The numb pain at her heart forced some sharp tears from the closed eyes. She bent and unbent her fingers hopelessly, two or three times, and then let them lie out flat and still. It was not their fault, not the fingers’ fault; they could learn to do it, if they only had the chance; but they could never, never have the chance. They must always do something else, always a hundred other things first, always save and spare and patch and contrive; there was never time to do the thing she longed for most. Only the odd moments, the unexpected freedoms, the stolen half-hours, in which to live one’s highest dream, only the castaway time for one’s soul! And every year the fleeting glory waned, wavered, sunk away more and more sorrowfully into the gray, soundless shadows of an unlived life. Once she had heard it so clearly—long ago, on the far-off sun-spaced, wind-singing fields of home—the wild sweet choruses, the songs no man had ever sung. Still she heard them sometimes in the twilight, in the night, when she sat alone and work was over; high and thin and fading, only sound-ghosts, but still with the incomparable glory of a first revelation, a song no one else has ever heard, a marvel to be seized and bodied; only—they faded away into the nodding sleep that would conquer, and in the light and rush of day were mournfully silent. And she never captured them, never would; life was half over now.
With the thought she started up, struck the chords again, a world of plaint throbbing through the strings; surely the wizard himself would have been satisfied. But ah, once more the fatal uncertainty of the fingers. … She bit the left hand savagely, then touched it, softly and remorsefully, with the other, murmuring: “Poor fingers! Not your fault.” At last she rose and stood at the window, looking out into the night, and thinking of the ruined gift, the noblest gift, that had been hers and would die dumb; thinking of the messages that had come to her up out of the silent dark and sunk back into it, unsounded; of the voices she would have given to the messages of the masters, and never would give now; and with a bitter compression of the lips she said: “Well, I was born to strive and fail.”
And suddenly a rush of feeling swept her own life out of sight, and away out in the deepening night she saw the face of an old, sharp-chinned, white-haired, dead man; he had been her father once, strong and young, with chestnut hair and gleaming eyes, and with his own dream of what he had to do in life. Perhaps he, too, had heard sounds singing in the air, a new message waiting for deliverance. It was all over now; he had grown old and thin-faced and white, and had never done anything in the world; at least nothing for himself, his very own; he had sewn clothes—thousands, millions of stitches in his work-weary life—no doubt there were still in existence scraps and fragments of his work—in same old ragbag perhaps—beautiful, fine stitches, into which the keen eyesight and the deft hand had passed, still showing the artist-craftsman. But that was not his work; that was the service society had asked of him and he had rendered; himself, his own soul, that wherein he was different from other men, the unbought thing that the soul does for its own outpouring—that was nowhere. And over there, among the low mounds of the soldiers’ graves, his bed was made, and he was lying in it, straight and still, with the rain crying softly above him. He had been so full of the lust of life, so alert, so active! and nothing of it all!—“Poor father, you failed too,” she muttered softly.
And then behind the wraith of the dead man there rose an older picture, a face she had never seen, dead fifty years before; but it shone through the other face, and outshone it, luminous with great suffering, much overcoming, and complete and final failure. It was the face of a woman not yet middle-aged, smitten with death, with the horror of utter strangeness in the dying eyes; the face of a woman lost in a strange city of a strange land, and with her little crying, helpless children about her, facing the inexorable agony there on the pavement, where she was sinking down, and only foreign words falling in the dying ears!—She, too, had striven; how she had striven! Against the abyss of poverty there in the old world; against the load laid on her by Nature, Law, Society, the triune God of Terror; against the inertia of another will. She had bought coppers with blood, and spared and saved and endured and waited; she had bent the gods to her will; she had sent her husband to America, the land of freedom and promise; she had followed him at last, over the great blue bitter water with its lapping mouths that had devoured one of her little ones upon the way; she had been driven like a cow in the shambles at the landing stage; she had been robbed of all but her ticket, and with her
