The Choir Invisible

In the Country of the Spirit there is a certain high table-land that lies

far on among the out-posts toward Eternity. Standing on that calm clear

height, where the sun shines ever though it shines coldly, the wayfarer may

look behind him at his own footprints of self-renunciation, below on his

dark zones of storm, and forward to the final land where the mystery, the

pain, and the yearning of his life will either be infinitely satisfied or

infinitely quieted. But no man can write a description of this place for

those who have never trodden it; by those who have, no description is

desired: their fullest speech is Silence. For here dwells the Love of which

there has never been any confession, from which there is no escape, for

which there is no hope: the love of a man for a woman who is bound to

another, or the love of a woman for a man who is bound to another. Many

there are who know what that means, and this is the reason why the land is

always thronged. But in the throng no one signals another; to walk there is

to be counted among the Unseen and the Alone.

To this great wistful height of Silence he had struggled at last after all

his days of rising and falling, of climbing and slipping back. It was no

especial triumph for his own strength. His better strength had indeed gone

into it, and the older rightful habitudes of mind that always mean so much

to us when we are tried and tempted, and the old beautiful submission of

himself to the established laws of the world. But more than what these had

effected was what she herself had been to him and had done for him. Even his

discovery of her at the window that last night had had the effect of bidding

him stand off; for he saw there the loyalty and sacredness of wifehood that,

however full of suffering, at least asked for itself the privilege and the

dignity of suffering unnoticed.

Thus he had come to realize that life had long been leading him blindfold,

until one recent day, snatching the bandage from his eyes, she had cried:

"Here is the parting of three ways, each way a tragedy: choose your way and

your tragedy!"

If he confessed his love and found that she felt but friendship for him,

there was the first tragedy. The wrong in him would lack the answering wrong

in her, which sometimes, when the two are put together, so nearly makes up

the right. From her own point of view, he would merely be offering her a

delicate ineffaceable insult. If she had been the sort of woman by whose

vanity every conquest is welcomed as a tribute and pursued as an aim, he

could never have cared for her at all. Thus while his love took its very

origin from his belief of her nobility, he was premeditating the means of

having her prove to him that this did not exist.