The Brimming Cup. Dorothy Canfield Fisher
gaze into each other's eyes went far beyond the faltering words they spoke. She asked him in a low voice, "Couldn't you do more for me than for yourself? One never knows, but … what else is love for, but to give greater strength than we have?"
There was a moment's silence, in which their very spirits met flame-like in the void, challenging, hoping, fearing. The man's face set. His burning look of power enveloped her like the reflection of the sun. "I swear you shall have it!" he said desperately, his voice shaking.
She looked up at him with a passionate gratitude. "I'll never forget that as long as I live!" she cried out to him.
The tears stood in his eyes as in hers.
For the fraction of an instant, they had felt each other there, as never before they had felt any other human being: they had both at once caught a moment of flood-tide, and both together had been carried up side by side; the long, inevitable isolation of human lives from birth onward had been broken by the first real contact with another human soul. They felt the awed impulse to cover their eyes as before too great a glory.
The tide ebbed back, and untroubled they made no effort to stop its ebbing. They had touched their goal, it was really there. Now they knew it within their reach. Appeased, assuaged, fatigued, they felt the need for quiet, they knew the sweetness of sobriety. They even looked away from each other, aware of their own bodies which for that instant had been left behind. They entered again into the flesh that clad their spirits, taking possession of their hands and feet and members, and taken possession of by them again. The fullness of their momentary satisfaction had been so complete that they felt no regret, only a simple, tender pleasure as of being again at home. They smiled happily at each other and sat silent, hand in hand.
Now they saw the beauty before them, the vast plain, the mountains, the sea: harmonious, serene, ripe with maturity, evocative of all the centuries of conscious life which had unrolled themselves there.
"It's too beautiful to be real, isn't it?" murmured the girl, "and now, the peaceful way I feel this minute, I don't mind it's being so old that it makes you feel a midge in the sunshine with only an hour or two of life before you. What if you are, when it's life as we feel it now, such a flood of it, every instant brimming with it? Neale," she turned to him with a sudden idea, "do you remember how Victor Hugo's 'Waterloo' begins?"
"I should say not!" he returned promptly. "You forget I got all the French I know in an American university."
"Well, I went to college in America, myself!"
"I bet it wasn't there you learned anything about Victor Hugo's poetry," he surmised skeptically. "Well, how does it begin, anyhow, and what's it got to do with us?"
The girl was as unamused as he at his certainty that it had something to do with them, or she would not have mentioned it. She explained, "It's not a famous line at all, nothing I ever heard anybody else admire. We had to learn the poem by heart, when I was a little girl and went to school in Bayonne. It starts out,
'Waterloo, Waterloo, morne plaine
Comme une onde qui bout dans une urne trop pleine,'
And that second line always stuck in my head for the picture it made. I could see it, so vividly, an urn boiling over with the great gush of water springing up in it. It gave me a feeling, inside, a real physical feeling, I mean. I wanted, oh so awfully, sometime to be so filled with some emotion, something great and fine, that I would be an urn too full, gushing up in a great flooding rush. I could see the smooth, thick curl of the water surging up and out!"
She stopped to look at him and exclaim, "Why, you're listening! You're interested. Neale, I believe you are the only person in the world who can really pay attention to what somebody else says. Everybody else just goes on thinking his own thoughts."
He smiled at this fancy, and said, "Go on."
"Well, I don't know whether that feeling was already in me, waiting for something to express it, or whether that phrase in the poem started it. But it was, for ever so long, the most important thing in the world to me. I was about fourteen years old then, and of course, being a good deal with Catholics, I thought probably it was religious ecstasy that was going to be the great flood that would brim my cup full. I used to go up the hill in Bayonne to the Cathedral every day and stay there for hours, trying to work up an ecstasy. I managed nearly to faint away once or twice, which was something of course. But I couldn't feel that great tide I'd dreamed of. And then, little by little … oh, lots of things came between the idea and my thinking about it. Mother was … I've told you how Mother was at that time. And what an unhappy time it was at home. I was pretty busy at the house because she was away so much. And Father and I hung together because there wasn't anybody else to hang to: and all sorts of ugly things happened, and I didn't have the time or the heart to think about being 'an urn too full.'"
She stopped, smiling happily, as though those had not been tragic words which he had just spoken, thinking not of them but of something else, which now came out, "And then, oh Neale, that day, on the piazza in front of St. Peter's, when we stood together, and felt the spray of the fountains blown on us, and you looked at me and spoke out. … Oh, Neale, Neale, what a moment to have lived through! Well, when we went on into the church, and I knelt there for a while, so struck down with joy that I couldn't stand on my feet, all those wild bursts of excitement, and incredulity and happiness, that kept surging up and drenching me … I had a queer feeling, that awfully threadbare feeling of having been there before, or felt that before; that it was familiar, although it was so new. Then it came to me, 'Why, I have it, what I used to pray for. Now at last I am the urn too full!' And it was true, I could feel, just as I dreamed, the upsurging of the feeling, brimming over, boiling up, brimming over. … And another phrase came into my mind, an English one. I said to myself, 'The fullness of life.' Now I know what it is."
She turned to him, and caught at his hand. "Oh, Neale, now I do know what it is, how utterly hideous it would be to have to live without it, to feel only the mean little trickle that seems mostly all that people have."
"Well, I'll never have to get along without it, as long as I have you," he said confidently.
"And I refuse to live a minute, if it goes back on me!" she cried.
"I imagine that old folks would think we are talking very young," suggested the man casually.
"Don't speak of them!" She cast them away into non-existence with a gesture.
They sank into a reverie, smiling to themselves.
"How the fountains shone in the sun, that day," she murmured; "the spray they cast on us was all tiny opals and diamonds."
"You're sure you aren't going to be sorry to go back to America to live, to leave all that?" asked the man. "I get anxious about that sometimes. It seems an awful jump to go away from such beautiful historic things, back to a narrow little mountain town."
"I'd like to know what right you have to call it narrow, when you've never even seen it," she returned.
"Well, anybody could make a pretty fair guess that a small Vermont town isn't going to be so very wide," he advanced reasonably.
"It may not be wide, but it's deep," she replied.
He laughed at her certainty. "You were about eleven years old when you saw it last, weren't you?"
"No, you've got it wrong. It was when we came to France to live that I was eleven, and of course I stopped going to Ashley regularly for vacations then. But I went back for several summers in the old house with Cousin Hetty, when I was in America for college, after Mother died."
"Oh well, I don't care what it's like," he said, "except that it's the place where I'm going to live with you. Any place on earth would seem wide enough and deep enough, if I had you there."
"Isn't it funny," she mused, "that I should know so much more about it than you? To think how I played all around your uncle's mill and house, lots of times when I was a little girl, and never dreamed … "
"No funnier than all the rest of it,"