The bridge of San Luis Rey

At last after Doña Clara had seen even the kitchens, the Abbess said: "Now will you excuse me, for I must go into the room of the very sick and say a few words for them to think about when they cannot sleep. I will not ask you to come with me there, for you are not accustomed to such ... such sounds and things. And besides I only talk to them as one talks to children." She looked up at her with her modest rueful smile. Suddenly she disappeared a moment to return with one of her helpers, one who had likewise been involved in the affair of the bridge and who had formerly been an actress. "She is leaving me," said the Abbess, "for some work across the city and when I have spoken here I must leave you both, for the flour-broker will not wait for me any longer, and our argument will take a long time."

But Doña Clara stood in the door as the Abbess talked to them, the lamp placed on the floor beside her. Madre María stood with her back against a post; the sick lay in rows gazing at the ceiling and trying to hold their breaths. She talked that night of all those out in the dark (she was thinking of Esteban alone, she was thinking of Pepita alone) who had no one to turn to, for whom the world perhaps was more than difficult, without meaning. And those who lay in their beds there felt that they were within a wall that the Abbess had built for them; within all was light and warmth, and without was the darkness they would not exchange even for a relief from pain and from dying. But even while she was talking, other thoughts were passing in the back of her mind. "Even now," she thought, "almost no one remembers Esteban and Pepita, but myself. Camila alone remembers her Uncle Pio and her son; this woman, her mother. But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."

THE END.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

THORNTON WILDER was born on April 17, 1897, in Madison, Wisconsin. At the time, his father was editor of the Wisconsin State Journal but in 1906 was appointed United States Consul-General at Hong Kong, a post he held for three years before being assigned to Shanghai. Having thus received some of his early schooling in China, young Thornton prepared for college in California, attended Oberlin College from 1915 to 1917, and then transferred to Yale.

After World War I broke out, he interrupted his studies to serve as a corporal in the Coast Artillery at Narragansett Bay in 1918. Returning to college after the Armistice, Wilder graduated from Yale in 1920. William Lyon Phelps wrote of him: "As an undergraduate he was unusually versatile, original and clever. He played and composed music, wrote much prose and verse, and stood well in the studies of the course."

Upon leaving Yale, Wilder did a year of archeological study at the American Academy of Classical Studies in Rome. From 1921 to 1928 he taught French at Lawrenceville Academy. During this period he continued his graduate work, receiving his master's degree from Princeton in 1926.

All the while, Wilder had been writing on the side, experimenting with narrative style and technique, determined to write for pleasure, not for profit. When his first novel, The Cabala, appeared in 1926, many critics praised the graceful and distinguished literary style; however, his short tale of the decay of a group of sophisticates in Rome was too remote for the work to have general appeal. Also that year, the American Laboratory Theatre produced his first play, The Trumpet Shall Sound.