Charles Williamson - Where the Path Breaks

In dim twilight a spark of life glittered, glinted like a bit of mica catching the sun, on a vast face of gray cliff above a dead gray sea. There was nothing else in the world but the vastness and the grayness of the cliff and the sea, till the spark felt the faint thrill of warmth which gave to it the knowledge of its own life. “I am alive,” the whisper stirred, far down in the depths of consciousness. Next the question came, “What am I?”

At first just that infinitesimal bright glint lived where all the rest was dead, or creation not yet begun. Then slowly the answer followed the question: “I am I. A man. I was a man. I am dead. This is the twilight between worlds. I must dream back. I must know myself as I was. Later I shall wake and know what I am.”

The soul was very still, tired after an all-but-forgotten struggle. It was beginning to remember that it had suffered infinitely. It was patient, with all the patience of eternity before it. There was no hurry. Hurry and turmoil seemed strange and remote, part of some outworn experience. Lying still, it passively waited for the dream to begin. For a moment – or perhaps years – there remained only the gray blankness of the empty world; but the spark of life grew in brightness as a star grows to visibility in the pallor of an evening sky. Then, suddenly, a face flashed into existence – a girl’s face.

“I knew her. I loved her,” the soul remembered with a thrill, like a shooting ray of the star that was itself. “Where? Who was she? What were we to each other?”

The dream began to take on definiteness. The soul groped back to find its body and its lost place in the world. Not this gray limbo, but the sad and happy, the glorious and terrible world whence it had somehow passed.

The girl’s face faded away for an instant, and the face of a man seemed to be reflected in a blurred mirror. The eyes of the soul looked into the man’s eyes and knew them. They were his own. He was that man, or had been. “What a dull dog you are,” he heard himself say, as if he had said it long ago, said it often, and the echo had followed him to this twilit place beyond death. He thought the face was rather like a dog’s, an ugly mongrel dog’s. The girl could not possibly care for him! Yet some one had told him that she did care, and that she would marry him if he asked. “I’m her mother. I ought to know!” As he heard the woman’s voice speaking the words, he saw the face that belonged to the voice: the face of a pretty woman, young looking till the girl came near… The girl had come now! The cream-and-rose tints of her youth made the other face old. This was rather pathetic. He remembered that it had so impressed him more than once. Yet he had never been able to like the mother.

The dream was growing in distinctness. They three – he and the girl and the woman – were in a house. It was a beautiful old house, in the country. Outside it was black and white, with elaborate patterns of oak on plaster. A sheet of water lay so near that the black and white front was reflected in it, like a dream within a dream. The calm water was asleep, and dreaming the house; and some great dark trees and clumps of rhododendrons were dreaming also, which seemed very confusing, and made him doubt whether there were any such soul as his, or whether after all he were only the spirit of the water or the trees, and had never known this girl who was walking with the ugly man. Yet it seemed to be the ugly man’s house, and he knew what the man was thinking. They were one and the same, at all events in the dream. And though he was out of doors with the girl, he could see every room in the house as plainly as he could see the lake and the trees and the pink rhododendrons. He seemed to pass through each room, one after another, because the girl was extolling the charm of the house, and his mind moved here and there following her words, picturing her, white and flower-like against a dark oak paneling, or old brocade, or hanging of faded tapestry.

Yes, it was a beautiful house. He had that to offer her, and money too. There were women who would take him because of what he had to give. And there was something else. What was it? Oh, a title. Not much of a title. He couldn’t believe she would be influenced by a trifle like that. She was too perfect, too wonderful. A great many men with nobler titles and more money must have asked her to marry them, or they would ask her in future; for she was still very young. So far she had never fallen in love. She had told him so.

“Not seriously in love,” she had said, half laughing, and half in earnest. “There was only my cousin. I adored him when I was child. But I haven’t seen him since I was sixteen. And now I’m twenty-one. He was most awfully good looking, and I thought he was a knight and a hero. Perhaps if he came back from India I should be disappointed in him.”

Queer that the groping soul should hold an echo of these chance words about India, though there was none for the name of the cousin, nor even of the girl herself. This made the awakening man wonder again if the girl had existed, or whether she lived only in his dreams. It was a vaguely sweet, vaguely sad dream, which seemed to have ended before it was fairly begun, with a very sorrowful ending which he couldn’t quite recall yet. He wished to go on dreaming, and to change the end if he could.

The girl and her mother were visiting the ugly man at the old black and white house. He – whoever he was – had to go away. He was begging the girl to stop until he came back. “If I do come back,” he added. “Your mother is willing to stay if you are. It would make me happy to think of you in my house, and if anything happens to me…”

“Oh, don’t speak of such things!” she broke in. “It’s terrible that you must go.”

This was very kind of her, because it was not reasonable that she could really care much – such a girl – for such a man, who had never been able to interest her, he felt. But she looked at him, looked up mistily with her dear eyes of smoke-blue. There was some message in them, behind a glaze of tears.

Drowned in those eyes, he heard himself stammering out things he had not thought that he would ever dare to say. “If you could marry me … I don’t suppose you could … but if…”

Her answer did not come into the dream. Perhaps she had not answered. But he could see the ugly man holding out his hands, and the girl putting her hands into them. He could see her looking up at him again, and in the beautiful eyes there was that message she wanted him to read. There, at that place, was the end of the dream-picture; it never went further, though he tried over and over to carry it on; the girl looking up, a tall slender shape in white, with the afternoon sun burnishing her hair, and giving to it the color of a copper beech tree under which she stood. He knew that he had thought, “I shall never forget her as she is now, not even when I’m dead.” He had kept his word. He was dead; hovering on the borderland of the unknown: and he had not forgotten. But just where the dream ended, before he could read the girl’s look and hear what she had to say, her mother had come quickly out of the house, with an open book in her hand. That seemed to be the reason why the picture broke.

It seemed afterwards too, though there was no clear vision, that the girl was willing to marry him, just barely willing. Her mother took it for granted that she had said “yes” when he asked her, and the girl let it go as if it were true; though he could not be sure it was what she had meant when she looked up with the strange light in her eyes, and tried to speak. He would have given years of the future he hoped for then, to have been sure, without any doubts.