The Prophecy

She opened the door. It was not her husband. It was the runner from the prefectural city, the man the examiners send out with the name boards, and he was red-faced and grinning, and he held up a scrap of paper as if it were a lantern in the dark.

Your husband, the runner said. Your husband has passed. He is third on the list. He has sent me on ahead to tell you, and to tell you to have a hot bath ready, and a hot meal, because he is coming himself this afternoon, and he means to sleep for two days.

The wife held the door. She did not, for a moment, understand what she was being told. The word passed reached her, and then the word third, and then the word sleep, and then, all at once, the whole of it. She was aware, in the same instant, of the scrap of paper in her hand, and of the light on the river, and of the fact that she had not slept.

She thanked the runner. She gave him what silver she had by the door, and she stood and watched him ride away, and then she sat down on the step, because her legs had gone, and because a woman who has grieved all night for a defeat she did not have to grieve for needs a moment to remember how to be glad.

She sat there a long time, in the morning light. And then, very slowly, she heard the words again, and this time she heard them the way the gods had meant them to be heard.

It's cold out. That was the runner, or her husband, or the morning: the cold was real, and it did not mean what she had made it mean. Why didn't you go in and lie down and rest? It was not the language of a man who had fallen. It was the language of a man who had won, and was coming home, and wanted nothing in the world but to take off his clothes and lie down in his own warm bed and sleep.

The old friends over their last cup had not been speaking of failure. They had been speaking, without knowing it, of a man who had worn himself out for a long season, and was now done, and had earned, more than anything in the world, the right to go in and lie down and rest.

She had spent the night reading defeat into a message that was only, all along, a kind one. She got up from the step, and she did not, this time, feel foolish. She felt, instead, very small, and very grateful, and very much a wife who had been loved by the world for one long mistaken night.

She lit the fire. She put the soup on. She set the mirror back on the dressing table in the place her husband liked it, and she washed her face, and she did not look at herself in it, because she did not need to any longer. The mirror had given her the truth. She had, in her own time, finally understood it.

In the afternoon her husband came up the road, dusty and grinning, with his box of brushes under his arm, and the first thing he said was not about the exam at all. He said, I am cold. Where is my bed? And the wife, standing in the doorway, laughed and cried at once, because the prophecy had come home, word for word, and it had meant exactly what she had needed to hear.