The Noise of the World by Adriana Spadoni

At the end of three weeks, Roger wrote his first real letter. He was going on to the Pennsylvania coal fields, then to New York, the West Virginia mining country, the southern cotton mills and home. It would take him fully a month longer. Anne read it several times, as if committing the itinerary to memory, gathered no picture or quickening of interest from it, and slowly tore the pages up. Roger might have mapped a trip from star to star, so little did it seem to touch her life. The only realities were this growing antagonism between herself and Roger, and the helplessness of her father and Rogie. Between these two points of advancing Death and Life, Anne stood, making mechanical motions of getting up, going to bed, caring for Rogie, listening to Hilda's chatter, and filling some of the empty hours for her father.

This was the most difficult of all. No book held him, although he complained if none were provided for him. His fettered mind exhausted itself in the effort to assimilate experience beyond his own. He would put away the travels and biographies and fiction, for which Anne spent hours searching the library, for the evening paper or the most trivial bit of gossip. Sometimes this need to fill the emptiness about him with little concrete facts oppressed Anne until her very jaws ached with the unuttered words she could not summon, and her brain went dizzily round, searching in the vacancy, conscious of its own motion.

Bound in a life of routine, James Mitchell complained if his useless medicine was a moment late, his nourishment delayed. He was jealous of Hilda's health and upbraided her cheerfulness as indifference; but when she was over-zealous for his comfort he grew irritable and asked for Anne.

Anne quieted him. The old friction between them was lost in the profundity of Anne's indifference to all that happened. It was cloaked under her gentle touch, her quiet movements, her quickness in understanding his thickened speech, her anticipation of his needs. He liked to hold her cool hand after she had straightened his pillows for the night, or feel its sure grip guiding his dragging feet to the window to investigate some trivial noise in the street below. She read to him for hours, never putting the book aside at his first lurching into sleep, and so drawing him back to realization of her own preference.

She read on until his gray head dropped to his breast and his hands relaxed in his lap. Then Anne would lay aside the book and look at him impersonally; at the thin hair, the clothes spotted with dropped food, the heavy canes propped against the chair arm. This man was her father. From this now decaying body, she had drawn life. She had never loved him, never been near him, and could never be quite separated from him. From the beginning of Time to the end of Time, the chain ran, a living link, a dead link, on and on; health no more permanent than decay, life as accidental and meaningless as death. She would grow old and rot; Rogie would grow old and rot; and his son's sons until Time itself dropped in death. Or, somewhere along the line, Time would snap suddenly, as purposeless in its ceasing as in its beginning. Her longings for a permanent Beauty, Hilda's unconscious clutching at happiness, Roger's childish faith in his power to create justice, Black Tom's ferocious idealism, all meaningless words scratched on the monument to Death. This overwhelming negation was Reality. Only people like Charlotte Welles, blind and insensate before their own terror of extermination, could juggle away this truth.

Charlotte Welles no longer annoyed Anne. Charlotte was no more deluded than any one else. In the confusion of living, she had darted down a blind alley, but no more of a blind alley than any other path opened to the shufflings of humanity. At least this path hurt no one, as Roger hurt her, as Black Tom hurt Merle, as her father and mother hurt each other.

Anne had even grown to like Mrs. Welles and look for her coming. With quiet cheerfulness she often led James Mitchell away from the realization of his heavy canes and numbed feet back into the only world he had ever known. Deep within him, the hope lingered that he would again be able to go to the office, make endless rows of figures and be commended for his faithfulness: that he would draw his salary, place his small bets, make his luckless snatches at fortune, become again "the head of the house. " Without deliberately deceiving him, Mrs. Welles deepened this faith, so that, after a visit from her he was actually stronger and once managed, unaided except for his canes, to stumble across the room.

Anne felt her always standing beside the sick man, throwing the thread of her faith about him, trying to draw him back to health. When she did not come for a few days, James fretted.

"I really believe you do him good," Anne said to her at the end of an afternoon in which Charlotte had kept him cheerful for hours.

"Faith will move mountains. You can never tell. " It was the first direct reference she had made to her belief since the night of Anne's rudeness. But now, the assurance did not anger Anne. She was too weary.

"Faith in what?"

"Faith -- in the power of faith. Just believing."

"Believing that you will get what you want just because you want it?"

"Not exactly. Believing in the harmony of Life, knowing that what you must have, what your soul needs, must come."

"How do you know what your soul needs?"

The other paused, thoughtful. "By listening," she said at last. "By escaping from the noise of material life. Material life is not Real."

"It's the only reality we have, our brains and bodies and senses to measure by."

Mrs. Welles shook her head. "No. Our brains and bodies and senses are not the ultimate reality. It is something else, something almost impossible to put into words, something you must feel."

"But how can you feel without your body?"

"By leaving your body behind and going into Silence. Then you Know. You Feel it, you See it, you Touch it."