The unlit lamp

That was for her! That was an arrow for her heart.

She was quite alone in the house; Rose had gone out to a lodge meeting of the Lady Pioneers. Claudine was always glad to let her go; she was never so happy as when alone with her ghosts. When the stairs creaked, that was the stout figure of her mother in dull black silk, going about her benevolent household affairs; there was a rustle of paper; that was the boy Lance studying in his room upstairs; a faint tapping; that was her father emptying his pipe. The wind blowing across the garden brought back to her unblemished the old emotions, the sheltered security, that careless and formless hope that had filled her girlhood; she would forget, alone in her room, the reality she had found so bitter.

But to be a ghost among these other ghosts! That frightened her. She looked about the quiet lamp-lit room; in the bookcase her old books, on the walls her old pictures, on the bureau the photographs of her father and mother, and a pitiful little bottle of that Cherry Blossom perfume; only the old things; it was as if twenty years had been a dream. She was aware that she had tried to make them so, that she had tried with desperation not to live. Blasphemous effort, rewarded now by this numb anguish!

“A frustrate ghost!” she cried aloud, and her voice seemed to have no sound. She had a preposterous idea that she was invisible and inaudible, that there was nothing in this room but the memory of her. She was only her own dream. She sprang up to look in the mirror, and saw there a white face and wide eyes; an apparition.... The wind blowing on her was suddenly chill, like a cold breath.

“No, no!” she said. “Oh, no! I want to be alive!”

There was for once no solace for her in that dear garden; she closed the window and pulled down the blind, to shut away the dark and the troubling sounds; she sat down and clasped her trembling hands; she tried to see herself once more in the stream of life, let it be never so cold and violent. She thought of Andrée; nothing but pain in that thought. Poor young Andrée and her poor little baby! Poor Al! She thought of Edna, hiding under her tranquillity an unforgettable humiliation, of Bertie, with his gallant despair; of Gilbert, unaccountably forlorn. There was a thin veil hung between her and these living, struggling creatures; she could see them but not reach them; she fancied them being swept past her and calling to her and needing her, while she looked on, standing apart.

“Oh, why haven’t I done something? Why haven’t I helped?” she demanded of her shrinking heart. And the inexorable response was “Begin now!”

But remorse came easier than effort. She passionately condemned herself. She saw herself an egoist; in her young days she had been gay and gracious because she had had what she wanted. And when that had been withdrawn from her, she had grown cold, aloof, finding peace in indifference. She thought of all she might have done, of the influence she might have exerted. Not that she believed herself stronger or wiser than these four adult human beings for whom she felt responsible; it was a mystic belief in the power of a woman and a mother. She was convinced that she could give more than was in her, more than she had; she loathed herself for not having done so. She believed, as was natural, that if she had tried she must have succeeded. She knew that in her garden everything grew only according to its type; she believed nevertheless that human creatures might be so warmed by her love, so nourished by her tears, that they would grow not according to any laws, but according to her own desires.

She felt that this was the turning point in her life; she had wasted twenty years, dreamed them away; only God knew how few or how many remained to her. She was making the most painful effort of her life; it was not a struggle, she wished it were; it was an attempt to struggle. The lamp must be lit, the loin girded; she must no longer pass among the living as a gentle phantom. She must help all these people who belonged to her; she must by her valour and devotion compensate for what they were denied; she must inspire and fortify. But what was to breathe life into her? Love—even such love as she had for Andrée—had not done it. She was not religious; she could not turn to prayer. And her philosophers had nothing at all to give her. She sat up almost all that night, trying to fan her shrinking and mutinous spirit into a blaze.... Her life should be service; she clung to that idea.

It was the inevitable moment, due to everyone whose work is finished, to women whose children have grown; it was a little death. But she did not recognize it as that; she felt it to be a spiritual re-birth. The world was empty and she was obliged to fill it with herself. And she was by no means large enough.

§ ii

She telephoned to Gilbert in his office the next morning; she was so affable that he was upset. She should have been home long ago, anyhow, instead of staying down there alone on Staten Island in that peculiar way. He felt that she was trying to be ingratiating, and this of course aroused his hostility and distrust. Her quiet, clear voice reaching him in the midst of his morning mail caused him all the usual feelings of annoyance induced by any thought of home life. She asked him about his health, and he knew she didn’t care; she even asked that supremely irritating question “How is business?” Well did he know why his family asked that.

Then, amazingly, she said:

“If you’re not too tired, Gilbert, won’t you come down here for dinner? The garden is so lovely.”

“Suppose you come home,” he said, surlily, but it was only an instinctive reaction; the bear hitting out with his paw.

“Do come,” she said, pleasantly. “It would be nice to be by ourselves. And the garden—”

“Very well! Very well!” he said. “I’ll come. I can’t spend the morning at the telephone. I’ll come, Claudine. Good-by.”

Now this disturbed him. He was inclined to suspect, with reason, all advances made by his family, and yet he liked these advances. He felt fairly sure that his wife had some favour to ask, some feminine chicanery to execute, but he was like a king with his courtiers; he was grimly contemptuous of all this beguilement, but he relished the homage.

The idea of going back to that house on the hill to see Claudine stirred in him old and unpleasant memories. He felt himself no phantom; he was poignantly aware of the passing of twenty years and youth with them; he didn’t feel that he had not tried, but that he had not succeeded. He had made money, just as he had intended, but the rewards of his activity had been unjustly withheld. He had the wrong sort of wife, the wrong sort of children, the wrong sort of life altogether. Still he would do the right thing, as he had always done. He stopped on his way to the ferry and bought Claudine a five-pound box of chocolates, the kinds she hated most and which he had bought for years and years, never being undeceived.

§ iii

But long before he got there, all Claudine’s plans had been upset. She had gone about all the morning, seriously intent upon her scheme to win back her husband. This, she felt, was the first step along her new road; once he was won back, she would make him into something different, as it was her womanly duty to do; she would take him to concerts and persuade him to read. She had that idea common to good and inexperienced women, of the fascination she might wield if she chose, an idea in no way related to vanity, but a conception necessary to existence. She had never yet consciously tried to be fascinating, but at the back of her mind had always been the thought of how powerful she might be, if she weren’t so nice. She was obliged to believe this. If Gilbert, by analogy, had realized when he went out to lunch, that perhaps seven out of ten men that he passed could have knocked him flat on his back, he couldn’t have endured life; he had to believe that he could hold his own, if he wanted. And she, too, must have her belief in her mystic power.

She had been sitting down to a delightful, solitary lunch; the dining-room with its shining waxed floor and well-polished mahogany furniture, the yellow roses in a great Delft bowl, the dim, cool peace all about her, filled her with serenity and courage. Certainly she would change Gilbert and everything else in her life; she intended to ask him to stop here with her for the rest of the summer; a real sacrifice, for it meant the end of this delicate and immaterial existence, and a hateful preoccupation with roasts and wines and laundry. Edna had gone to Easthampton with the Ryders, Bertie was away with Lance; Miss Dorothy could have the Brooklyn house to herself. This transplanting would make her work easier, but she realized that she would have to be notably charming in order to win his consent. She thought a good deal about what she should wear; she was engaged in this when Al came in. He was very hot and crumpled and cheerful.

“Oh ... Alfred!” she cried. “Andrée ...?”

“Fine!” he told her. “But I had a free afternoon—she had some friends there, and I thought I’d like to see you.”

“There’s nothing at all wrong?”

“Not a thing! Only—I don’t know—I’ve been wanting to have a talk with you for a good while.... I know I talk too much, but just the same, it seems to me the best way to get anywhere.”

“Sit down,” she said, smiling. “I think you’re very fortunate to be able to talk, Alfred. I can’t think of anything nicer than to be able to express what you feel.”

He did sit down opposite her, and at once assumed his serious, conversational look.

“It’s a lot more than that,” he said. “I have an idea that you can’t really feel a thing until you do express it. That’s the value of talking; not that it conveys your ideas to someone else, because generally it doesn’t, but that it wakes up your own brain.... But this was going to be about Andrée.... There’s something I want to get from you—something I can’t get hold of.”

“If you mean how best to get on with her—” she began, but he interrupted.

“No; it’s not that. That’s all a mistake—this ‘getting on’ with people. It means either humouring her, like a spoiled child, or trying to dominate her. Well, what I want is, to let her alone. And that’s what I can’t do. I’m always trying to make her see things my way.”

“But you can’t help doing that when you know you’re right.”

“I don’t know; I only think. I’m only an experimenter. I may be wrong about lots of things. Anyway, she’s experimenting, too, and she’s altogether too fine to be bothered. I’ve spent the best part of my life shouting people down, and now it’s hard to stop. It isn’t that I’ve tried to cram my ideas down anyone’s throat,” he assured her, earnestly. “All I ever wanted to do was to start people thinking. I’ve always tried to keep hold of that idea that I was an experimenter, but I’m too darned sure. I’m—well, I’m not humble enough, d’you see? I interfere.... Now, that’s what I’ve always admired so in you. That’s what makes you so wonderful. You don’t interfere.”

“But—Alfred!” said the frustrate ghost, with something like a gasp.

“I wish you’d explain to me—give me some idea how you do it.... How your mind works,” he went on. “I mean, how can you watch, the way you do, without interfering?”

Many reasons prevented her from telling him that she had very often tried to interfere, and had invariably failed. She was silent for some time, while he waited anxiously for her words.

“I’d been thinking, only last night, that I didn’t help—interfere—nearly enough,” she said, at last. She raised her eyes to his face with a look he had never seen before, a glance troubled and appealing; she was making a heroic struggle for candour with her reticent and uncandid soul. No other living creature had seemed to her so human, so impersonal, so secure, as this young man; she felt that she could say to him as much as her heart would ever permit her to utter. She quite forgot that he was waiting for wisdom from her; she grew pale with the intensity of her desire to hold communion with her kind, to hear the truth without entirely telling it.

“Alfred....” she said. “It seemed to me—I’d wasted my life.”

“But how?” he demanded.

“By not helping.”

“Well ...” he said, honestly. “Of course there’s a lot that needs doing in the world, and the people with money and leisure—”

“I don’t mean doing anything,” she said, with an impatient little frown. “I mean—influencing. I haven’t tried to influence the people about me.”

He uttered a mild oath of himself. It was startling, to say the least, that she should talk like this, as if she hadn’t heard a word he had spoken—when he had been waiting for the secret of her non-intervention.

“I should have tried to help my children—to influence them,” she went on, with increasing agitation. “I’ve stood aside—”

“But don’t you see?” he cried. “That’s what’s so wonderful! That’s the fine thing about you—you’ve let them alone. Even if you haven’t accomplished much yourself, you’ve given other people a chance.”

He was distressed to see tears in her eyes.

“My children aren’t happy,” she said.

“They’re living,” he said. “They’re growing. They’re learning their own lessons in their own way. If you’d done what you call influence them, it would only mean that they saw things through your eyes.”

“I’ve accomplished nothing. I’ve only passed through life like—”

His glance fell on the Delft bowl.

“Like a flower,” he said, thoughtfully. “You’ve just existed, in a very sweet, gentle way. I think that’s a mighty fine thing.... I don’t believe there are many people who have done so little harm.”

He got up; he took her outstretched hand, and went off, without the sage advice he had come for, but consoled for lack of it by a variety of new ideas. And he left Claudine strangely assuaged.

§ iv

She went walking along, gravely inspecting her sweet peas, bending over them to inhale their perfume, to touch with a delicate finger their exquisite petals. They had done very well; she was proud of them. People passing along the street stopped to look at them in their incredible variety; a great bloom of colour against the high board fence, faint pink, pale yellow, lavender, rose, a strange, deep purple brown; they looked like little winged things, alighting for the moment on the fragile vines.

She came to the end of the row and turned the corner to the bed where the verbenas stood, and beside them a turbulent little sea of petunias, closely massed. The smell of the moist earth, of the grass freshly cut, of all the little flowers she had planted and tended, came to her on a tiny breeze, and a limitless joy filled her. Never before in her life had she felt so happy, so tranquil, so strong. Her glance embraced the smooth lawn stretching to the gravel drive that encircled the house, and the flower beds against the walls, filled with nasturtiums, thickly bordered with sweet alyssum, drenched in the sun, hot, fragrant, valiant little things. She was one with all of this, with no more purpose than they had.

Alfred’s words had filled her with actual bliss. She might be a ghost, but she was no more frustrate than that sweet pea that had swung loose from the string upon which it should have climbed, and swayed in the breeze, holding by nothing. She was an unlit lamp, but by the blaze of the sun, who needed her little flame? The world wanted nothing from her, and she had nothing to give. The turmoil of the night before was gone, her little effort ended.

She saw Gilbert coming up the hill; he looked hot and cross, with his straw hat pushed back on his head, and the box of chocolates under his arm. But now his crossness didn’t seem to her alien and alarming; he was nothing but Gilbert, a familiar mystery. There was no need to understand him, no need for any excessive interest in him. She wasn’t required to explain herself to him, or him to herself. She believed that she could never again be repelled by any strangeness in him, or disturbed by what he did. Her soul felt relieved of all its burdens, light, almost gay. He was one person, and she was another; they couldn’t gravely affect each other, they were not inter-dependent; they were allied, but it was an alliance only for their interest, not to hurt or to hamper them. She went out to meet him, with a friendly smile she led him up on the veranda and left him there while she made an artful mint julep. Her friendliness didn’t depend upon his being friendly; it was her own independent emotion. But it provoked an instant response from him.

“What’s come over you?” he asked, curiously. “You haven’t been like this for I don’t know how long.”

“Perhaps it’s this dear garden,” she answered, vaguely.

“You’d better stay in it, then,” he said, with, a sulky smile. “It agrees with you.”

“That’s what I’d like to do. Won’t you come down here for the rest of the summer, Gilbert? It’s very cool and quiet.”

“I might,” he answered, to her surprise.

The sun had gone down and a cheerful dusk had fallen, lively with the chirping of insects. They talked carelessly, of the small things that interested them; he too grew affable, almost tranquil. Astonishing how little he wanted! Not to be charmed, not to be comprehended, only to be accepted, casually and kindly, just as he was.

An absurd idea came to her of their two souls, sitting side by side, in rocking chairs, absorbed in the contemplation of life; she saw these souls as pliable white things, like half-melted candles, with great black eyes. It made her laugh aloud.

“What’s the joke?” asked Gilbert.

“Only the silliest sort of fancy,” she said, in a comfortable tone that didn’t irritate him. He didn’t ask again, because he didn’t care. His desire had been always to be understood, never to understand others. And any woman who could sit in the dusk by him while he smoked, who talked so little, who made a julep like that, undoubtedly understood him. He was content.