A Tale in Breaths — Musings of the Heart (8)

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All this was at the beginning of her passing beyond the years of girlhood.

And she went on waiting for him, opportunity after opportunity, to speak to him the plaintive talk of her soul; and he would promise her and not keep his word.

And the days pass swiftly, one upon another, without any mercy... and dissipation sinks its hold deeper into the beloved brother... so he forgets house and family, takes to wine and falls in love with gambling.

And his sister's eyes stream with tears — but between herself and herself alone. And this restless soul turns away from amusement and from food, a turning-away against which neither the doctors' devices nor their drugs avail.

And it ends with her wasting to such thinness that the doctors fear for her chest, and they send her away to a sanatorium, where more than once she tempts herself toward suicide.

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But shall she leave him to flounder in this headlong course alone, thus, without a helper to right the stumblings of the crooked way?... Then she will live, and she will help her doctors toward a swift cure.

And a month passes, and another; and the members of the family visit the sick girl one by one, and likewise her friends and the companions of her age; all except him — yes, her beloved brother, for whose sake she had hated life, and then come to love it again, likewise for his sake.

And in the sanatorium she comes to know things she could never have come to know had she remained in her own milieu, within its narrow bounds. And she meets the world with another face than the one she had been accustomed to meet it with.

She faced misery in people in all its kinds, and so ceased to heed her own private misery; she faced, with the sick, their various crises, and learned from them how to stand fast against them and defy them.

Her idealism, in her past life, had moved upon a theoretical, philosophical plane; after she had passed through the treatment of those afflictions it became practical and applied. And so her moral loftiness began to sit more lightly upon her, until she came to find, for every disapproved gesture of people's, an excuse to lay before their pretensions.

And thus she lowered her two wings, that had soared so high, to be a genuine human being; for in this humanity there is an interplay that all the philosophies of the universe together do not possess.

But was she truly able to be that person who disowns everything bound to the past... so as to create herself anew?

And was it given to her to forget that younger brother, wandering the earth far, far away? Had she done so, she would have disowned the sweetest and most delightful of her hours.

And what can make up for the dear, merry memories she had so long lived — as she has not once lived her practical life now — when she would come to him, her soul all eagerness, from one country to another, to share with him for a spell of time his simple, austere life, leaving her parental home, aristocratic in its ways, to grieve at her parting.

And there... she would tend him with all the tenderness a mother can have; and he would yield to the calls of this tenderness, of which he had been deprived as a child, and which he refused as a grown man.

And he in his turn would care for her, as completely as a man can, thrusting his personal inclinations behind him, pressing on, as far as he was able, in the settled life she loved.

And on the evenings when the moon did not appear to light his hard road, she would stand on the balcony of his modest house, waiting for him the long hours, as he came back late from his work and hurried up to her, eagerness for the sight of her spurring him on; and when he was almost arrived, he would whistle her a tune she loved from him, and how quickly she would answer him with sung syllables she had taken from him for diversion, and meet him at the door, happiness leaping from her beautiful eyes.

And through the evening, and over the meal, he would ply her with his jokes and recount to her the novel pranks that had come his way in the daytime. And the little house would ring with her laughter, joyous and unruly.

And when she laid her head on the pillow to sleep, he would insist on telling her one of his delightful tales, after putting out the light and taking to his bed. For he knew that his pampered sister had been accustomed, from childhood, never to fall asleep at night except upon a new story, whose monotonous murmur would lull her until she drowsed off into virgin dreams of dancing hopes.

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Can she, then, wipe all this from the record of her past, casting away that huge, crowded record — the wide expanse upon whose radiant smiles she opened her eyes for the first time?

From here there began to form, in the folds of her subconscious mind, a new complex, nearer to pessimism than to the generous outlook and the sound nature.

And from here this pessimism began to peer out whenever it found a way to prove its existence, only to draw back and hide again behind her overwhelming humanity, which also seeks to prove its existence in every moment of creation and of giving — strong, responsive, genuine.

But scarcely does she do so before she falls back, as though she had been flung from a great height, to writhe in her death-throes between dust and blood.