In a Mysterious Way

"Alva!" she exclaimed.

"It's nothing, dear, only that side of me that keeps forgetting the lesson of the tree. Don't mind me, – I am so happy that you must not mind anything nor must I mind anything either; but – when I come into this room and think – " her tone suddenly turned dark, full of quivering emotion, and she put her hand to her eyes.

"Alva, tell me what you mean? I feel frightened, – I must know what's back of it all now. Tell me. Tell me!"

"I'm going to tell you in just a minute, as soon as I've shown you all over the house." She took her handkerchief, pressed it to her eyes, made a great, choking effort at self-control, and then managed to go on speaking. "See," pushing open a door, "this is a nice little dressing-room, isn't it? And then around and through this narrow back hall comes the kitchen. There is an up-stairs, but I've done nothing there except make a room comfortable and pleasant for the Japanese servant who will do the work, that is, all that I don't do myself."

"Won't you want but one servant?"

"I think so. A man from outside will take the extras, and really it's a very small house, dear. The laundry will be sent out. Dear me, how I do enjoy hearing that kind of speech from my own lips. 'The laundry will be sent out!' That sounds so delightfully commonplace, so sort of everyday and like other people. I can't express to you what the commonplaces, the little monotonies of ordinary lives, mean to me here. You'll divine later, perhaps. But fancy a married life where nothing is too trivial to be glorified! That is how things will be with us."

"Are you so sure?" Lassie tried to smile and speak archly. Tried very hard to do both, because an intangible atmosphere of sorrow was beginning to press heavily on her spirits.

"Very sure, – really, quite confident. You must not think that, because I sob suddenly as I did just now, I am ever weak or ever doubt myself or any one else. I never doubt or waver. It is only that no matter how hard one tries, one can hardly rise completely out of the thrall of one existence into the freedom of another at only a week's notice."

"Is that what you are trying to do?"

"Dear, I'm not only trying to do it, but the greater part of the time I do do it. It's only very seldom that my soul faints and the tears come. I am really happy! You are not going to be able to comprehend how happy I am. Every one who wants anything in this world always wants it in such a narrow, finite way, – no one can understand joy too limitless to be finite. The difficulty is that occasionally I get blind myself, or else in mercy God sometimes veils the splendor for a few minutes. When I faint or struggle, it is just that my soul is absent; you must not mind when you see me suffer, for the suffering has no meaning. It's just a sort of discipline, – it doesn't count." She smiled with wonderful brightness into Lassie's troubled face, and then, pushing open the outer door, – "You don't quite see how it is, but be patient with yourself, dearie; it will come. All things come to him who waits."

"Oh, but I don't understand, not one bit," Lassie cried, almost despairingly.

They were in the yard now; Alva looked at her and took her hand within her own. "Come," she said, "we'll go down through the woods to a certain lovely, bright spot where the view is big and wide, and there I'll tell you all about it."

"I so want to know!"

"I know you do, dear, and I want to tell you, too. I'm not purposely tormenting you, but there is no one else to whom I can speak. And that human, sobbing part of me needs companionship just as much these days, as the merry, house-loving spirit, or the beatifically blessed soul. Can't you see, dear, that with all my affection for you, I dread telling you my story, and the reason for that is that it will be too much for you to comprehend at first, and that I know perfectly well that it is going to shock and pain you." The last words burst forth like a storm repressed.

"Shock and pain me!" Lassie opened mouth and eyes.

"Yes, dear, of a certainty."

They were in the woods, quite alone.

Involuntarily Lassie drew a little away; a common, cruel suspicion flashed through her head. "Alva, is it – is it that you do not mean to marry the man?"

Alva laughed then, not very loudly, but clearly and sweetly. "No, Lassie, it isn't that. I am going to be married in the regular way and, besides, I will tell you in confidence that I fully believe that I have been married to the same man hundreds of times before, and shall be married to him countless times again. Does that help you?"

"Alva!"

"There! I told you that you wouldn't understand, and you don't."

"No, I certainly don't, when you talk like that."

"It's natural that you shouldn't, dear; but at the end of the week you will, perhaps. We'll hope so, any way. Oh, Lassie, how much we are both to live and learn in the next week."

Lassie turned her eyes to the eyes of the other.

"It's queer, Alva; you talk as if you were crazy, but I know you're not crazy, and yet I'm worried."

"You don't need to be worried, – "

"I'll try not to be." She raised her sweet eyes to her friend's face as she spoke, and her friend bent and kissed her. "Don't keep me waiting much longer," she pleaded.

They were passing through the little, tree-grown way which led out on the brow of the hill. All the wide, radiant wonder of that October morning unrolled before them there. For an instant Lassie stood entranced, forgetting all else; and then:

"Tell me now!" she cried.

"Let us sit down here," Alva said, pointing to a rough seat made out of a plank laid across two stumps. They sat down side by side.

"Alva, it seems as if I cannot wait another minute; I must know it all now. Tell me who he is, first; is it some one that I know?"

Alva's eyes rested on the wide radiance beyond.

"You know of him, dear," she replied quietly.

"Who is it?"

The woman laid her arm around the girl and drew her close and kissed her gently. Then she whispered two words in her ear.

With a scream, Lassie started to her feet. "Oh – no! – no! —no!"

Alva looked straight up at her where she stood there above her and smiled, steadily.

"No, no, – it can't be! I didn't hear right."

"Yes, you heard quite right."

The girl's hands shook violently; tears came fast pouring down her face. "But, Alva, he is – he can't – "

Tears filled the other's eyes, too, at that, and stole thickly out upon her cheeks. "I know, my dear child, but didn't I tell you how to me – to us – this life is only a small part of the whole?"

"Oh, but – but – oh, it's too horrible!" She sank down on the seat again and burst out sobbing.

"No, dear," Alva exclaimed, her voice suddenly firm, "not horrible, just that highest summit of life of which I spoke before – the point toward which I've lived, the point from which I shall live ever afterwards, – my point of infinite joy, – my all. For he is the man I love – have always loved – shall always love. Only, dear, don't you see? – he isn't a man as you understand the word; the love isn't even love as you understand love. It's all so different! So different!"

A long, keenly thrilling silence followed, broken only by the sound of the younger girl's repressed weeping.

It was one of those pauses during which men and women forget that they are men and women, that the world is the world, or that life is life. Every human consideration loses weight, and one is stunned into heaven or oblivion, according to his or her preparation for such an entry to either state.

The two friends remained seated side by side, facing the wonderful valley in all its rich beauty of varied colorings; but neither saw valley or color, neither remembered for a little what she was or where she was. Alva, with her hands linked around her knees, was out and away into another existence; Lassie, her eyes deadened and darkened with a horror too acute for any words to relieve, sat still beside her, and knew nothing for the time being but a fearful throbbing in her temples – a black cloud smothering her whole brain – and tears.

It was Lassie who broke the silence at last, trying hard to speak evenly. "But, Alva, I never knew … when did you learn to love him … why – " her voice died again just there, and she buried her face on the other's shoulder.

Alva laid her hand upon the little hand that shook under a fresh stress of emotion, and said gently, her tone one of deepest pity: "Shall I tell you all about it? Would you like to know the whole story?"

"Oh, yes, yes, – so much."

"You'll try to be patient and give yourself time to really see how things may be to one who is altogether outside of your way of thinking, won't you, dear? You won't pass judgment too quickly?"

"I'll try. Indeed, I will, as well as I can – "

Alva pressed the hand. "Dear little girl," she said, very tenderly, "you see I look at even you with quite different eyes from those with which the ordinary person sees you. If you could only see things as I do, you'd see everything so much more clearly. How can I put it all straight for you? When even my love for you is not at all what any other gives you."

Lassie lifted up her head. "How do you mean?"

"There are two Lassies to me, dear, – the pretty, sweet-looking girl, and the Lassie who loves me. Most people confuse the two, and think them one and the same; I don't. No matter what happened to you, the Lassie whom I love could never alter – she is unchangeable. She is not subject to change; she doesn't belong to this world; she cannot die. And just as I feel about you, I feel about everybody. What I can see and touch in those I love is what I love least in them."

"Oh, Alva!" it was like a little moan – the girl's voice.

"That is my earnest belief. Bodies and what they suffer don't count. That has come to me bit by bit under the pressure of these last years. But it has come in its completest form in the end. I am entirely satisfied as to the only truth in the universe being the fact that only Truth is eternal. Please try to remember all this, while you listen to my story; try not to forget it. You will, won't you?"

"I'll try, but it isn't clear to me."

"No, I don't suppose so – " Alva sighed – "but do your best, my dear;" she paused a moment, then drew the hand that she held close between her own two, and went on slowly; "I must tell you first of all that I have never seen him but three times in my life. Just think – only three times!"

"Only three – " Lassie looked up in surprise.

"Only three times. And hardly any one knows that I saw him even those times. No one knows to-day that we love one another, or that we are to be married, except the surgeons and nurses, who had to be told, of course. It's a very great secret."

"Tell me how it all began, Alva."

"I don't know when I first heard his name. It all began here, dear, five years ago. When I stopped off for a few days to visit the Falls. I've always loved this country, and from the time that I was born I've always been here for a few days now and then. I always had a queer feeling that something drew me here. I have those queer feelings about things and places and people, you know, and out there on the bridge has always seemed to me a sort of pivot in my life. Every time I go there, the clock seems to strike some hour for me – " she stopped.

Lassie opened and shut her free hand with a sensation of being very uneasy; the suspicion that Alva was not quite sane just lightly crossed her mind. It certainly was not sane to talk as she did.

"So I came here again, on my way home from New York, just five years ago now. And he was here then, staying at Ledge Park, and I saw him for the first time; we met out there on the bridge;" she stopped for just a second or so, then went steadily on. "I think I read about him in the papers. I had learned to admire him intensely – who could help it? – but of course I'd never for one instant thought of loving him. He was like a sort of a story-hero to me; he never seemed like a man; I never thought of any woman's loving him. He just seemed to be himself, all alone – always alone. He had seemed quite above and apart from all other men to me. He interested me; I wanted to learn all that I could about him and his work, and I did learn a great deal, but I'd never dreamed of meeting him face to face, of really speaking to him, of having his eyes really looking at me; he seemed altogether beyond and away from my existence. As if he lived on another world. And then I met him that evening on the bridge, in just the simplest sort of way. Oh, it was very wonderful."

"Did you know him right off?"

"Yes, he looked just like his picture; but then I knew him in another way, too. I can't describe it; it was all very – very strange. It doesn't seem strange to me now, but it would seem almost too strange to you."

"Won't you try to tell me?"

"I will some day, dear, perhaps. I can't tell you now, I couldn't explain it all to you; but, anyway, we met and I looked at him and he looked at me – " she pressed the hand within her own yet closer, adding simply, "I believe that love – real love – comes like that, first of all that one look, and then all the past rushes in and makes the bridge to all the future. Oh, Lassie," her voice sank to a whisper, "when I think of that meeting and of all that it brought me, I am so happy that I want to take the whole wide world into my confidence, and beg every one not to play at love or to take Love's name in vain; but to be patient, and wait, and starve, or beg, or endure anything, just so as to merit the joy which may perhaps be going to be. I never had thought of what love might be; at least I had never been conscious of such thinking. My life all these years had been bound so straitly and narrowly there at home. How could I think of anything that would take me from those duties! And yet I see now that it was all preparation, all the getting ready. If I had only known it, though, – if I had only known it then! It would all have been so much easier."

The whisper died away; she sat quite still looking out over the hills. Lassie's eyes gazed anxiously upon her; nothing in her own spirit tuned to this key; instead, flashes of recollection kept lighting up the present with forgotten paragraphs out of the newspaper accounts of the accident. She shivered suddenly.

Alva did not notice. After a while she went on again.

"Some day you'll learn to love some one, and then you'll know something of what I feel. I don't want you to suffer enough to know all that I feel. But, believe me, whatever one suffers, love is worth it. In that first instant I learned – that first look showed me – that it can mean all, everything, more even than happiness itself; oh, yes, a great, great deal more than happiness itself. In one way they're not synonymous at all, love and happiness. I have been happy without love all my life, and now I shall love without being what the world calls 'happy'; but I shall be happy – happy in my own way, just as I am happy now in something that makes you tremble only to think of."

She paused; her eyelids fell over her eyes and the lashes quivered where they lay on her cheeks, but her hand continued to hold Lassie's, warm and close. There was another long pause. And then another sigh.

"So in that first hour – it was only one hour – I learned the beginning of life's biggest lesson – what life may be, what love may be, and also what for me could never be. For just as soon as I really saw him, I saw why he had remained alone. It was perfectly plain to me. It was that he didn't live for himself; he lived to carry out his purpose. One reads of such people, but I never had met any one who was unable to see himself in his own life before. It was a tremendous lesson to me. It was like opening a door and looking suddenly out upon a new order of universe. Everything whirled for the first minutes, and then I saw that my own life had been sufficiently unselfish to have made me capable of comprehending his. It rose like a flood through my soul, that everything has a reason, and that my blind, stupid, hopeless years there at home had all been leading straight up to that minute. It was such a revelation, and such a new light on all things. I was born anew, myself; I have never been the same woman since. Never, never!"

Lassie's brows drew together; the revelation did not appeal to her personal reason as reasonable.

"We talked for quite a while – not about ourselves – we understood each other too well to need do that. It seems to me now that we were almost one then, but I didn't know it. All I knew was that I could measure a little of what he was, and that there was a bond between us of absolute content in working out God's will rather than our own. I believe now that that is really the only true love or the only true basis for any marriage, and that when that mutual bond is once accepted, nothing can alter, not even an ocean rolling between – not even ten oceans. He spoke of the Falls, and he spoke of his own work. I listened and thanked God that I knew what he meant, and comprehended what it meant to me. At the end of the hour we parted, and I came back to the hotel and started for home the morning after… He went away, too, and it was later – when we began to write letters – that our life together, our beautiful ideal life together, began. You can't realize its happiness any more than you can measure all that my words really mean. I can't explain myself any better, either. After a while it will all come to you, I hope. I went on with the work at home, and he continued his labors which allowed him neither home nor family. Nobody knew and nobody would have known, even if he or she thought that they knew. The very best and loveliest things lie all around the most of us, and the best and loveliest of all treasures are within our own hearts – and yet very few of us know anything about them. Perhaps better that the world in general shouldn't understand the joy of my kind of love, anyhow; it isn't time for that yet."

"How, Alva?"

She smiled almost whimsically, "Dearest, as soon as the whole world understands that sort of life, its own mission will be fulfilled, and then there will be no more of this particular world. You see!"

"Oh!"

"So then, dear, time went on and on, and I was happy, very happy. And he was very happy, also. There was something truly childlike in his happiness; he had never expected love in his life, because he had never thought of meeting any one who would be able to adapt herself to his circumstances. We never met, because it didn't seem best or wise. We just loved, and I don't believe that any two people have ever been happier together than we were, apart, for these five years – these happy, happy five years."

Lassie felt a deepening misery; the last horrible part must be going to come now.

Alva passed her hand over her eyes and drew a long breath.

"It's so difficult to be different from other people, and then to bear their way of looking at things. It's so hopeless to try to translate one's feeling into their language all the time. How can I go on, when I know just how it all looks to you. It's fearfully hard for me."

"I won't say a word," – the girl's cry was pitiful.

Alva threw both arms quickly about her and held her close. "Bless you, darling, I know it. But you'll suffer and I know that, too; and I feel your suffering more than you guess. I know just how it all seems to you. There is that within me which shudders too, sometimes, and would shrink and weep only for the strong, divine power that fills me with something better than I can describe, something big enough and high enough to fight down the coward. You have that same divinity within you, dear, and you can't tell when or where it will be called out, but once it is called out, you never will be weak in the face of this earth's woes."

Lassie was weeping softly again.

"One morning – you know when – I opened the paper to read it to papa after breakfast, and I saw on the first page, across the top in bright red letters, that he had been killed."

There was a little sharp cry – "But he wasn't?" – and then a great sob.

"No, dear, but that was the first report."

"And you thought – "

"Yes, of course I believed it. But, Lassie, try to calm yourself – because it wasn't to me what you think. I was calm; I had learned so much, he had taught me so much, during the five years, that I astonished myself with my strength; really, I did. I went about all that day just as usual, only thinking with a white sort of numbness how long the rest of life would seem; and then, in the evening, the paper said that he was still alive. Then I telegraphed and the next day I went to him. I knew that I must go to him and see him once more, so I arranged things and went. I was surprised all the journey at my own courage; it was like a miracle, my power over myself. It was a long journey, but I knew that I should see him again at the end. I knew that he would not leave me without saying good-bye, now that he was conscious that he was going. I was sure of that. So confident can love and strength be in love and strength.

"I arrived – I went to the hospital – they had the room darkened because – well, you can guess. I went to where the bed stood and knelt down beside him, and laid my hand on his bosom. I felt his heart beating – ever so faintly, but still beating, – and I heard his voice. Only think, I had not heard his voice for five years! To you or to any one else it might have all been frightful, because, of course, the reality was frightful. The man, as you understand men, was mangled and dying, and could not possibly be with me except for a few brief days. But, oh, my dearest, – with me it was so different; it was all so absolutely different. The man that I loved was unhurt, and the evil chance had only made us nearer and dearer forever. I don't say that I was not trembling, and that I was not almost unnerved by the shock; but I can say, too, and say truly, that the Something Divine which had filled me from the first day, filled and upheld me and made me know that all was good even then, even in that dark hour and in that dark room, where he whom I held dearest on earth was chained to pain beneath my hand. The nurses were very kind. They left me there beside him while he was conscious and unconscious for some hours. They saw very quickly that it was different with us from most people; and when I went out two of the surgeons took me into a room alone and told me the truth.

"I think that then was the greatest moment of my life – when I comprehended that one who was not killed outright by such a shock might live even months until – until – Well, if a man so injured has vitality enough to live at all, he may – live – "

"Don't go on, Alva, please, – I don't want to know how long he may live."

"No, dear, I won't go into that. Only you must think that to me it was such unexpected heaven. Instead of death, he was alive. Instead of separation for this life, we were to have some days of absolute companionship. It was something so much more than I had ever thought of hoping. A life – even for a day – together! Companionship! Not letters, but words. I to be his nurse, his solace, to have him for my own. I stayed awake all night thinking. I knew what being swept suddenly away meant to him. I knew of his life plans, and what made death hardest to him. It came to me that I might ease that bitterness. That his need could go forth through the medium of my love and interest. That his work would pass on into other hands through mine. That all the golden web of Fate had been woven directly to this end."

Lassie continued sobbing.

"I saw what we could do. In the morning I went to the surgeons, and they said that each day added a week of possible life, and that although it would be many days before anything could be done, after that, he could be moved and wait for the end – with me. I went to him then, and again I knelt there by the bed, and this time I told him how I was going to spend the weeks, and what he must look forward to. He was unable to talk, but he looked at me and – like the first time – we understood one another absolutely. He accepted the happiness that was to be as gratefully as I did myself. As I said before, it was so much more – so much more – than we had ever expected! He took up his burden of agony as cheerfully and courageously as he had taken everything in life, and I came away. There was no use in my remaining there, as he would be either unconscious or – I could not remain there; the surgeons forbade it.