy my picture, on condition that its name shall be changed!"
"Accept!" cried Anne. "Change the name every year. Think how many noble truths you could illustrate."
The conversation drifted on through the old, great themes. Half earnestly, half in jest, they repeated worn remarks, weighed down by that dull sense of foreboding that haunts all partings. The sky above grew darker; the stars shone out more clearly.
"Isn't there anything that lasts?" asked Helen despairingly.
"Yes," murmured Mrs. Kent.
"If I could only paint those lovely, triumphant eyes," thought Anne, watching Mrs. Kent's face in the flickering light, "I'd call the picture 'Love and Death.'"
"You are all too impatient," said Mrs. Kent. "Wait. In the great moments of experience, one knows. One feels that one is working with God at the heart of things, and knows more than one can explain."
"Suppose we haven't any great moments?" said Howard grimly.
"There's your philosophy of learning through loss," answered Mrs. Kent. "Moments of denial may be great."
She looked sadly at Anne. To her it seemed that the girl had made the great mistake of her life.
"That is pretty thin philosophy, when it comes to personal application," said Howard, shaking his head.
"Most philosophy is," suggested Anne.
"After all, there's some truth in it. Life is just a chance to learn by living out your own life faithfully," Howard remarked.
"Isn't it a chance to learn to enter other people's lives?" asked Mrs. Kent. "One's joy and one's sorrow come to make one understand."
"How can one understand other people's lives," demanded Anne, "when it is so hard to make the least sense out of one's own?"
"Oh dear!" groaned Helen, "you are all saying just the opposite of what you said at first. Don't you remember?"
They did remember, and they laughed.
"All this confirms Mrs. Kent's idea that opinions are not of much account," said Anne. "Miserere is the only one who has been true to his philosophy." She stroked the cat lying in her lap. "He has the only kind of philosophy one can be true to."
"We have changed our points of view," said Mrs. Kent meditatively. "That, is because we have faced certain experiences. Life always outstrips opinion. We learn the secret bit by bit, and not by thinking only. Every vivid experience is like touching the eyes of the blind. After it, we see forces written over with meanings that escaped us before. So we go creeping nearer and nearer the heart of things. There are worlds within worlds."
The studio was silent for a minute, except for Miserere's purring.
"After all, the beauty of it lies in the mystery," continued Mrs. Kent. "Life is full of subtle hints, as if its experiences were symbols of something greater, that we cannot understand, yet."
"Oh dear!" said Anne. "Life seems to be a kind of game where the new question rises to the lips of the man who answered the last one. I suppose that the privilege of saying the last word is reserved for the last man."
It was growing late. Mrs. Kent rose to go. Anne lit the lamp and gazed sadly at her departing friends.
"It is going to be so lonely in Bohemia!" she said. "Mrs. Kent and I will go about with slowly whitening hair, holding converse with the ghosts of our friends. Then grass will begin to grow in the pavement."
"The fellowship of the Round Table is broken forever," said Howard, holding out his hand in parting.
Anne's eyes grew dim. The world of real people seemed for a moment to disappear with those familiar faces that faded away into the darkness of the corridor.