“If you like,” was her answer.
THE MISSING YEARS
“Why shouldn’t life be always like this?”
said Waymark, lying on the upper beach and throwing
pebbles into the breakers, which each moment drew
a little further hack and needed a little extra exertion
of the arm to reach them. There was small disturbance
by people passing, here some two miles up the shore
eastward from Hastings. A large shawl spread
between two walking-sticks stuck upright gave, at
this afternoon hour, all the shade needful for two
persons lying side by side, and, even in the blaze
of unclouded summer, there were pleasant airs flitting
about the edge of the laughing sea. “Why
shouldn’t life be always like this? It might
be—sunshine or fireside—if men
were wise. Leisure is the one thing that all
desire, but they strive for it so blindly that they
frustrate one another’s hope. And so at
length they have come to lose the end in the means;
are mad enough to set the means before them as in itself
an end.”
“We must work to forget our troubles,”
said his companion simply.
“Why, yes, and those very troubles are the fit
reward of our folly. We have not been content
to live in the simple happiness of our senses.
We must be learned and wise, forsooth. We were
not content to enjoy the beauty of the greater and
the lesser light. We must understand whence they
come and whither they go—after that, what
they are made of and how much they weigh. We thought
for such a long time that our toil would end in something;
that we might become as gods, knowing good and evil.
Now we are at the end of our tether, we see clearly
enough that it has all been worse than vain; how good
if we could unlearn it all, scatter the building of
phantasmal knowledge in which we dwell so uncomfortably!
It is too late. The gods never take back their
gifts; we wearied them with our prayers into granting
us this one, and now they sit in the clouds and mock
us.”
Ida looked, and kept silent; perhaps scarcely understood.
“People kill themselves in despair,” Waymark
went on, “that is, when they have drunk to the
very dregs the cup of life’s bitterness.
If they were wise, they would die at that moment—if
it ever comes— when joy seems supreme and
stable. Life can give nothing further, and it
has no more hellish misery than disillusion following
upon delight.”
“Did you ever seriously think of killing yourself?”
Ida asked, gazing at him closely.
“Yes. I have reached at times the point
when I would not have moved a muscle to escape death,
and from that it is not far to suicide. But my
joy had never come, and it is hard to go away without
that one draught.—And you!”
“I went so far once as to buy poison. But
neither had I tasted any happiness, and I could not
help hoping.”
“And you still wait—still hope?”
