The Fighting Chance

The call--low, imperative, sustained--continued softly persistent against her windows--the summons of the young year's rain.

She went to the window and stood among the filmy curtains, looking out into the mist; a springlike aroma penetrated the room. She opened the window a little way, and the sweet, virile odour enveloped her.

A thousand longings rose within her; unnumbered wistful questions stirred her, sighing, unanswered.

Aware that her lips were moving unconsciously, she listened to the words forming automatic repetitions of phrases long forgotten: "And those that look out of the windows be darkened, And the door shall be shut in the streets."

What was it she was repeating?

"Also they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fear shall be in the way."

What echo of the past was this?

"And desire shall fail: because--"

Intent, absorbed in retracing the forgotten sequence to its source, she stood, breathing the thickening incense of the rain; and every breath was drawing her backward, nearer, nearer to the source of memory. Ah, the cliff chapel in the rain!--the words of a text mumbled deafly--the yearly service for those who died at sea! And she, seated there in the chapel dusk thinking of him who sat beside her, and how he feared a heavier, stealthier, more secret tide crawling, purring about his feet!

Enfin! Always, always at the end of everything, He! Always, reckoning step by step, backward through time, He! the source, the inception, the meaning of all!

Unmoored at last, her spirit swaying, enveloped in memories of him, she gave herself to the flood--overwhelmed, as tide on tide rose, rushing over her--body, mind, and soul.

She closed her eyes, leaning there heavily amid the cloudy curtains; she moved back into the room and stood staring at space through wet lashes. The hard, dry pulse in her throat hurt her till her under lip, freed from the tyranny of her small teeth, slipped free, quivering rebellion.

She had been walking her room to and fro, to and fro, for a long time before she realised that she had moved at all.

And now, impulse held the helm; a blind, unreasoning desire for relief hurried into action on the wings of impulse.

There was a telephone at her elbow. No need to hunt through lists to find a number she had known so long by heart--the three figures which had reiterated themselves so often, monotonously insistent, slyly persuasive; repeating themselves even in her dreams, so that she awoke at times shivering with the vision in which she had listened to temptation, and had called to him across the wilderness of streets and men.