“There’s nothing in there,” he said, and he put his hands up in front of his face and started to cry. His sister started to cry, too, and she went out of the room and was back in a minute with a cup of tea for him. He refused the tea, and when she suggested calling the doctor he refused to see the doctor. He would not take his hands from his face and he would not get up and go into his bedroom and lie down and he would not do anything except cry. The tears hurt him. They hurt his chest and his eyes and they seemed to be tracing sticky wooden lines all over his face and neck and they hurt his brain and made it ache. The tears did not run down his face and away. They poured all over him and stayed on him and encased him, and when he tried to stop crying, because he was afraid he might smother in them, imprisoned in them, they poured out all the more and there seemed to be no end to them. The tears had him in a straitjacket, and he could not speak. Now that he could not speak, he wished he could speak, because he longed now to tell his sister the truth and have the matter cleared up once and for all. The tears hurt him and covered him with a pain that seemed to grow more unbearable every minute, but what hurt most of all was his inability to tell his sister that he was not crying for Rose, because he really and truly felt no grief for Rose, but that he was crying for the lack of grief, because surely poor Rose had deserved more than a casual dismissal from life, and that most of all he was crying simply and solely because he was sad. He was sad and he was crying, and that is all there was to it. But he could not speak to tell his sister that, and she continued to watch him, helpless with tears herself and murmuring about how happy Rose was in Heaven, and he could not speak to her to tell her that it was all only a masquerade and that he was only a sham of a man, and after a long time, when he finally got command of himself, it no longer seemed worthwhile to tell her, and the way it worked out he never told her, and never told anybody.

The Twelfth Wedding Anniversary

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