MY FRIEND Annabel Lee has told me there are bitterer things in store for me than I have known yet.
Times I have wondered what they can be.
"When you have come to them," said my friend Annabel Lee, "they will be so bitter and will fit so well into your life that you will wonder that you did not always know about them, and you will wonder why you did not always have them."
"The bitterest things I have known yet," I said, "have had to do with the varying friendship of one or another whom I have loved."
"Varying friendship?" said Annabel Lee. "But friendship does not vary."
"No, that is true," I rejoined. "I mean the varying deception I have had from some whom I have loved."
"In time," said my friend Annabel Lee, "you will love more, and your deceiving will be all at once, and bitterer. It will be a rich experience."
"Why rich?" I inquired.
"Because from it," said my friend Annabel Lee, "you will learn to not see too much, to not start out with faith, in fact, to take the goods that the gods provide and endeavor to be thankful for them. Your other experiences have been poverty-stricken in that respect. They leave you with rays of hope, without which you would be better off. They are poor and bitter. What is to come will be rich and bitterer. Their bitterness will prevent you from appreciating the richness of them—until perhaps years have come and taken them from immediately before your eyes. As soon as they are where you can not see them, you can consider them and appreciate their richness."
"Whatever they may be," I made answer, "I do not think I shall ever be able to appreciate their richness."
"Then you will be very ungrateful," said my friend Annabel Lee.
I looked hard at her—and she looked back at me. There are times when my friend Annabel Lee is much like a stone wall.
"Yes," said my friend Annabel Lee, "if you ever feel to express proper gratitude for the good things of this life, be sure that you express your gratitude for the right thing. Very likely you will not have a great deal of gratitude, and you must not waste any of it—but what you do have will be of the most excellent quality. For it will accumulate, and the accumulation will all go to quality. And the things for which you are to be grateful are the bitternesses you have known. If you have had it in mind ever to give way to bursts of gratitude for this air that comes from off the salt sea, for that line of pearls and violets that you see just above the horizon, for the health of your body, for the sleep that comes to you at the close of the day, for any of those things, then get rid of the idea at once. Those things are quite well, but they are not really given to you. They are merely placed where any one can reach them with little effort. The kind fates don't care whether you get them or not. Their responsibility ends when they leave them there. But the bitternesses they give to each person separately. They give you yours, Mary MacLane, for your very own. Don't say they never think of you."
"I've no intention of saying it," said I.
"You will find," said my friend Annabel Lee—without noticing my interruption, and with curious expressions in her voice and upon her two red lips—"you will find that these bitternesses come from time to time in your life, like so many milestones. They are useful as such—for of course you like to take measurements along the road, now and again, to see what progress you have made. Along some parts of the road you will find your progress wonderful. If you are appreciative and grateful, at the last milestone you have come to thus far you will express your measure of gratitude to the kind fates. That is, no—" said my friend Annabel Lee, "you will not do this at the milestone, but after you have passed it and have turned a corner, and so can not see it even when you look back."
"But why shall I express gratitude there?" I inquired in a tone that must have been rather lifeless.
"Why?" repeated my friend Annabel Lee. "Because you will have grown in strength on account of these milestones; because you will have learned to take all things tranquilly. Why, after the very last milestone I daresay you would be able to sit with folded hands if a house were burning up about your ears!"
"Which must indeed be a triumph," said I.
"A triumph?—a victory!" said my friend Annabel Lee—with still more curious expressions. "And the victories are not what this world sees"—which reminded me of things I used to hear in Sunday-school ever so many years ago. "You remember the story of the Ten Virgins? Taking the story literally," said my friend Annabel Lee, "the lot of the five Foolish Virgins is much the more fortunate. There was a rare measure of bitterness for them when they found themselves without oil for their lamps at a time when oil was needed. They gained infinitely more than they lost. As for the five Wise Virgins—well, I wouldn't have been one of them under any circumstances," said my friend Annabel Lee. "Fancy the miserable, mean, mindless, imaginationless, selfish natures that could remain unmoved by the simplicity of the appeal, 'Give us of your oil, for our lamps are gone out.' It must now," said my friend Annabel Lee, "be a hundred times bitterer for them to think of being handed down in endless history as demons of selfishness—and they are now where they can not, presumably, measure their bitterness by milestones of progress."
"So then, yes," said my friend Annabel Lee—"whatever else you may do as you go through life, remember to save up your gratitude for the bitternesses you have known—and remember that for you the bitterest is yet to come."
"Have you, Annabel Lee," I asked, "already known the bitterest that can come—and can you sit with your hands folded in the midst of a burning house?"
"Not I!" said my friend Annabel Lee, and laughed gayly.
Again I looked hard at her—and she looked back at me.
Certainly there are times when my friend Annabel Lee is like a stone wall.