V. V.'s Eyes Part 94

And then he added, in a let-down sort of way: "Freest man I ever saw."

There was no reply to make to these things. They went down the stairs together. Halfway down, the man spoke again:

"In the little while I've been here, I've seen and heard a great deal.

Some day you must let me tell you--how much there is down here to keep his memory green."

The stairs were long. A kind of terror was growing within her. She would go to pieces before she reached the bottom. But that peril pa.s.sed; and very near now was the waiting car, and merciful shelter....

They crossed, amid springing memories, the old court where, one rainy afternoon, there had happened what had turned her life thenceforward.

Then they were safely through the door, and came out upon the portico, into the last light of the dying afternoon. And here, above all else that she felt, she encountered a dim surprise.

When she had pa.s.sed this way a little while before, it was as if all power of feeling had been frozen in her. Sights and sounds were not for her. So now the sudden spectacle that met her eyes came as a large vague confusion.

The shabby street was black with people.

Her affliction had been so supremely personal, her sense of this man's tragic solitariness in the world so overwhelming, that she could not at once take in the meaning of what she saw. She must have faltered to a pause. And she heard Pond's voice, so strangely gentle:

"You see he was much loved here."

Her eyes went once over the dingy street, the memorable scene. Thought shook through her in poignant pictures.... Herself, one day, prostrated by calamity on calamity; and in the little island-circle where she had spent her life, not one heart that had taken her sorrow as its own. And beside that picture, this: a great company, men and women, old and young, silent beneath a window: and somewhere among them the sounds of persistent weeping....

And Cally seemed suddenly to see what had been hidden from her before.

If he was much loved, it was because he had loved much.

Yet her confusion must have lingered. Was it so, indeed? Many, so many, to compensate his loneliness? It seemed to be important to understand clearly; and she turned her veiled face toward Pond, and spoke indistinctly:

"All these.... Are they all ... his friends?"

There sprang a light into the Director's hawk-eyes, changing his whole look wonderfully.

"They're his mother," he said, "and his brothers and his sisters...."