Death - Page 2

the
circumstances of their existence, but something inside
them meant the same thing, wanted the same release,
would have left the same impression on the memory of an
onlooker. Later, and when he grew older and married a
young wife, the doctor often talked to her of the hours
spent with the sick woman and expressed a good many
things he had been unable to express to Elizabeth. He
was almost a poet in his old age and his notion of what
happened took a poetic turn. "I had come to the time in
my life when prayer became necessary and so I invented
gods and prayed to them," he said. "I did not say my
prayers in words nor did I kneel down but sat perfectly
still in my chair. In the late afternoon when it was
hot and quiet on Main Street or in the winter when the
days were gloomy, the gods came into the office and I
thought no one knew about them. Then I found that this
woman Elizabeth knew, that she worshipped also the same
gods. I have a notion that she came to the office
because she thought the gods would be there but she was
happy to find herself not alone just the same. It was
an experience that cannot be explained, although I
suppose it is always happening to men and women in all
sorts of places."

* * *

On the summer afternoons when Elizabeth and the doctor
sat in the office and talked of their two lives they
talked of other lives also. Sometimes the doctor made
philosophic epigrams. Then he chuckled with amusement.
Now and then after a period of silence, a word was said
or a hint given that strangely illuminated the life of
the speaker, a wish became a desire, or a dream, half
dead, flared suddenly into life. For the most part the
words came from the woman and she said them without
looking at the man.

Each time she came to see the doctor the hotel keeper's
wife talked a little more freely and after an hour or
two in his presence went down the stairway into Main
Street feeling renewed and strengthened against the
dullness of her days. With something approaching a
girlhood swing to her body she walked along, but when
she had got back to her chair by the window of her room
and when darkness had come on and a girl from the hotel
dining room brought her dinner on a tray, she let it
grow cold. Her thoughts ran away to her girlhood with
its passionate longing for adventure and she remembered
the arms of men that had held her when adventure was a
possible thing for her. Particularly she remembered one
who had for a time been her lover and who in the moment
of his passion had cried out to her more than a hundred
times, saying the same words madly over and over: "You
dear! You dear! You lovely dear!" The words,