Studies in Solitude

I

SHE was never lonely, she told herself. The solitude of her old little white house, sitting retired from the village street among its lilac trees and syringas, did not frighten or depress her. She could spend a whole day of rain there, seeing no one but the grocer’s boy, the big gray cat, and occasional stooped hurrying figures out in the wet street; and could come down into evening calmly, busied with her enforced or chosen duties and thoughts. A cloud seemed to wrap her round in many folds of seclusion till the common world of hurry and friction and loud or secret loves and hates was dim to her eyes and ears. Street sounds and whistles of trains at the cross-roads were muffled echoes; but the ticking of the tall clock, the throbbing of rain on a tin roof, the infrequent wind banging at a loose window, the cat’s creepy tread on the stairs, grew rhythmic and insistent.

Yet she was not lonely. She never stopped to brood, listening long to perilous voices. She denied even to certain pieces of furniture, books, or ornaments, their passive right to conjure up the spectre of her solitude. If a room seemed too vibrant with unseen presences, she would enter it and drive out the quivering mystery with some brisk petty business of sweeping, of shifting a picture, or rearranging a book-shelf. Often she whistled softly about her work, although there were moments when as if by an instinct she would stop short and glance over her shoulder, to see nothing, and after that to be still.

So the day would shift from gray dawn to gray dusk; and she had not allowed herself to think that she might have cause for loneliness, there in the quiet house behind its dripping lilac trees.

Only in the evenings did the clock and the rain become too loud and real. Then, as she sat with a pleasant book or broidery in the yellow lamplit circle of her sitting-room, warm and quaint in its accumulation of color, — old gay reds, greens, blues, tumbled together by generations of fond house-holders, and now subdued into harmony by years and the low light, — she would find herself all at once rigid as an iceimage, yet alert as a coiled serpent; listening, listening, — for what? For a quick step on the flags before the door? For along jangling peal at the bell? For a voice in the hall, or a sick querulous summons from the downstairs chamber, or the scraping of a chair from above? No, she knew that she had no cause to wait for these things. There was only the rain, the clock, sleek Diogenes purring on the white foxskin, the lamp-wick fretting a little to itself, and once in a while, out in the dark street, the splash and clatter of wheels, the faint wet whisper of feet that always passed her gate.

So, with a self-scorning smile and a drawing of her hand across her eyes, she would take up again the book or needle-work, and stop abruptly that rigid listening for sounds which never came. Long since, on her first solitary night in the old house, she had vowed to herself that she would not be sad, or strange, no matter what tricks her heart and mind might play her. She would not fear memory and anticipation, but would compel them to be her servants, to keep their distance. She had been young then, and had not quite believed in her solitude. Now that she knew it through and through, she was still aware that to look too far back or too far forward would equally undo her. On these rainy nights of withdrawal, her trial-times were still upon her. If she failed now, if one shudder or one tear escaped her, she was lost forever; and the white house would drive her out, into a world where she could no more choose her own way of being alone.

But she was not lonely, she repeated; and to prove it, her mind would indulge in a fantasia of loneliness. The book would slip from her hand, and she, gazing half-hypnotized into shadowy corners, visited all the solitary people over the wide world. It pleased her to imagine homesick officers in stifling Indian bungalows; young men and girls, fresh come to the City, wandering forlorn through the glare of streets, or idling under their meagre lodging-house gas-jets; light-keepers on desolate sand-dunes and rock-ledges, climbing at night twisted iron steps to tend the eternal lamp; night-watchmen pacing deserted yards and millcorridors; sailors in the dead watch; poets and prophets trying passionately to capture the wild visions which leaped across their darkness; and most of all, many women sitting as she did in warm quaint rooms, near village streets, hearing the clock tick and the rain throb.

It pleased her, to travel so on light unhindered wing. Almost it seemed as if her soul left her body, and fared out to knock against every lonely window and to keep dumb company round every solitary lamp. And she felt that she was one of an endless army, marching straightforwardly and silently out upon their lives, stripped of the disguises that kindred and close friendship invent, and making, in return for the silence of their hearts and the smiling of their lips, only one demand of all that encountered them.

That demand she never shaped, of her own will. But when she had sat a long time, dreaming, and had at length roused herself to make fast doors and windows, had shut the cat in the kitchen, taken her hand-lamp and gone up the broad stairs to bed, — then, in the gay chintz-hung security of her own chamber, her throat would fashion involuntarily those words that her heart and lips refused to let themselves speak.

‘It is all right enough,’ her throat would say for her, as she turned down the counterpane, untied her shoes, and wound her watch. ‘I am quite all safe and right. But — no one must ask me — if I am lonely. No one must ever ask me that.'

II

It had appeared presently that her house was haunted, though not by ghostly terrors. For herself, she had only felt, at times, the vaguely imagined intimation of some presence other than her own in the quiet rooms. But she had no surer knowledge of her dimly harbored guests until a friend, wearied out with the love and care of over-many babies, came to her for rest; and after two days of grateful idleness in her sunny window, asked suddenly, —

‘Miriam, whose are the Voices?’

‘What voices?’ Miriam parried; and Lucy described them: happy, laughing voices, as of young people playing and gossiping together. ‘I have heard them so often when I was lying alone and you were out, or off somewhere. I almost asked a dozen times who was talking. They are always downstairs, or across the hall, or under the window; and they are such happy voices: young voices, — oh, very sweet and glad.' _

Miriam smiled and stroked her friend’s nervous fingers. Lucy had always heard and seen more than other people did, and now that she was so tired, no doubt her worn-out fancy befooled her lightly. They talked it over together. Lucy, smiling at herself, none the less insisted: there were Voices in the house.

‘Some time you’ll hear them too,’ she nodded. ‘They’re not sad or dreadful or gloomy; oh no! They’re just young and glad. I love to hear them.’

And another evening, when Miriam came into the sitting-room after an errand down the street, Lucy greeted her eagerly, saying, —

‘It was music this time. Oh, I’ve heard such music! I almost went to see if some one was n’t playing. It was like a harp, I think, with a violin and piano: it was very beautiful. I thought some one must be playing, until it came to me that of course it was the Young People. It was happy music, just as the Voices are so happy. Miriam, there are young people somehow in your house.’

It became a sort of gentle pleasant joke between them, while Lucy stayed on. ‘Have you heard them to-day?’ Miriam would ask; and sometimes Lucy replied, ‘No; they must have gone off on a picnic; it was such a good day’; or, ‘Yes; they were here while you were out this afternoon. I don’t see why you don’t hear them.’ And Miriam would shake her head. ‘I never hear and see Things, you know. They are your Voices, Lucy; they are your babies grown-up who are talking to you even here in my old-maid house.’

But Lucy denied it. ‘No, Miriam, I never heard them anywhere else. They belong to you and your house, and they mean something good, and sweet, and coming, not gone by. They’re not ghosts.’

And when at last Miriam kissed her good-bye at the train, Lucy was saying, ‘ I’m glad to think of you, there in your nice sunny house, with the Voices, and the Music. Good-bye, dear.’

As Miriam sat alone that evening, she wondered about those young happy presences. She wished that she could hear them laugh and sing and play; not merely feel them blindly stirring about her. She sat, deep in reverie, smiling at Lucy’s merry yet honest insistence upon her quaint little hallucination, — at herself for more than half believing it.

‘It is better that I never hear them,’ she concluded at last, rather soberly. ‘I could n’t live alone this way if I heard them. It is all well enough for Lucy, with her husband and her houseful of babies, to hear things like that; granting that she truly did, dear mysterious Lucy! — But if I heard them — if I heard them, —’ she glanced about the room as if she half expected to see a gay face above the piano, a bright head bending by the lamp, — ‘it would mean that I was going a little bit mad: yes, just a little bit mad, for all that they are sweet, young voices.’

She shivered, stood up quickly, and went over to the long mirror. ‘Miriam,’ she whispered, looking into the shadowy face that met hers, ‘ Lucy said those were young voices, coming voices, not gone by. But you know, Miriam, that if they are, they belong to some one else who may live in this house: to some one else, I tell you, not to you at all. Don’t be a fool. — You’ve been quite sensible so far: don’t spoil it all now. Do you hear? you must n’t even wish to hear those Voices, or that lovely harp-music. Now you understand.’

Months later she saw her friend again. ‘How are the Voices?’ Lucy asked gayly, across the laughing baby who pulled at her necktie and snatched down her curls.

‘I never hear them,’ Miriam answered, almost shortly. ‘You know, don’t you, — “to him that hath shall be given”? — Please may I hold the baby?’

III

Yet often, when she had spent a part of the day or evening away from home, she had a curious expectation of returning to find her house not empty and silent, but with something alive in it to greet her. She did not think of the people who had been her own in the different days so far past, nor of her living friends, nor of the young presences whose laughter Lucy had insisted upon hearing. It seemed to her simply that there was more life and motion and personality in her waiting house, than just Diogenes crouching on the front porch, and the kettle steaming to itself on the back of the stove.

One winter evening she walked late down the village street. The moon rode high and white. Every frosty breath shone, every step creaked and crackled in the snow. Through the thin leafless maple-trunks and lilacboughs she could see her house plainly: the snowy roof, glittering to the moon, the low eaves, ragged with silver icicles, and the four yellow windows of the hall and sitting-room, which she had lit against her late return.

She had a definite sense of expectancy. She was going back to something, to somebody, — and found herself hurrying almost joyfully. But with her hand on the gate, she stopped, and stared at the house as if it were strange to her. An icy little stream flowed suddenly round her heart. For a second, all the world — the moon, the village, the house, and her own inner secret universe — staggered and reeled and shook. But as suddenly, everything grew calm and still again. The frightful chill melted from her blood; the moon watched her with the same high virgin regard, and the yellow windows beckoned her home.

She went slowly up the path and into the warm silent hall.

In that moment at the gate, she had realized that it was only Herself to whom she was going back. Herself, who made those windows bright, who piled the logs on the hearth that now she could light and sit by, dreaming. It was Herself, who would be running down the stairs to greet her, and fetching an apple from the pantry, and listening to her story of the evening’s doings.

It seemed to her almost as if she had become two individuals. One of her went out into the village and the world. The other stayed always in the little white house. She would always be waiting to greet her home.

That was all. Now that she understood it, it did not concern her any more.

She was becoming a good hermit, she commented; but noticed, with the detachment that had grown upon her, that she was not going to remember that shuddering moment at the gate. She blew the fire high, thinking, ‘After all, there is nobody but Myself who understands me much,’ and was amused at her simple egotism.

IV

But secretly she knew her most perilous enemy. It was not sadness, or selfishness, or the Voices, or the odd wildness of a determined recluse. It was Eternity.

There was no telling when Eternity might claim her. Sometimes she awoke at dawn, and went down into the dewy garden to work among the roses and iris and pansy-plants, with the birds all singing and the sun dancing like a great wise morning star. The day wore on, as she digged and transplanted and clipped and watered, till, weary a little, she went into the house and took up the endless bit of sewing, or some story or poem to finish. And all at once, in spite of the sun, the earth-smell, the brisk village-sounds beyond her garden-fence, she knew that her anchor dragged, — she had slipped her moorings in the safe harbor of Time, and was drifting off, off, into Eternity.

Then she cared nothing for rosebugs, or iris-roots, or stockings to darn, or stories to read. She thought of Love, and Sin, and Death: of nations at war and her friends’ souls in joy or agony, of God Himself, — and they were all as nothing. She saw the flickering garden, she heard the songsparrow and the clucking hen, she felt her own scrubbed and earth-stained fingers and her beating heart, but these were not necessary to her. She was terribly remote; terribly careless and still and proud; for she was in Eternity.

‘What does it all matter?’ she would murmur. ‘What if they drink and steal and sin and die? or love and lose and win and die too? And what of me? What of me? —We are all in Eternity. God Himself is in Eternity.’

But she kept the peril close. None of the neighbors, who hailed her on the street or gossiped on the vine-hung porch, ever noticed that often, as she talked, she would clasp her hands with a sudden fierce little gesture, as if she were holding tight to some strong arm, and that in her heart she was whispering, even while the swift crooked smile danced across her lips, ‘O God, make me remember! make me remember! We’re in Time now: not in Eternity yet: not in Eternity yet! ’