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Show HI JjJtLSljtiJtL By James Stephens H "i?13 wns qulto xcitoti as iiQ toid H, I the story to his wife, and in H tho telling ho revealod to lier H a depth of credulity of which she Hj could not havo helicved him capable. Hf He was a hard-headed, man, and con- Hj ducted his business on hard-headed K principles; indeed, he had conducted K his courtship and matrimonial affairs W in a manner which she would not have termed reckless or romantic. m When, therefore, she found him ex- V cited, "and over such a story, she did H not know what to think. She ended M by agreeing with him, not because M her reason was satisfied or even H touched, but simply because he was H excited, and women generally wel- M come anything which varies the dull H round of use and wont, and will bathe, M In excitement whenever they get the m chance. Hj This was the story he told. M As ho was walking down Grafton m street to lunch, a motor car came spinning down the road at a speed Hlj much too dangerous for that narrow Bj and always congested thoroughfare. H A man was walking in front of him, H'' and, just as the car came behind, this HJ man stepped off the path with a view Hjj to crossing the road. He did not even H" look behind as he stepped off. Her H husband on the moment stretched H forth a long, muscular arm that swept H the man back to the pavement one Hk second before the car went blaring H and buzzing by. Hf "If I had not been there!" said her H, husband. The two men had grinned H( at each other, her husband smiling H with good-fellowship, the other crink- H, ling with amusement and gratitude: H they walked together down the street, H and they had lunch together; they sat H for a long time after lunch, smoldng H innumerable cigarettes, and engaged H in a conversation which she could H never have believed her husband H would have stood for ten minutes, and Hj they parted with an expressed wish Hi from her husband that they should H meet again on the following day, and HL a wordless smile from the man. He Hj had neither ratified nor negatived the H' arrangement. H" "I hope he'll turn up," said her hus- H band. H, It was tliis conversation had excited H her man, for1 it had drawn him into H a mental atmosphere to which he was H a stranger, and he had found himself HJ, moving there with such ease and H) pleasure that he wished to get back K to it as often and with as little delay B as possible. V Briefly, as he explained it to her, fr the atmosphere was religious, and k while it was entirely intellectual, it f was more heady and exhilarating than R the emotional religion to which he H had been accustomed and from which H he had long since passed. Hi Ho tried to describe his companion, HUt but had such ill-success that she could Ki not remember afterwards whether ho Hp was tall or shoft, fat or thin, fair or Hi? dark. It was the man's eyes only he Bl succeeded in emphasizing, and these, Hy it appeared, were eyes such as he had never before seen in a human face. That also, he said, was a wrong way of putting it, for his eyes were exactly like everybody else's. It was the way ho looked through them that was different dif-ferent something very steady, very ardent, immensely quiet and powerful, was using these eyes for purposes of vision: he had never met anyone who looked at him so directly, so compre-hendingly, compre-hendingly, so agreeably. "You are In ilovo," said she, with a laugh. After this her husband's explanations explana-tions became more explanatory, but not Jess confused until she found that they were both with curious unconsciousness uncon-sciousness in the middle of a fairy tale. "He asked me," said her husband, "what was the thing I wished for beyond be-yond all things?" "That was the most difficult question ques-tion I havo ever been invited to answer," an-swer," he went on, "and for nearly half an hour we sat quietly thinking it out, and discussing various magnificences mag-nificences and chances In life." "I had all the usual thoughts, and, of course, the first of them was wealth. I mentioned it, too, tentatively, tentative-ly, as a possibility, and ho agreed that it was worth considering, but after a while I knew that I did not want money." "One always has need of money," said his wife. "In a way, that is true," said he, "but not in this way; for, as I thought ii over, I remembered that we have no children, and that we had few desires de-sires which tho money we had already gathered could not buy. Also, we are fairly well off; we have enough in the stocking to last our time even if I ceased from business, which I am not going to do, and, in short, I discovered that money or its purchasing power had not any particular advantages to offer." 4.11 the same!" said she, and halted with her eyes fixed on bonnets far away in time and space. "AH the same!" he agreed, with a smile. "I could not think of anything worth wishing for," he continued. "I men tioned health and wisdom, and we spoke of these, but judging myself by the standard of the world in which we move, I concluded that both my wealth and knowledge were as good as the next man's, and I thought if I elected to become wiser than my contemporaries contempo-raries I might be a very lonely person for the rest of my days." "Yes," said she, thoughtfully; "I am glad you did not asked to be made wise, unless you could have asked it for both of us." "I asked him in the end what he would advise me to demand, but he replied that he could not advise me at all. 'Behind everything stands desire,' de-sire,' said he, 'and you must find out your desire.' " "I asked him then, If tho opportunity came to him what he would, ask for, not in order that I might copy his wish, but from sheer curiosity; and he replied that he would not ask for anything, and I was about to adopt that attitude." "Oh!" said his wife. "When an idea came to me. Here I am, I said to myself, forty-eight years of age, rich enough, sound enough in wind and limb, and as wise as I can afford to be. What is there now belonging to me, absolutely mine, ibut from which I must part and which I would like to keep? And I saw that the thing which was leaving me day by day, second by second, irretrievably and inevitably, was my forty-eight years, and I thought I would like to continue at the age of forty-eight until my time was up." "I did not ask to live forever, or any of that nonsense, but I asked to be allowed al-lowed to stay at the age of forty-eight years with all the equipment of my present state unimpaired." "You should not have asked lor such a thing," said his wife, a little angrily. "It is not fair to mo; you are older than I am now, but in a few years this will mean that I shall be needlessly needless-ly older than you. I think it was not a loyal wish." "I thought of that objection," said he, "and I also thought that I was past the age at which certain things matter, mat-ter, and that temperamentally and in the matter of years I was proof against, well, say, female attractions, or feminity of any kind. It seemed to me to be right, so I just registered L my wish with him." "What did he' say?" she queried. "He did not say anything; he just nodded, and began to talk again of other matters religion, life, death, mind, a host of things, which, for all the diversity they seem to have when I enumerate them, were yet one singlo theme." "I feel a more contented man tonight to-night than I have ever felt," he continued, con-tinued, "and I feel in some curious way a different person from the man I was yesterday." Here his wife woke up, as it were, from the conversation, and began to 1 laugh. 9, "You are a foolish man," said she, A "and. I am just as bad. If anyone were I to hear us talking this solemn sllll- ness they would have a right to mock n at us." N He laughed heartily with her, and after a light supper they went to bed. During the night his wife had a dream. She dreamed that a ship set off for the Polar seas on an expedition in which she was not sufficiently inter- '' ested to find out its reason. The ship departed with her on board; for a time she was concerned with baggage, and with counting and going over the various articles she had bought against the Arctic weather. She had thick woolen stockings; she 'had skin boots all hairy inside, all pliable and wrinkled without; she had a great skin cap shaped like a helmet, and fitting down in a cape over the shoulders; she had even, and It did not astonish her, a pair of very baggy fur trousers; she had a sleeping sack she had an enormous quantity of things, and everybody in the expedition expedi-tion was equipped, if not with the same tilings, at least similarly. These traps were an unending subject sub-ject of conversation aboard, and al- jl-though jl-though days and weeks passed, the talk of the ship hovered about and fell continually into the subject of warm olothing. There came a day when the weather began to bo perceptibly colder, so cold Indeed that she was tempted to draw on these wonderful breeches and fit her head into that most cosy hat, but she did not do so, for, and everybody on the ship explained it to her, it was necessary that she should accustom herself to the feeling of cold, and, she iwas further informed, the chill which she was now feeling was nothing to the chill she would presently have to bear. It seemed good advice, and she decided de-cided that as long as she could bear the cold she would-do so, and would not put on any protective covering; thus, when the cold became really intense, in-tense, she would be to some degree ready for It, and would not suffer so much. But steadily, and day by day, it be- came colder, and now they were in I wild, whirling seas wherein great h green and white icebergs went sailing lL, by, and all about the ship little hum- mocks of ice bobbed and surged, and J went under and came up, and the grey fl water slashed and hissed against and on top of these small hillocks. Her hands were so chilly that she had to put them under her armpits to keep any warmth in them, and her feet were in a worse condition. They had begun to pain her, so she decided that on the next day she would put on ! her winter equipment, and would not mind what anybody said to the contrary. con-trary. It is cold enough, said she, for my Arctic trousers and my warm, soft boots, and my great furry glove3. I will put them on in the morning; for it was then almost night, and she meant to go to bed at once. She did go to bed, and she lay there quite cold and miserable. In the morning she was yet colder, and immediately on rising she looked about for the winter clothes which she had laid ready by the side of her bunk the night before, but she could not find them. She was forced to dress in her usual rather thin clothes, and having done so she went on deck. When she got to the side of the vessel ves-sel she found that the world about her was changed. The sea had dls- appeared. Far as the eye could go was a level plain of ice, not white but grey, and over it there lowered a sky grey as itself. Across this waste there blew a bitter and piercing wind so that her ears tingled and stung. No one was moving on the skip, and the dead silence which brooded on the snow lay heavy and almost solid on the vessel. ! She ran to the other side, and found that the whole ship's company had landed and were staring at her from a i little distance of the land, and these people were as silent as the frozen air, as the frozen ship. They stared at her and made no move and made no sound. She noticed that they were all dressed In their winter furs, and while she stood ice began to creep Into her I veins. One of the ship's company sud denly strode forward a few ipaces and held up a bundle in his mittened hand. She saw the bundle contained her clothes her broad, furry trousers, her great, cozy helmet and gloves. To get from the ship to the ice was painful but not difficult, for a rope-ladder rope-ladder was hanging against the side, and down this she went. The rungs felt hard as iron, for they were frozen stiff, and the torch of those glassy surfaces bit into her tender hand like fire. But she got to the ice, and went across it towards her companions. Then, to her dismay, to her terror, all these suddenly, with one unexpressed unex-pressed accord, turned and began to run swiftly away from her, and she, with a heart that could scarcely beat, took after them. Every few paces she fell, for her shoes could not grip on the ice, and each time she fell those monsters Btood and turned and watched her, and the man who had her clothes waved the bundle at her and danced grotesquely, silently. She continued running, sliding, falling, fall-ing, picking herself up until her breath went, and she came to a halt, unable to move a limb further and scaicely able to breathe, and this time they did not stay to look at her. They continued con-tinued running but now with greater and greater speed, and she saw them become black specks away on the white distance, and she saw them disappear, dis-appear, and" there was nothing left where she stared but the long, white miles and the terrible silence and the 'cold. How cold it was! And with that there rose again a little wind, keen as a razor, which stung into her face, swirled about her ankles like a whip, and stabed under her armpits like a dagger. "I am cold," she murmured. She looked backwards whence she had come, but the ship was no longer in sight, and she could not remember in what direction it lay. Then sh? began be-gan to run in any direction. Indeed, she ran in every direction to find the ship, for when she had taken a hundred hun-dred steps in one way she thought frantically, this is not the way, and at once she began to run on the opposite road. But run as she might she could not get warm, it was colder she got, and then she slipped again, and went sliding down a hollow faster and faster; she came to thebrink of a cleft and swished over this and down into a hole of ice, and there she lay. "I shall die," she said. "I shall fall asleep here and die." Then she woke. She opened her eyes directly on the window and saw the dawn struggling with the darkness, a film of greyish light which framed the window, but did not lift the obscurity of the room, and she Jay for a second smiling to herself at her grotesque dream and thanking God that it had only been a dream. The next second she felt that she was cold. She pulled the clothes more tightly about her, and she spoke .to her husband. "Plow miserably cold it is!" she said. She turned over in the bed and lay against him for warmth, and then she found that the atrocious cold came from him, that it was he. She leaped out of bed with a scream, switched on the light, and bent over him. He was stone dead, ho was stone cold, and she stood by him, shivering and whimpering. whimper-ing. Prom the London Nation. |