Thoughts from the Heart: "A Little Tale in Gasps" — 4

Her first love...

One wonders! Was all this... for those reasons, those complexes, that stubborn repression?!

Or was it because she truly loved him, from that very hour,

and with love in its primal simplicity.

For she loved nothing, afterward, except by the first glimmerings of that passion.

And she cared for nothing except this radiance, which spread through her inmost self the warmth of goodness and beauty and love?!

But... but what has she to do with all this now; nothing of it concerns her except that she responded to him.

Because he laid before her his infatuation with her, with that spontaneity she had never known in any other lover, among those she had read of, or heard of, or taken in...

She responded to him, but not as girls respond to a first love that consoles their innocent hearts.

Rather, to think of him — a wondrous thinking, with a happy calm in it,

gazing toward him from the ferment of her well-watered imagination as the mermaids of the sea gaze — toward their fishermen — with no defiled rapture,

but in a devout absorption, in which there is tenderness and loftiness and rapture.

And in it: giving without taking, and a freshness she feared for even from a fleeting whisper, in the purest and deepest image of chaste love.

And so she began to gaze upon him,

and she would find him, with his gaunt, towering frame and his endearing bashfulness, like one of the righteous hermits of the caves, who had cut himself off from the world to turn toward her alone, night and day, gazing at her from the depths of his lovesick heart, as though life had been effaced before him and nothing remained but her... her alone, that sweet little one.

But when she met him in the world of reality, she would soon turn away from him. Her withdrawn nature would get the better of her.

And her pure character would get the better of her too, so that she found in the innocent flirtation, which went no further than a word, or a glance —

she found in it a sin... and she would set about accusing herself: how had she allowed herself to gaze at him with the ardor of the smitten and the longing of the lover.

And she would accuse him in her secret heart: why did he permit himself this give and take in the conversations of love.

It was enough for him to know that she loved him.

And it was enough for her that she knew it likewise. Let them commune, then, from behind a curtain,

where he would hear her only in the world of imagination, and she would hear him only there.

XXXX

But he is a man like all men.

He has his clamorous senses and his importunate nature.

Her imagination went to extremes in embellishing his ideal image and adorning his merits,

and her naive soul and her pampered nature went to extremes

in setting him, with total reverence, in the temple prepared for the first who should prove worthy.

So she worshipped him with her eyes closed.

And when one day she opened them upon his true nature, it pained her to strike against the rock of bitter reality.

And for the third time, her trust in true manhood was cruelly betrayed...

So she cried out with the fullness of her rebellious womanhood:

I shall hate man — as father, as brother, and as beloved —

for man — in his everlasting smallness — is unworthy of the blessing of love.

As for his voice, it rang in her ears, violent and thundering:

Go your smooth way, strewn with roses, and let me go my barren way... whose thorns have filled it with blood.

xxxx

And so, after life had been for her a gush of the gushes of ardent passion and dewy hope,

she became, before she had passed fifteen, a heedless murmur among the murmurs of uneasy doubt.

And doubt, once it has soiled a clear soul, takes much from it

and leaves it floundering in piled-up darknesses from which there is no way out to the light.

xxxx

But the hidden powers of youth, which labor forever to disguise the facts, and to embroider events in enchanting colors,

began to work, behind her despondent spirit, to draw the curtains of forgetfulness between her and the past, near and far.

Perhaps she might find in her coming day something to make up for her dismal yesterday.

And life, for all that, is wide of horizon, far-flung of reaches.

So let her extreme idealism be content with whatever would bring

to her own soul: peace of mind,

and to this wide world, which she has never ceased to love: devotion and faithfulness.

And to the great world she opened her great heart — yes, she opened it, as in everything she does, impulsive, loving, loyal,

yet with no small share of the philosophy of suppressed pessimism and disappointed hope.