The Brimming Cup by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

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THE BRIMMING CUP

_Dorothy Canfield_

HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY NEW YORK

1919

_By the same author_

THE SQUIRREL-CAGE
A MONTESSORI MOTHER
MOTHERS AND CHILDREN
HILLSBORO PEOPLE
THE BENT TWIG
THE REAL MOTIVE
FELLOW CAPTAINS
(_With Sarah N. Cleghorn_)
UNDERSTOOD BETSY
HOME FIRES IN FRANCE
THE DAY OF GLORY
THE BRIMMING CUP
ROUGH-HEWN
RAW MATERIAL
THE HOME-MAKER
MADE-TO-ORDER STORIES
HER SON'S WIFE
WHY STOP LEARNING?
THE DEEPENING STREAM
BASQUE PEOPLE
FABLES FOR PARENTS
SEASONED TIMBER

CONTENTS

CHAPTER Page
I. PRELUDE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
II. INTERLUDE . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

_PART ONE_

III. OLD MR. WELLES AND YOUNG MR. MARSH. 29
IV. TABLE TALK. . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
V. A LITTLE GIRL AND HER MOTHER. . . . 64
VI. THINGS TAKE THEIR COURSE. . . . . . 80
VII. THE NIGHT-BLOOMING CEREUS . . . . . 91
VIII. WHAT GOES ON INSIDE . . . . . . . . 115
IX. THE GENT AROUND THE LADY. . . . . . 130
X. AT THE MILL . . . . . . . . . . . . 151

_PART TWO_

XI. IN AUNT HETTY'S GARDEN. . . . . . . 179
XII. HEARD FROM THE STUDY. . . . . . . . 199
XIII. ALONG THE EAGLE ROCK BROOK. . . . . 215
XIV. BESIDE THE ONION-BED. . . . . . . . 224
XV. HOME-LIFE . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
XVI. MASSAGE-CREAM; THEME AND VARIATIONS 256
XVII. THE SOUL OF NELLY POWERS. . . . . . 266

_PART THREE_

XVIII. BEFORE THE DAWN . . . . . . . . . . 279
XIX. MR. WELLES LIGHTS THE FUSE. . . . . 285
XX. A PRIMAEVAL HERITAGE. . . . . . . . 294
XXI. THE COUNSEL OF THE STARS. . . . . . 302
XXII. EUGENIA DOES WHAT SHE CAN . . . . . 309
XXIII. MARISE LOOKS DOWN ON THE STARS. . . 323

_PART FOUR_

XXIV. NEALE'S RETURN. . . . . . . . . . . 331
XXV. MARISE'S COMING-OF-AGE. . . . . . . 338
XXVI. MARISE LOOKS AND SEES WHAT IS THERE 360
XXVII. THE FALL OF THE BIG PINE. . . . . . 367
XXVIII. TWO GOOD-BYES . . . . . . . . . . . 380
XXIX. VIGNETTES FROM HOME-LIFE. . . . . . 390

THE BRIMMING CUP

CHAPTER I

_PRELUDE_

SUNSET ON ROCCA DI PAPA

_An Hour in the Life of Two Modern Young People_

April, 1909.

Lounging idly in the deserted little waiting-room was the usual shabby,
bored, lonely ticket-seller, prodigiously indifferent to the grave
beauty of the scene before him and to the throng of ancient memories
jostling him where he stood. Without troubling to look at his watch, he
informed the two young foreigners that they had a long hour to wait
before the cable-railway would send a car down to the Campagna. His lazy
nonchalance was faintly colored with the satisfaction, common to his
profession, in the discomfiture of travelers.

Their look upon him was of amazed gratitude. Evidently they did not
understand Italian, he thought, and repeated his information more
slowly, with an unrecognizable word or two of badly pronounced English
thrown in. He felt slightly vexed that he could not make them feel the
proper annoyance, and added, "It may even be so late that the signori
would miss the connection for the last tramway car back to Rome. It is a
long walk back to the city across the Campagna."

They continued to gaze at him with delight. "I've got to tip him for
that!" said the young man, reaching vigorously into a pocket.

The girl's answering laugh, like the inward look of her eyes, showed
only a preoccupied attention. She had the concentrated absent aspect of
a person who has just heard vital tidings and can attend to nothing
else. She said, "Oh, Neale, how ridiculous of you. He couldn't possibly
have the least idea what he's done to deserve getting paid for."

At the sound of her voice, the tone in which these words were
pronounced, the ticket-seller looked at her hard, with a bold,
intrusive, diagnosing stare: "Lovers!" he told himself conclusively. He
accepted with a vast incuriosity as to reason the coin which the young
foreigner put into his hand, and, ringing it suspiciously on his table,
divided his appraising attention between its clear answer to his
challenge, and the sound of the young man's voice as he answered his
sweetheart, "Of course he hasn't any idea what he's done to deserve it.
Who ever has? You don't suppose for a moment I've any idea what I've
done to deserve mine?"

The ticket-seller smiled secretly into his dark mustache. "I wonder if
_my_ voice quivered and deepened like that, when I was courting
Annunziata?" he asked himself. He glanced up from pocketing the coin,
and caught the look which passed between the two. He felt as though
someone had laid hands on him and shaken him. "_Dio mio_" he thought.
"They are in the hottest of it."

The young foreigners went across the tracks and established themselves
on the rocks, partly out of sight, just at the brink of the great drop
to the Campagna. The setting sun was full in their faces. But they did
not see it, seeing only each other.

Below them spread the divinely colored plain, crossed by the ancient
yellow river, rolling its age-old memories out to the sea, a blue
reminder of the restfulness of eternity, at the rim of the weary old
land. Like a little cluster of tiny, tarnished pearls, Rome gleamed
palely, remote and legendary.

* * * * *

The two young people looked at each other earnestly, with a passionate,
single-hearted attention to their own meaning, thrusting away
impatiently the clinging brambles of speech which laid hold on their
every effort to move closer to each other. They did not look down, or
away from each other's eyes as they strove to free themselves, to step
forward, to clasp the other's outstretched hands. They reached down
blindly, tearing at those thorny, clutching entanglements, pulling and
tugging at those tenuous, tough words which would not let them say what
they meant: sure, hopefully sure that in a moment . . . now . . . with the
next breath, they would break free as no others had ever done before
them, and crying out the truth and glory that was in them, fall into
each other's arms.

The girl was physically breathless with this effort, her lips parted,
her eyebrows drawn together. "Neale, Neale dear, if I could only tell
you how I want it to be, how utterly utterly _true_ I want us to be.
Nothing's of any account except that."

She moved with a shrugging, despairing gesture. "No, no, not the way
that sounds. I don't mean, you know I don't mean any old-fashioned
impossible vows never to change, or be any different! I know too much
for that. I've seen too awfully much unhappiness, with people trying to
do that. You know what I told you about my father and mother. Oh, Neale,
it's horribly dangerous, loving anybody. I never wanted to. I never
thought I should. But now I'm in it, I see that it's not at all
unhappiness I'm afraid of, your getting tired of me or I of you . . .
everybody's so weak and horrid in this world, who knows what may be
before us? That's not what would be unendurable, sickening. That would
make us unhappy. But what would poison us to death . . . what I'm afraid
of, between two people who try to be what we want to be to each
other . . . how can I say it?" She looked at him in an anguish of endeavor,
". . . not to be true to what is deepest and most living in us . . . that
would be the betrayal I'm afraid of. That's what I mean. No matter what it
costs us personally, or what it brings, we must be true to that. We
_must!_"

He took her hand in his silently, and held it close. She drew a long
troubled breath and said, "You _do_ think we can always have between us
that loyalty to what is deep and living? It does not seem too much to
ask, when we are willing to give up everything else for it, even
happiness?"

He gave her a long, profound look. "I'm trying to give that loyalty to
you this minute, Marise darling," he said slowly, "when I tell you now
that I think it a very great deal to ask of life, a very great deal for
any human beings to try for. I should say it was much harder to get than
happiness."

She was in despair. "Do you think that?" She searched his face anxiously
as though she found there more than in his speech. "Yes, yes, I see what
you mean." She drew a long breath. "I can even see how fine it is of you
to say that to me now. It's like a promise of how you will try. But oh,
Neale, I won't _want_ life on any other terms!"

She stopped, looking down at her hand in his. He tightened his clasp.
His gaze on her darkened and deepened. "It's like sending me to get the
apples of Hesperides," he said, looking older than she, curiously and
suddenly older. "I want to say yes! It would be easy to say yes.
Darling, darling Marise, you can't want it more than I! But the very
intelligence that makes you want it, that makes me want it, shows me how
mortally hard it would be! Think! To be loyal to what is deepest and
most living in yourself . . . that's an undertaking for a life-time's
effort, with all the ups and downs and growths of life. And then to try
to know what is deepest and most living in another . . . and to try . . .
Marise! I will try. I will try with all my might. Can anybody do more
than try with all his might?"

Their gaze into each other's eyes went far beyond the faltering words
they spoke. She asked him in a low voice, "Couldn't you do more for me
than for yourself? One never knows, but . . . what else is love for, but
to give greater strength than we have?"

There was a moment's silence, in which their very spirits met flame-like
in the void, challenging, hoping, fearing. The man's face set. His
burning look of power enveloped her like the reflection of the sun. "I
swear you shall have it!" he said desperately, his voice shaking.

She looked up at him with a passionate gratitude. "I'll never forget
that as long as I live!" she cried out to him.

The tears stood in his eyes as in hers.

For the fraction of an instant, they had felt each other there, as never
before they had felt any other human being: they had both at once caught
a moment of flood-tide, and both together had been carried up side by
side; the long, inevitable isolation of human lives from birth onward
had been broken by the first real contact with another human soul. They
felt the awed impulse to cover their eyes as before too great a glory.

The tide ebbed back, and untroubled they made no effort to stop its
ebbing. They had touched their goal, it was really there. Now they knew
it within their reach. Appeased, assuaged, fatigued, they felt the need
for quiet, they knew the sweetness of sobriety. They even looked away
from each other, aware of their own bodies which for that instant had
been left behind. They entered again into the flesh that clad their
spirits, taking possession of their hands and feet and members, and
taken possession of by them again. The fullness of their momentary
satisfaction had been so complete that they felt no regret, only a
simple, tender pleasure as of being again at home. They smiled happily
at each other and sat silent, hand in hand.

* * * * *

Now they saw the beauty before them, the vast plain, the mountains, the
sea: harmonious, serene, ripe with maturity, evocative of all the
centuries of conscious life which had unrolled themselves there.

"It's too beautiful to be real, isn't it?" murmured the girl, "and now,
the peaceful way I feel this minute, I don't mind it's being so old that
it makes you feel a midge in the sunshine with only an hour or two of
life before you. What if you are, when it's life as we feel it now, such
a flood of it, every instant brimming with it? Neale," she turned to him
with a sudden idea, "do you remember how Victor Hugo's 'Waterloo'
begins?"

"I should say not!" he returned promptly. "You forget I got all the
French I know in an American university."

"Well, I went to college in America, myself!"

"I bet it wasn't there you learned anything about Victor Hugo's poetry,"
he surmised skeptically. "Well, how does it begin, anyhow, and what's it
got to do with us?"

The girl was as unamused as he at his certainty that it had something to
do with them, or she would not have mentioned it. She explained, "It's
not a famous line at all, nothing I ever heard anybody else admire. We
had to learn the poem by heart, when I was a little girl and went to
school in Bayonne. It starts out,

'Waterloo, Waterloo, morne plaine
Comme une onde qui bout dans une urne trop pleine,'

And that second line always stuck in my head for the picture it made. I
could see it, so vividly, an urn boiling over with the great gush of
water springing up in it. It gave me a feeling, inside, a real physical
feeling, I mean. I wanted, oh so awfully, sometime to be so filled with
some emotion, something great and fine, that I would be an urn too full,
gushing up in a great flooding rush. I could see the smooth, thick curl
of the water surging up and out!"

She stopped to look at him and exclaim, "Why, you're listening! You're
interested. Neale, I believe you are the only person in the world who
can really pay attention to what somebody else says. Everybody else just
goes on thinking his own thoughts."

He smiled at this fancy, and said, "Go on."

"Well, I don't know whether that feeling was already in me, waiting for
something to express it, or whether that phrase in the poem started it.
But it was, for ever so long, the most important thing in the world to
me. I was about fourteen years old then, and of course, being a good
deal with Catholics, I thought probably it was religious ecstasy that
was going to be the great flood that would brim my cup full. I used to
go up the hill in Bayonne to the Cathedral every day and stay there for
hours, trying to work up an ecstasy. I managed nearly to faint away once
or twice, which was _some_thing of course. But I couldn't feel that
great tide I'd dreamed of. And then, little by little . . . oh, lots of
things came between the idea and my thinking about it. Mother was . . .
I've told you how Mother was at that time. And what an unhappy time it
was at home. I was pretty busy at the house because she was away so
much. And Father and I hung together because there wasn't anybody else
to hang to: and all sorts of ugly things happened, and I didn't have the
time or the heart to think about being 'an urn too full.'"

She stopped, smiling happily, as though those had not been tragic words
which he had just spoken, thinking not of them but of something else,
which now came out, "And then, oh Neale, that day, on the piazza in
front of St. Peter's, when we stood together, and felt the spray of the
fountains blown on us, and you looked at me and spoke out. . . . Oh, Neale,
_Neale_, what a moment to have lived through! Well, when we went on into
the church, and I knelt there for a while, so struck down with joy that
I couldn't stand on my feet, all those wild bursts of excitement, and
incredulity and happiness, that kept surging up and drenching me . . . I
had a queer feeling, that awfully threadbare feeling of having been
there before, or felt that before; that it was familiar, although it was
so new. Then it came to me, 'Why, I have it, what I used to pray for.
Now at last I am the urn too full!' And it was true, I could feel, just
as I dreamed, the upsurging of the feeling, brimming over, boiling up,
brimming over. . . . And another phrase came into my mind, an English one.
I said to myself, 'The fullness of life.' Now I know what it is."

She turned to him, and caught at his hand. "Oh, Neale, now I _do_ know
what it is, how utterly hideous it would be to have to live without it,
to feel only the mean little trickle that seems mostly all that people
have."

"Well, I'll never have to get along without it, as long as I have you,"
he said confidently.

"And I refuse to live a _minute_, if it goes back on me!" she cried.

"I imagine that old folks would think we are talking very young,"
suggested the man casually.

"Don't speak of them!" She cast them away into non-existence with a
gesture.

They sank into a reverie, smiling to themselves.

"How the fountains shone in the sun, that day," she murmured; "the spray
they cast on us was all tiny opals and diamonds."

"You're sure you aren't going to be sorry to go back to America to live,
to leave all that?" asked the man. "I get anxious about that sometimes.
It seems an awful jump to go away from such beautiful historic things,
back to a narrow little mountain town."

"I'd like to know what right you have to call it narrow, when you've
never even seen it," she returned.

"Well, anybody could make a pretty fair guess that a small Vermont town
isn't going to be so very _wide_," he advanced reasonably.

"It may not be wide, but it's deep," she replied.

He laughed at her certainty. "You were about eleven years old when you
saw it last, weren't you?"

"No, you've got it wrong. It was when we came to France to live that I
was eleven, and of course I stopped going to Ashley regularly for
vacations then. But I went back for several summers in the old house
with Cousin Hetty, when I was in America for college, after Mother
died."

"Oh well, I don't care what it's like," he said, "except that it's the
place where I'm going to live with you. Any place on earth would seem
wide enough and deep enough, if I had you there."

"Isn't it funny," she mused, "that I should know so much more about it
than you? To think how I played all around your uncle's mill and house,
lots of times when I was a little girl, and never dreamed . . ."

"No funnier than all the rest of it," he demurred. "Once you grant our
existing and happening to meet out of all the millions of people in the
world, you can't think up anything funnier. Just the little
two-for-a-cent queerness of our happening to meet in Rome instead of in
Brooklyn, and your happening to know the town where my uncle lived and
owned the mill he left me . . . that can't hold a candle for queerness,
for wonderfulness, compared to my having ever laid eyes on you. Suppose
I'd never come to Rome at all? When I got the news of Uncle Burton's
death and the bequest, I was almost planning to sail from Genoa and not
come to southern Italy at all."

She shook her head confidently. "You can't scare me with any such
hideous possibilities. It's not possible that we shouldn't ever have
met, both of us being in the world. Didn't you ever study chemistry?
Didn't they teach you there are certain elements that just _will_ come
together, no matter how you mix them up with other things?"

He made no answer, gazing out across the plain far below them, mellowing
richly in the ever-softening light of the sunset.

She looked doubtfully at his profile, rather lean, with the beginning
already drawn of the deep American line from the Corner of the nose to
the mouth, that is partly humorous and partly grim. "Don't you believe
that, Neale, that we would have come together somehow, anyhow?" she
asked, "even if you had gone straight back from Genoa to Ashley? Maybe
it might have been up there after you'd begun to run the mill. Maybe I'd
have gone back to America and gone up to visit Cousin Hetty again."

He was still silent.

She said urgently, as if in alarm, "Neale, you don't believe that we
could have passed all our lives and never have _seen_ each other?"

He turned on her his deep-set eyes, full of tenderness and humor and
uncertainty, and shook his head. "Yes, dear, I do believe that," he said
regretfully. "I don't see how I can help believing it. Why, I hadn't the
faintest idea of going back to settle in Ashley before I met you. I had
taken Uncle Burton's mill and his bequest of four thousand dollars as a
sort of joke. What could I do with them, without anything else? And what
on earth did I want to do with them? Nothing! As far as I had any plans
at all, it was to go home, see Father and Mother for a while, get
through the legal complications of inheritance, sell the mill and house
. . . I wouldn't have thought of such a thing as bothering even to go to
Ashley to look at them . . . and then take the money and go off somewhere,
somewhere different, and far away: to China maybe. I was pretty restless
in my mind, pretty sure that nothing in our civilization was worth the
candle, you know, before you arrived on the scene to put everything in
focus. And if I had done all that, while you were still here in Rome,
running up and down your scales, honestly . . . I know I sound awfully
literal . . . but I don't see how we ever could have met, do you, dear?"

He offered her this, with a look half of apology, half of simple
courage.

She considered it and him seriously, studying his face and eyes,
listening retrospectively to the accent of his words, and immensely
astonished him by suddenly flashing a kiss on his cheek. "You're
miraculous!" she said. "You don't know how it feels; as though I'd been
floundering in a marsh, deeper and deeper, and then all at once, when I
thought I'd come to know there wasn't anything in the world _but_ marsh,
to come out on beautiful, fine, clean earth, where I feel the very
strength of ages under my feet. You don't _know_ how good it seems to
have a silly, romantic remark like what I said, answered the way you
did, telling the truth; how _good_ it feels to be pulled down to what's
what, and to know you can do it and really love me too."

He had been so startled and moved by her kiss that he had heard her
words but vaguely. "I don't seem to catch hold of all that. What's it
all about?"

"It's all about the fact that I really begin to believe that you will be
loyal and tell me the truth," she told him.

He saw cause for gravity in this, remembering the great moment so
shortly back of them, and said with a surprised and hurt accent, "Didn't
you believe me, when I said I would?"

She took up his hand in hers and said rapidly, "Dear Neale, I did
believe it, for just a moment, and I can't believe anything good of
anybody for longer than that, not _really_ in my heart of hearts. And
it's my turn to tell you some truth when I tell you about that unbelief,
what I've hardly even ever told myself, right out in words."

He was listening now, fixing on her a look of profound, intelligent
attention, as she went on, stumbling, reaching out for words, discarding
those she found, only her steady gaze giving coherence to her statement.
"You know, living the way I have . . . I've told you . . . I've seen a
great deal more than most girls have. And then, half brought up in France
with people who are clever and have their eyes wide open, people who
really count, I've seen how they don't believe in humans, or goodness, or
anything that's not base. They know life is mostly bad and cruel and
dull and low, and above all that it's bound to fool you if you trust to
it, or get off your guard a single minute. They don't _teach_ you that,
you know; but you see it's what they believe and what they spend all
their energies trying to dodge a little, all they think they can. Then
everything you read, except the silly little Bibliotheque-Rose sort of
thing, makes you know that it's true . . . Anatole France, and Maupassant,
and Schnitzler. Of course back in America you find lots of nice people
who don't believe that. But they're so sweet you know they'd swallow
anything that made things look pleasant. So you don't dare take their
word for anything. They won't even look at what's bad in everybody's
life, they just pretend it's not there, not in _their_ husbands, or
wives or children, and so you know they're fooled." She lowered her
voice, which faltered a little, but she still continued to look straight
into his eyes, "And as for love, why, I've just hated the sound of the
name and . . . I'm horribly afraid of it, even now."

He asked her gravely, "Don't you love me? Don't you think that I love
you?"

She looked at him piteously, wincing, bracing herself with an effort to
be brave. "I must try to be as honest as I want you to be. Yes, I love
you, Neale, with all my heart a thousand times more than I ever dreamed
I could love anybody. But how do I know that I'm not somehow fooling
myself: but that maybe all that huge unconscious inheritance from all my
miserable ancestors hasn't _got_ me, somehow, and you too? How do I know
that I'm not being fooled by Nature and fooling you with fine words?"

She hesitated, probing deep into her heart, and brought out now, like a
great and unexpected treasure, "But, Neale, listen! I _don't_ think that
about you! I don't believe you're being fooled. Why, I believe in you
more than in myself!" She was amazed at this and radiant.

Then she asked him, "Neale, how do _you_ manage about all this? What do
you feel about all the capacity for being low and bad, that everybody
has? Aren't you afraid that they'll get the best of us, inevitably,
unless we let ourselves get so dull, and second-rate and passive, that
we can't even be bad? Are you afraid of being fooled? Do you believe in
yourself at all?"

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