The Altar of the Dead | Page 9

she had ever pronounced his own; but it was not their
names that mattered, it was only their perfect practice and their
common need.
These things made their whole relation so impersonal that they hadn't
the rules or reasons people found in ordinary friendships. They didn't
care for the things it was supposed necessary to care for in the
intercourse of the world. They ended one day--they never knew which
of them expressed it first--by throwing out the idea that they didn't care
for each other. Over this idea they grew quite intimate; they rallied to it
in a way that marked a fresh start in their confidence. If to feel deeply
together about certain things wholly distinct from themselves didn't
constitute a safety, where was safety to be looked for? Not lightly nor
often, not without occasion nor without emotion, any more than in any
other reference by serious people to a mystery of their faith; but when
something had happened to warm, as it were, the air for it, they came as
near as they could come to calling their Dead by name. They felt it was
coming very near to utter their thought at all. The word "they"
expressed enough; it limited the mention, it had a dignity of its own,

and if, in their talk, you had heard our friends use it, you might have
taken them for a pair of pagans of old alluding decently to the
domesticated gods. They never knew-- at least Stransom never
knew--how they had learned to be sure about each other. If it had been
with each a question of what the other was there for, the certitude had
come in some fine way of its own. Any faith, after all, has the instinct
of propagation, and it was as natural as it was beautiful that they should
have taken pleasure on the spot in the imagination of a following. If the
following was for each but a following of one it had proved in the event
sufficient. Her debt, however, of course was much greater than his,
because while she had only given him a worshipper he had given her a
splendid temple. Once she said she pitied him for the length of 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