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Updated: June 1, 2025
Theophil dreamed that he and some friends were gay together in a room, just before setting out for a theatre; and as they laughed and talked there came a little tapping on the wall, so that they grew silent and listened. Then through the wall was heard a faint but glad little voice speaking. It was Jenny's voice. "I can hear you all," she said; "you are off to the theatre.
She was a real little great man's wife now; and as Theophil looked at her, with her lit eager face, her whole soul so alive to help him in however humble a way, her whole life his, his, his, such love seemed almost tragic in its very beauty and joy. It was so irremediably love. At times he almost trembled before it. He would almost chide her with its divine completeness.
"But," she continued presently, "you should both be very happy too for it would be worth while to suffer for so beautiful a love.... I feel happy," she added half gaily, "even to resemble a woman who is so wonderfully loved." Theophil lingered on, still fascinated, till the actress suggested that he should walk with her to her hotel.
She had to stay at home, and bed was perhaps the best place for her. So Jenny went to bed, and looked very pretty there, and was quite merry of an evening when Theophil, bringing her flowers, he was already bringing her flowers, would draw up the arm-chair by her side, and read to her.
It seemed impossible that one form could so mockingly resemble another, and yet be so hopelessly someone else. Theophil could hardly bring himself to believe that the woman yonder with Jenny's eyes and mouth and hair had never even heard of Jenny's name.
Otherwise, indeed, the poetic life would be impossible to live; poets could not go on maintaining the deadly fire of love, to which it is one of the conditions of their precarious art that they must daily expose themselves. Sometimes, indeed, as we know, even these firemen of the emotions dare the burning house once too often, and we hear their death-song amid the flames. Theophil?
Experience indeed was now divided for Theophil into what Jenny had not seen or known and into what she had seen and known; and it was one of the tricks of his grief, as time went on, to confuse the two. Sometimes he would think that Jenny had been with him at a certain place, or perhaps had read a certain book which, on taking thought, he knew she could never have seen.
One night, in the haunted hushed middle of it, the old mother had softly pushed open the door to ask if all went well, and in a whisper Theophil had assured her. A night-light gave an uncanny shadow-breeding light in the room. Jenny was sleeping peacefully, her tired ivory face, with her dark elf-locks falling about it, framed on the pillow.
With the reawakening of his ambition, Theophil began to realise that his work at New Zion was nearing its end, and that before long he must seek that larger stage. Yet all his heart remained in that dull little Zion Place, and while Jenny's old mother lived he could not conceive tearing himself away.
It is only by taking them to our feasts, keeping up with them the same old human companionship, that we may hope to keep the dead as friends. A modern poet has written eight lines which were of great comfort to Theophil, "You go not to the headstone As aforetime every day, And I who died, I do not chide, Because, dear friend, you play;
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