The Brimming Cup. Dorothy Canfield Fisher
XXVI
MARISE LOOKS AND SEES WHAT IS THERE
CHAPTER I
PRELUDE
SUNSET ON ROCCA DI PAPA
An Hour in the Life of Two Modern Young People April, 1909.
Lounging idly in the deserted little waiting-room was the usual shabby, bored, lonely ticket-seller, prodigiously indifferent to the grave beauty of the scene before him and to the throng of ancient memories jostling him where he stood. Without troubling to look at his watch, he informed the two young foreigners that they had a long hour to wait before the cable-railway would send a car down to the Campagna. His lazy nonchalance was faintly colored with the satisfaction, common to his profession, in the discomfiture of travelers.
Their look upon him was of amazed gratitude. Evidently they did not understand Italian, he thought, and repeated his information more slowly, with an unrecognizable word or two of badly pronounced English thrown in. He felt slightly vexed that he could not make them feel the proper annoyance, and added, "It may even be so late that the signori would miss the connection for the last tramway car back to Rome. It is a long walk back to the city across the Campagna."
They continued to gaze at him with delight. "I've got to tip him for that!" said the young man, reaching vigorously into a pocket.
The girl's answering laugh, like the inward look of her eyes, showed only a preoccupied attention. She had the concentrated absent aspect of a person who has just heard vital tidings and can attend to nothing else. She said, "Oh, Neale, how ridiculous of you. He couldn't possibly have the least idea what he's done to deserve getting paid for."
At the sound of her voice, the tone in which these words were pronounced, the ticket-seller looked at her hard, with a bold, intrusive, diagnosing stare: "Lovers!" he told himself conclusively. He accepted with a vast incuriosity as to reason the coin which the young foreigner put into his hand, and, ringing it suspiciously on his table, divided his appraising attention between its clear answer to his challenge, and the sound of the young man's voice as he answered his sweetheart, "Of course he hasn't any idea what he's done to deserve it. Who ever has? You don't suppose for a moment I've any idea what I've done to deserve mine?"
The ticket-seller smiled secretly into his dark mustache. "I wonder if my voice quivered and deepened like that, when I was courting Annunziata?" he asked himself. He glanced up from pocketing the coin, and caught the look which passed between the two. He felt as though someone had laid hands on him and shaken him. "Dio mio" he thought. "They are in the hottest of it."
The young foreigners went across the tracks and established themselves on the rocks, partly out of sight, just at the brink of the great drop to the Campagna. The setting sun was full in their faces. But they did not see it, seeing only each other.
Below them spread the divinely colored plain, crossed by the ancient yellow river, rolling its age-old memories out to the sea, a blue reminder of the restfulness of eternity, at the rim of the weary old land. Like a little cluster of tiny, tarnished pearls, Rome gleamed palely, remote and legendary.
The two young people looked at each other earnestly, with a passionate, single-hearted attention to their own meaning, thrusting away impatiently the clinging brambles of speech which laid hold on their every effort to move closer to each other. They did not look down, or away from each other's eyes as they strove to free themselves, to step forward, to clasp the other's outstretched hands. They reached down blindly, tearing at those thorny, clutching entanglements, pulling and tugging at those tenuous, tough words which would not let them say what they meant: sure, hopefully sure that in a moment … now … with the next breath, they would break free as no others had ever done before them, and crying out the truth and glory that was in them, fall into each other's arms.
The girl was physically breathless with this effort, her lips parted, her eyebrows drawn together. "Neale, Neale dear, if I could only tell you how I want it to be, how utterly utterly true I want us to be. Nothing's of any account except that."
She moved with a shrugging, despairing gesture. "No, no, not the way that sounds. I don't mean, you know I don't mean any old-fashioned impossible vows never to change, or be any different! I know too much for that. I've seen too awfully much unhappiness, with people trying to do that. You know what I told you about my father and mother. Oh, Neale, it's horribly dangerous, loving anybody. I never wanted to. I never thought I should. But now I'm in it, I see that it's not at all unhappiness I'm afraid of, your getting tired of me or I of you … everybody's so weak and horrid in this world, who knows what may be before us? That's not what would be unendurable, sickening. That would make us unhappy. But what would poison us to death … what I'm afraid of, between two people who try to be what we want to be to each other … how can I say it?" She looked at him in an anguish of endeavor, " … not to be true to what is deepest and most living in us … that would be the betrayal I'm afraid of. That's what I mean. No matter what it costs us personally, or what it brings, we must be true to that. We must!"
He took her hand in his silently, and held it close. She drew a long troubled breath and said, "You do think we can always have between us that loyalty to what is deep and living? It does not seem too much to ask, when we are willing to give up everything else for it, even happiness?"
He gave her a long, profound look. "I'm trying to give that loyalty to you this minute, Marise darling," he said slowly, "when I tell you now that I think it a very great deal to ask of life, a very great deal for any human beings to try for. I should say it was much harder to get than happiness."
She was in despair. "Do you think that?" She searched his face anxiously as though she found there more than in his speech. "Yes, yes, I see what you mean." She drew a long breath. "I can even see how fine it is of you to say that to me now. It's like a promise of how you will try. But oh, Neale, I won't want life on any other terms!"
She stopped, looking down at her hand in his. He tightened his clasp. His gaze on her darkened and deepened. "It's like sending me to get the apples of Hesperides," he said, looking older than she, curiously and suddenly older. "I want to say yes! It would be easy to say yes. Darling, darling Marise, you can't want it more than I! But the very intelligence that makes you want it, that makes me want it, shows me how mortally hard it would be! Think! To be loyal to what is deepest and most living in yourself … that's an undertaking for a life-time's effort, with all the ups and downs and growths of life. And then to try to know what is deepest and most living in another … and to try … Marise! I will try. I will try with all my might. Can anybody do more than try with all his might?"
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