FullReads

“Hungry?” the Brother asked.

“I don’t mean for bread, though he had none too much, I think, even of that. I mean for–well, what i had and what I was a monument of to him as I stood there up to my neck in preposterous evidence. He, poor chap, had been for ten years serenading closed windows and had never yet caused a shutter to show that it stirred. My dim blind was the first raised to him an inch; my reading of his book, my impression of it, my note and my invitation, formed literally the only response ever dropped into his dark alley. He saw in my littered room, my shattered day, my bored face and spoiled temper–it’s embarrassing, but I must tell you–the very proof of my pudding, the very blaze of my glory. And he saw in my repletion and my ‘renown’–deluded innocent!–what he had yearned for in vain.”

“What he had yearned for was to be you,” said the Brother. Then he added: “I see where you’re coming out.”

“At my saying to him by the end of five minutes: ‘My dear fellow, I wish you’d just try it–wish you’d for a while just be me!’ You go straight to the mark, good Brother, and that was exactly what occurred–extraordinary though it was that we should both have understood. I saw what he could give, and he did too. He saw moreover what I could take; in fact what he saw was wonderful.”

“He must be very remarkable!” Dane’s converser laughed.

“There’s no doubt of it whatever–far more remarkable than I. That’s just the reason why what I put to him in joke–with a fantastic desperate irony–became, in his hands, with his vision of his chance, the blessed means and measure of my sitting on this spot in your company.’Oh if I could just shift it all–make it straight over for an hour to other shoulders! If there only WERE a pair!’–that’s the way I put it to him. And then at something in his face, ‘Would YOU, by a miracle, undertake it?’ I asked. I let him know all it meant–how it meant that he should at that very moment step in. It meant that he should finish my work and open my letters and keep my engagements and be subject, for better or worse, to my contacts and complications. It meant that he should live with my life and think with my brain and write with my hand and speak with my voice. It meant above all that I should get off. He accepted with greatness–rose to it like a hero. Only he said: ‘What will become of you?’ “

“There was the rub!” the Brother admitted.

“Ah but only for a minute. He came to my help again,” Dane pursued, “when he saw I couldn’t quite meet that, could at least only say that I wanted to think, wanted to cease, wanted to do the thing itself–the thing that mattered and that I was trying for, miserable me, and that thing only–and therefore wanted first of all really to see it again, planted out, crowded out, frozen out as it now so long had been.’I know what you want,’ he after a moment quietly remarked to me.’Ah what I want doesn’t exist!’ ‘I know what you want,’ he repeated. At that I began to believe him.”

“Had you any idea yourself?” the Brother’s attention breathed.

“Oh yes,” said Dane, “and it was just my idea that made me despair. There it was as sharp as possible in my imagination and my longing–there it was so utterly not in the fact. We were sitting together on my sofa as we waited for breakfast. He presently laid his hand on my knee–showed me a face that the sudden great light in it had made, for me, indescribably beautiful.’It exists–it exists,’ he at last said. And so I remember we sat a while and looked at each other, with the final effect of my finding that I absolutely believed him. I remember we weren’t at all solemn–we smiled with the joy of discoverers. He was as glad as I–he was tremendously glad. That came out in the whole manner of his reply to the appeal that broke from me: ‘Where is it then in God’s name? Tell me without delay where it is!’ “