Edith Wharton
The Fulness of Life
Wharton, Edith. "The Fulness of Life."
Scribner's Magazine 14 (Dec. 1893): 699-704.
About the print version
The Fulness of Life
Wharton, Edith
Scribner's Magazine
New York
1893
Note: Volume 14
Published: 1893
I.
FOR hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweet
lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when the heat seems
to have silenced the very birds and insects, and, lying sunk in the tasselled
meadow-grasses, one looks up through a level roofing of maple-leaves at the vast
shadowless, and unsuggestive blue. Now and then, at ever-lengthening intervals,
a flash of pain darted through her, like the ripple of sheet-lightning across
such a midsummer sky; but it was too transitory to shake her stupor, that calm,
delicious, bottomless stupor into which she felt herself sinking more and more
deeply, without a disturbing impulse of resistance, an effort of reattachment to
the vanishing edges of consciousness.
The resistance, the effort, had known their hour of violence; but now they
were at an end. Through her mind, long harried by grotesque visions, fragmentary
images of the life that she was leaving, tormenting lines of verse, obstinate
presentments of pictures once beheld, indistinct impressions of rivers, towers,
and cupolas, gathered in the length of journeys half forgotten -- through her
mind there now only moved a few primal sensations of colorless well-being; a
vague satisfaction in the thought that she had swallowed her noxious last
draught of medicine . . . and that she should never again hear the creaking of
her husband's boots -- those horrible boots -- and that no one would come to
bother her about the next day's dinner . . . or the butcher's book. . . .
At last even these dim sensations spent themselves in the thickening
obscurity which enveloped her; a dusk now filled with pale geometric roses,
circling softly, interminably before her, now darkened to a uniform
blue-blackness, the hue of a summer night without stars. And into this darkness
she felt herself sinking, sinking, with the gentle sense of security of one
upheld from beneath. Like a tepid tide it rose around her, gliding ever higher
and higher, folding in its velvety embrace her relaxed and tired body, now
submerging her breast and shoulders, now creeping gradually, with soft
inexorableness, over her throat to her chin, to her ears, to her mouth. . . .
Ah, now it was rising too high; the impulse to struggle was renewed;. . . her
mouth was full;. . . she was choking. . . . Help!
"It is all over," said the nurse, drawing down the eyelids with official
composure.
The clock struck three. They remembered it afterward. Someone opened the
window and let in a blast of that strange, neutral air which walks the earth
between darkness and dawn; someone else led the husband into another room. He
walked vaguely, like a blind man, on his creaking boots.
II.
SHE stood, as it seemed, on a threshold, yet no tangible gateway was in front
of her. Only a wide vista of light, mild yet penetrating as the gathered glimmer of innumerable stars,
expanded gradually before her eyes, in blissful contrast to the cavernous
darkness from which she had of late emerged.
She stepped forward, not frightened, but hesitating, and as her eyes began to
grow more familiar with the melting depths of light about her, she distinguished
the outlines of a landscape, at first swimming in the opaline uncertainty of
Shelley's vaporous creations, then gradually resolved into distincter shape --
the vast unrolling of a sunlit plain, aerial forms of mountains, and presently
the silver crescent of a river in the valley, and a blue stencilling of trees
along its curve -- something suggestive in its ineffable hue of an azure
background of Leonardo's, strange, enchanting, mysterious, leading on the eye
and the imagination into regions of fabulous delight. As she gazed, her heart
beat with a soft and rapturous surprise; so exquisite a promise she read in the
summons of that hyaline distance.
"And so death is not the end after all," in sheer gladness she heard herself
exclaiming aloud. "I always knew that it couldn't be. I believed in Darwin, of
course. I do still; but then Darwin himself said that he wasn't sure about the
soul -- at least, I think he did -- and Wallace was a spiritualist; and then
there was St. George Mivart -- "
Her gaze lost itself in the ethereal remoteness of the mountains.
"How beautiful! How satisfying!" she murmured. "Perhaps now I shall really
know what it is to live."
As she spoke she felt a sudden thickening of her heart-beats, and looking up
she was aware that before her stood the Spirit of Life.
"Have you never really known what it is to live?" the Spirit of Life asked
her.
"I have never known," she replied, "that fulness of life which we all feel
ourselves capable of knowing; though my life has not been without scattered
hints of it, like the scent of earth which comes to one sometimes far out at
sea."
"And what do you call the fulness of life?" the Spirit asked again.
"Oh, I can't tell you, if you don't know," she said, almost reproachfully.
"Many words are supposed to define it -- love and sympathy are those in
commonest use, but I am not even sure that they are the right ones, and so few
people really know what they mean."
"You were married," said the Spirit, "yet you did not find the fulness of
life in your marriage?"
"Oh, dear, no," she replied, with an indulgent scorn, "my marriage was a very
incomplete affair."
"And yet you were fond of your husband?"
"You have hit upon the exact word; I was fond of him, yes, just as I was fond
of my grandmother, and the house that I was born in, and my old nurse. Oh, I was
fond of him, and we were counted a very happy couple. But I have sometimes
thought that a woman's nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is the
hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing-room, where
one receives formal visits; the sitting-room, where the members of the family
come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the
handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them,
no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies,
the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes."
"And your husband," asked the Spirit, after a pause, "never got beyond the
family sitting-room?"
"Never," she returned, impatiently; "and the worst of it was that he was
quite content to remain there. He thought it perfectly beautiful, and sometimes,
when he was admiring its commonplace furniture, insignificant as the chairs and
tables of a hotel parlor, I felt like crying out to him: 'Fool, will you never
guess that close at hand are rooms full of treasures and wonders, such as the
eye of man hath not seen, rooms that no step has crossed, but that might be
yours to live in, could you but find the handle of the door?'" "Then," the Spirit continued, "those moments of which you lately spoke, which
seemed to come to you like scattered hints of the fulness of life, were not
shared with your husband?"
"Oh, no -- never. He was different. His boots creaked, and he always slammed
the door when he went out, and he never read anything but railway novels and the
sporting advertisements in the papers -- and -- and, in short, we never
understood each other in the least."
"To what influence, then, did you owe those exquisite sensations?"
"I can hardly tell. Sometimes to the perfume of a flower; sometimes to a
verse of Dante or of Shakespeare; sometimes to a picture or a sunset, or to one
of those calm days at sea, when one seems to be lying in the hollow of a blue
pearl; sometimes, but rarely, to a word spoken by someone who chanced to give
utterance, at the right moment, to what I felt but could not express."
"Someone whom you loved?" asked the Spirit.
"I never loved anyone, in that way," she said, rather sadly, "nor was I
thinking of any one person when I spoke, but of two or three who, by touching
for an instant upon a certain chord of my being, had called forth a single note
of that strange melody which seemed sleeping in my soul. It has seldom happened,
however, that I have owed such feelings to people; and no one ever gave me a
moment of such happiness as it was my lot to feel one evening in the Church of
Or San Michele, in Florence."
"Tell me about it," said the Spirit.
"...
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