48.The Golden Shining
══════════════════════════════════════════════════
THEY went then, silently, from the twilight into the darkness of the house which had been their shared home in youth, and in which now there was no youth and no sound and no assured light anywhere. Yet a glow of pallidly veiled embers, not quite extinct where all else seemed dead, showed where the hearth would be. And Saraïde said:
“It is droll that we have not yet seen each other’s faces! Give me your foolish paper, Kerin of my heart, that I may put it to some use and light this lamp.”
Kerin, a bit disconsolately, obeyed: and Saraïde touched the low red embers with the paper which told about the one thing which is wholly true. The paper blazed. Kerin saw thus speedily wasted the fruit of Kerin’s long endeavor. Saraïde had lighted her lamp. The lamp cast everywhither now a golden shining: and in its clear soft yellow radiancy, Saraïde was putting fresh wood upon the fire, and making tidy her hearth.
After that necessary bit of housework she turned to her husband, and they looked at each other for the first time since both were young. Kerin saw a bent,dapper, not unkindly witch-woman peering up at him, with shrewd eyes, over the handle of her broom. But through the burning of that paper, as Kerin saw also, their small eight-sided home had become snug and warm and cozy looking, it even had an air of durability: and Kerin laughed, with the thin, easy, neighing laughter of the aged.
For, after all, he reflected, it could benefit nobody ever to recognize—either in youth or in gray age or after death—that time, like an old envious eunuch, must endlessly deface and maim, and make an end of, whatever anywhere was young and strong and beautiful, or even cozy; and that such was the one truth which had ever been revealed to any man, assuredly. Saraïde, for that matter, seemed to have found out for herself, somewhere in philanthropic fields, the one thing which was wholly true; and she seemed, also, to prefer to ignore it, in favor of life’s unimportant, superficial, familiar tasks.... Well, and Saraïde, as usual, was in the right! It was the summit of actual wisdom to treat the one thing which was wholly true as if it were not true at all. For the truth was discomposing, and without remedy, and was too chillingly strange ever to be really faced: meanwhile, in the familiar and the superficial, and in temperate bodily pleasures, one found a certain cheerfulness....
He temperately kissed his wife, and he temperately inquired, “My darling, what is there for supper?”