Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/24

16 it meant—how it meant that he should at that very moment step in. It meant that he should finish my work and open my letters and keep my engagements and be subject, for better or worse, to my contacts and complications. It meant that he should live with my life, and think with my brain, and write with my hand, and speak with my voice. It meant, above all, that I should get off. He accepted with magnificence—rose to it like a hero. Only he said: "What will become of you?

'There was the hitch!' the Brother admitted.

'Ah, but only for a minute. He came to my help again,' Dane pursued, 'when he saw I couldn't quite meet that, could at least only say that I wanted to think, wanted to cease, wanted to do the thing itself—the thing I was trying for, miserable me, and that thing only—and therefore wanted first of all really to see it again, planted out, crowded out, frozen out as it now so long had been. "I know what you want," he after a moment quietly remarked to me. "Ah, what I want doesn't exist!" "I know what you want," he repeated. At that I began to believe him.'

'Had you any idea yourself?' the Brother asked.

'Oh, yes,' said Dane, 'and it was just my idea that made me despair. There it was as sharp as possible in my imagination and my longing—there it was so utterly not in fact. We were sitting together on my sofa as we waited for breakfast. He presently laid his hand on my knee—showed me a face that the sudden great light in it had made, for me, indescribably beautiful. "It exists—it exists," he at last said. And so, I remember, we sat awhile and looked at each other, with the final effect of my finding that I absolutely believed him. I remember we weren't at all solemn—we smiled with the joy of discoverers. He was as glad as I—he was tremendously glad. That came out in the whole manner of his reply to the appeal that broke from me: "Where is it, then, in God's name? Tell me without delay where it is!