Chapter 5 - Page 2

his list - she had counted his candles almost as often as
himself - and this made him wonder what could have been the length
of hers. He had wondered before at the coincidence of their
losses, especially as from time to time a new candle was set up.
On some occasion some accident led him to express this curiosity,
and she answered as if in surprise that he hadn't already
understood. "Oh for me, you know, the more there are the better -
there could never be too many. I should like hundreds and hundreds
- I should like thousands; I should like a great mountain of
light."

Then of course in a flash he understood. "Your Dead are only One?"

She hung back at this as never yet. "Only One," she answered,
colouring as if now he knew her guarded secret. It really made him
feel he knew less than before, so difficult was it for him to
reconstitute a life in which a single experience had so belittled
all others. His own life, round its central hollow, had been
packed close enough. After this she appeared to have regretted her
confession, though at the moment she spoke there had been pride in
her very embarrassment. She declared to him that his own was the
larger, the dearer possession - the portion one would have chosen
if one had been able to choose; she assured him she could perfectly
imagine some of the echoes with which his silences were peopled.
He knew she couldn't: one's relation to what one had loved and
hated had been a relation too distinct from the relations of
others. But this didn't affect the fact that they were growing old
together in their piety. She was a feature of that piety, but even
at the ripe stage of acquaintance in which they occasionally
arranged to meet at a concert or to go together to an exhibition
she was not a feature of anything else. The most that happened was
that his worship became paramount. Friend by friend dropped away
till at last there were more emblems on his altar than houses left
him to enter. She was more than any other the friend who remained,
but she was unknown to all the rest. Once when she had discovered,
as they called it, a new star, she used the expression that the
chapel at last was full.

"Oh no," Stransom replied, "there is a great thing wanting for
that! The chapel will never be full till a candle is set up before
which all the others will pale. It will be the tallest candle of
all."

Her mild wonder rested on him. "What candle do you mean?"

"I mean, dear lady, my own."

He had learned after a long time that she earned money by her pen,
writing under a pseudonym she never disclosed in magazines he never
saw. She knew too well what he couldn't read and what she couldn't
write, and she taught him to cultivate indifference