Night came.  The wood was deserted.  Farewell, grass and flowers!  Wide heaven, a long farewell!  Snakes began to crawl about the tufts of grass.  Turtles crept along the paths.  The wood was ugly.  Everybody longed to be back in the stone desert, the moon landscape.  That is the place for men.

***

Dame Anna Erikson invited all her old friends.  The mechanics’ wives from the suburbs and the poorer scrub-women came to her for a cup of coffee.  The same were there who had been with her on the day of her desertion.  One was new, Maria Anderson, the captain of the Salvation Army.

Anna Erikson had now been many times to the Salvation Army.  She had heard her husband.  He always told about himself.  He disguised his story.  She recognized it always.  He was Abraham.  He was Job.  He was Jeremiah, whom the people threw into a well.  He was Elisha, whom the children at the wayside reviled.

That pain seemed bottomless to her.  His sorrow seemed to her to borrow all voices, to make itself masks of everything it met.  She did not understand that her husband talked himself well, that pleasure in his power of fancy played and smiled in him.

She had dragged her daughter with her.  The daughter had not wished to go.  She was serious, modest, and conscientious.  Nothing of youth played in her veins.  She was born old.

She had grown up in shame of her father.  She walked upright, austere, as if saying:  “Look, the daughter of a man who is despised!  Look if my dress is soiled!  Is there anything to blame in my conduct?” Her mother was proud of her.  Yet sometimes she sighed.  “Alas! if my daughter’s hands were less white, perhaps her caresses would be warmer!”

The girl sat scornfully smiling.  She despised theatricals.  When her father rose up to speak, she wished to go.  Her mother’s hand seized hers, fast as a vice.  The girl sat still.  The torrent of words began to roar over her.  But that which spoke to her was not so much the words as her mother’s hand.

That hand writhed, convulsions passed through it.  It lay in hers limp, as if dead; it caught wildly about, hot with fever.  Her mother’s face betrayed nothing; only her hand suffered and struggled.

The old speaker described the martyrdom of silence.  The friend of Jesus lay ill.  His sisters sent a message to him; but his time had not come.  For the sake of God’s kingdom Lazarus must die.

He now let all doubting, all slander be heaped upon Christ.  He described his suffering.  His own compassion tortured him.  He passed through the agony of death, he as well as Lazarus.  Still he had to keep silence.

Only one word had he needed to say to win back the respect of his friends.  He was silent.  He had to hear the lamentations of the sisters.  He told them the truth in words which they did not understand.  Enemies mocked at him.

And so on always more and more affecting.