The Brimming Cup

She looked up at him with a passionate gratitude. "I'll never forget

that as long as I live!" she cried out to him.

The tears stood in his eyes as in hers.

For the fraction of an instant, they had felt each other there, as never

before they had felt any other human being: they had both at once caught

a moment of flood-tide, and both together had been carried up side by

side; the long, inevitable isolation of human lives from birth onward

had been broken by the first real contact with another human soul. They

felt the awed impulse to cover their eyes as before too great a glory.

The tide ebbed back, and untroubled they made no effort to stop its

ebbing. They had touched their goal, it was really there. Now they knew

it within their reach. Appeased, assuaged, fatigued, they felt the need

for quiet, they knew the sweetness of sobriety. They even looked away

from each other, aware of their own bodies which for that instant had

been left behind. They entered again into the flesh that clad their

spirits, taking possession of their hands and feet and members, and

taken possession of by them again. The fullness of their momentary

satisfaction had been so complete that they felt no regret, only a

simple, tender pleasure as of being again at home. They smiled happily

at each other and sat silent, hand in hand.

* * * * *

Now they saw the beauty before them, the vast plain, the mountains, the

sea: harmonious, serene, ripe with maturity, evocative of all the

centuries of conscious life which had unrolled themselves there.

"It's too beautiful to be real, isn't it?" murmured the girl, "and now,

the peaceful way I feel this minute, I don't mind it's being so old that

it makes you feel a midge in the sunshine with only an hour or two of

life before you. What if you are, when it's life as we feel it now, such

a flood of it, every instant brimming with it? Neale," she turned to him

with a sudden idea, "do you remember how Victor Hugo's 'Waterloo'

begins?"

"I should say not!" he returned promptly. "You forget I got all the

French I know in an American university."

"Well, I went to college in America, myself!"

"I bet it wasn't there you learned anything about Victor Hugo's poetry,"

he surmised skeptically. "Well, how does it begin, anyhow, and what's it

got to do with us?"

The girl was as unamused as he at his certainty that it had something to

do with them, or she would not have mentioned it. She explained, "It's

not a famous line at all, nothing I ever heard anybody else admire. We

had to learn the poem by heart, when I was a little girl and went to

school in Bayonne. It starts out, 'Waterloo, Waterloo, morne plaine

Comme une onde qui bout dans une urne trop pleine,' And that second line always stuck in my head for the picture it made. I

could see it, so vividly, an urn boiling over with the great gush of

water springing up in it. It gave me a feeling, inside, a real physical

feeling, I mean. I wanted, oh so awfully, sometime to be so filled with

some emotion, something great and fine, that I would be an urn too full,

gushing up in a great flooding rush. I could see the smooth, thick curl

of the water surging up and out!"