They were silent a moment.
"I don"t know how it is," she drew her hand across her eyes; "but you give me again the old feeling that you"re somehow a prisoner--"
"A prisoner--yes."
"And that I must set you free."
His dark eyes were misty for a moment. "You couldn"t do that without--"
"Without?"
He shook his head, turned, and glanced behind him. "Oh, look at the sun!"
It was going down in a crimson flood that dyed the whole country-side a red that was like new-spilt blood. It was one of those atmospheric effects under which the most contradictory colors in nature are subdued to a common hue. One has at such times a sense of looking at the landscape through colored gla.s.s. The white and yellow farm-houses flamed a dull orange. Their windows glowed like bra.s.s reflecting fire. The very trees and gra.s.s were soaked in the strong dye of the sun. Ethan"s steady pull took them swiftly on, out of sight of farms, into the wilder country. Still the girl sat with uplifted face. Her love of autumn and of sunsetting had been no sad reflective sentiment, but something more than common--eager, subtly exhilarated, joyous. To-day, stimulated and at the same time balked, she found in the splendor of the hour a sharper sense than ever of the drama in life, the essential poetry in human experience.
"I think I must be growing old," she said, with a happy sigh.
"What are the signs?"
"I"m beginning to notice the scenery. I"m grateful to the sun."
Her eyes fell suddenly on the clean-carved features opposite; the dark head and the pale ivory of the face seemed alone of all things in the responsive world to refuse to wear the livery of light.
"Oh, I forgot," she said, "you don"t like sunsets any more than you like autumn. Here"s the mooring-place."
He stopped his long, steady stroke, and paddled the boat under the overhanging trees.
"On the contrary," he said, making fast, and looking the while through the branches to the conflagration in the west--"on the contrary, I"ve changed, too--"growing old," perhaps, like you." He smiled and sat down, his eyes on the slow-sinking sun. "These, and scenes like them, are the conditions that reconcile me."
"Reconcile! They lift me up so high that I am dizzy."
She closed her eyes an instant, and then opened them with a fluttering smile. They seemed to have forgotten there had been any thought of going ash.o.r.e.
"It is so splendid and yet so calm," he said, in a low voice. "It sets me free from the burden and heat of the day."
"It doesn"t set _me_ free--not that I want to be set free. I love the burden and heat of the day. But this--_this_ sets me thrilling. It clutches me at the heart, and makes my breath taste sharp, like steel, against my tongue. This is the wonder-time of day."
"Yes," he said, dreamily--"yes, in a sense, it is the wonder-time. No morning or high noon, anywhere up and down the world, can match this hour."
"But it makes you sad," she said, resentfully, as though he had spoken an ill thing of some one dear.
"No, I"m not sad any more; I"m reconciled. It is the moment when I can most easily forget my own existence, and feel melted into the general life."
She turned away with flashing eyes.
"Why are you so angry?" he said, softly, "or is it the sunset dyes you redder than it did?"
"That you can say such things so calmly, and at such a moment--with all this" (she opened her arms as if pa.s.sionately to embrace the beauty of the world)--"all this spread out before us, with only you and me to see it, the unconscious world not caring _that_"--she snapped her quick white fingers in the lazy air. "You sit there saying the eyes that glory in it, the hearts that ache at the wonder of it, _they_ are nothing; they are here to look on a moment, suffer, and die, while the great spectacle goes on and on and on. Why did we come here, then? What"s the good of it?"
"_I"ll_ never tell you."
"I"d begin to believe some of your libels on life if I thought there wasn"t more in it than just--"
"Just?"
"That we are brought here with all _this_ inside us"--she drew her doubled hand across her breast like one in pain--"all this, and with the destiny of brutes--cheated a little while with gladness while we"re children--"
"_That"s_ a superst.i.tion, too. The happiness of children is more than half an illusion of the old. _I_ remember. Others have forgotten; that"s the difference."
"No, no; I remember, too!" The raised voice was half challenge, half appeal. "_I_ was happy, and I"m happy still, except when you--" She broke off near the brink of tears. "And I mean to be happy. Oh, it"s a good, _good_ world, and I"m glad I"m here."
"_I"m_ glad you"re here."
"But if you were right"--she looked out with a vague fear to the fading west--"if all this keen consciousness existed just to be tortured a little while, and then flung down in the dark--if that is all"--the eager face grew white--"then human life"s an outrage."
Silence for a moment, and then in a low voice came the words:
"It _is_ an outrage."
"Don"t say so, Ethan; I can"t bear it."
"Oh yes, we can all bear it; and by so much we ephemera get back our lost significance, our sovereignty."
She looked up.
"Through this strange fate of ours," he said, "we fulfil the end of the world."
Old doctrinal a.s.sociations flitted before the phrase, blurring for her his pagan use of it.
"The end, the aim of the universe, seems to be beauty--beauty so varied in spirit and in form that it often gets strange names from men."
"Yes, it is _all_ beautiful, isn"t it, Ethan?"
"That you can always see it so, and that even I can see it sometimes, proves we are not the lowest in the scale of life. That power of finding Beauty through her disguises is the best seal civilization sets on men."
"And so even you believe we fulfil the end of the world?"
He nodded.
"It"s as magnificent, in its way, as a mountain peak, or the going down of the sun, that puny men should accept the outrage of life and the insult of death so n.o.bly, with so little crying out. When one thinks of it"--he laughed harshly--"the old G.o.ds and heroes were pygmies compared with modern men. What were their doings and their destinies to the hopeless, silent battle men are waging, without G.o.d and without hope in the world? The men of to-day don"t go reeling into battle, drunken with the wine of hope, or dazed with the fairy tales of faith. But they fight none the less well, knowing they go out to die, and not even sure for what cause. It is so they fulfil the end of the world. Nothing in it is mightier than the spirit of man calmly confronting his fate."
She drew a quick breath.
"You"ve put it into words," she said, "but I"ve _felt_ it."
He looked at her with dull foreboding. He had expected contradiction, not acquiescence.
"Come," he said, rising and catching up the boat-cushion. "It"s chilly here in the boat. Why did we come under these wet trees? Let"s land, and go and sit in what"s left of the sunset there."