And so the woman went to it and found a match somewhere in the darkness and touched the pile off.
There is a picture that will remain with me always. Just that—the barren room and the blind unseeing man standing there, and the woman kneeling and making a little flare of beauty at the last. Little flames leaped up. Lights crept and danced over the walls. Below, on the floor of the room, there was a deep well of darkness in which the man, blind with his own purpose, was standing.
The pile of burning papers must have made for a moment quite a glare of light in the room, and the woman stood for a moment, beside the fireplace, just outside the glare of light.
And then, pale and wavering, she walked across it as across a lighted stage, going softly and silently toward him. Had she also something to say? No one will ever know. What happened was that she said nothing.
She walked across to him, and at the moment she reached him fell down on the floor and died at his feet, and at the same moment the little fire of papers died. If she struggled before she died, there on the floor, she struggled in silence. There was no sound. She had fallen and lay between him and the door that led out to the stairway and to the street.
It was then Wilson became altogether inhuman—too much so for my understanding.
The fire had died and the woman he had loved had died.
And there he stood looking into nothingness, thinking, God knows, perhaps of nothingness.
He stood a minute, five minutes, perhaps ten. He was a man who, before he found the woman, had been sunk far down into a deep sea of doubt and questioning. Before he found the man no expression had ever come from him. He had perhaps just wandered from place to place, looking at people's faces, wondering about people, wanting to come close to other, and not knowing how. The woman had been able to lift him up to the surface of the sea of life for a time, and with her he had floated on the surface of the sea, under the sky, in the sunlight. The woman's warm body, given to him in love, had been as a boat in which he had floated on the surface of the sea, and now the boat had wrecked and he was sinking again, back into the sea.
